Salvatore Denaro

Almost every discussion about using LLMs seems to eventually leads to people mentioning they ways they've adjusted their writing style, prompting style and expectations to get the most out of their LLM. So it makes me wonder if the LLMs training us as we are training them as there is plenty of precedent for new communications media creating new rules for communication.  From smileys to emoji Back in college when I was just starting to use email to contact people I noticed that sometimes people used smileys at the end of a subject or at the end of an email to suggest that something was being said in as a joke. These were sometimes modified with other ascii characters. An O to suggest a halo when you claim you're innocent or an & replacing the ) to suggest you're tongue tied. Eventually, smileys would be added to subjects or to the first line of an email as a hint that there would be something funny in the email. Smileys became a new form of punctuation that were only us...

New York City's Office of Technology Innovation provides a collection of useful APIs that let you access City data. For the past few weeks I have been playing with the APIs looking for useful application ideas and I've been using Google's colab product for that exploration. These APIs are free to access and you can sign up here . If you are new to Colab, Google provides an introduction notebook that covers the basics. If you've used jupyter  with Python you should be good to go. While Colab is frequently used for data science and AI, I think this is a great platform for building internal tools. For one specific type of user, users with lots of domain specific knowledge who may not know an API or tool, Colab is useful as a way of bundling instructions and code in a way that allows them to be productive.   Minimal code example for connecting to an end point This is a minimal test script. It connects to an API, uses a secure way of holding the API keys and allows the use...