The Daily Index — Monday, May 15, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

FIRST-PRINCIPLES ON AI SCALING

Scaling laws indicate that Large Language Models (LLMs) will get substantially better at predicting words with the addition of more data and computational power. However, while it might be feasible to increase dataset size, there are potential barriers to making them more than 10 times larger than their current state, such as cost. Scaling LLMs to maximum potential would cost substantially more than the GDP of the planet with current technology. There is likely a computational limitation. Current scaling laws could be inaccurate due to the small amount of data and computation used to fit the model.

dynomight.net · 31 min

TLDR AI

INSTRUCT BLIP

Blip is a model developed by Salesforce that can be used for vision and language tasks. Following the line of work in language models that tunes them to follow instructions, we can also tune these vision language models to follow instructions. This dramatically improves the performance, and in this case it even outperforms the published numbers of GPT-4.

arxiv.org · 33 min

TLDR Web Dev

DESIGNING STICKY MENUS: UX GUIDELINES

Sticky menus are very useful on mobile and in responsive web apps. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when you add them in, as they can greatly impact UX in certain situations, such as the behavior of the menu when the keyboard is up on mobile. This article discusses when you should & shouldn't use sticky menus, how to make sure it isn’t distracting to your users, and best practices to make sure they are always responsive and accessible.

smashingmagazine.com · 6 min

TLDR Founders

WHY TIME-BLOCKING MIGHT NOT WORK FOR YOU AND WHAT TO DO INSTEAD

Irfan Bhanji mentions that the ideal work structure depends on your scheduling mindset, and time-blocking may not work for everyone. Focus on productivity and concentration rather than excessive structure or planning.

archive.is · 6 min

TLDR AI

ENHANCING IMAGE QUALITY WITH PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

A new technique has been created that enhances the quality of blurry images using pre-set text-to-image models. This method smartly uses a special encoder and doesn't need to change the existing image-making model, saving training time. Plus, users can control image quality with one simple adjustment. The strategy also handles larger images better than previous methods. Tests with both artificial and real-world images prove it's more effective than current solutions.

arxiv.org · 16 min

TLDR AI

COHERE LLM UNIVERSITY

Cohere is a startup that offers a language model API similar to other big players. They have a set of powerful models that you can use to build applications. This language model university is designed to bring you up to speed on modern language models and show how to build on them with cohere's tools.

docs.cohere.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

PROGRAMMING

There’s been a couple major programming tools that drastically improved developer productivity, such as high level languages, IDEs, code completion and so on. AI is the next major step in the evolution of programming - it will not only enable current developers to be more efficient, but also allow many non programmers to turn their ideas into apps.

blog.cloudflare.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

WORKING ON AN UNFAMILIAR CODEBASE

As developers, it’s common to work on an unfamiliar codebase. It happens every time one joins a new project or even needs to work on a previously untouched part in big ones. This occurrence is not limited to a developer having to fix a bug; it can be a solution architect having to design a new feature or an open source contributor working on a GitHub issue in their free time. This article describes how to best approach the situation so that one can reduce the time needed to start making contributions to an unfamiliar codebase.

blog.frankel.ch · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE JAVASCRIPT ECOSYSTEM IS DELIGHTFULLY WEIRD

The JavaScript ecosystem is steadily growing. But less than 10 years ago, JavaScript wasn’t as featured as it is now - it didn’t have imports, classes, async, arrow functions, and more. As time went on, JavaScript has been innovated on, but JavaScript is still fundamentally different from languages like Ruby and Python.

fly.io · 6 min