Welcome to my notes! I regularly publish notes to better understand what I’ve learned and to explore new ideas. I would love to hear from you—leave a comment or reach out on Bluesky @alexkehayias.com.
Notes From the Field
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Judgment Disqualifies Automation
When a process requires human judgement for an unknown number of possible decisions, automation is not possible.
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How to Be Productive
Here’s a collection of things that have helped me be more productive.
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Do Higher Temperatures Make LLMs More Creative?
Higher temperatures tell LLMs when generating a completion to not always use the highest probability next token.
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CSAT Benchmarks
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys measure how much people like a product or service.
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Prompt Engineering for LLMs - Literature Notes
Notes from reading Prompt Engineering for LLMs by John Berryman and Albert Ziegler.
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Lab Notebook for Founders
A lab notebook is where research scientists keep track of their experiments so that they can be reproduced and verified.
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Latent Space Reasoning
Rather than converting to text at every step in a chain of thought process with large language models to solve a complex problem, new research suggests that reasoning can happen in a latent space using the internal representation of the model.
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Mushy Systems
As large language models proliferate into every service and ultimately replaces business logic, we will be left with the horrible burden of maintaining mush.
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Rust Build Caching With Docker
Compiling rust dependencies every time a docker image is built can take a very long time.
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AI Replaces Business Logic
Satya from Microsoft talks about how orchestrating between business applications is the next step for artificial intelligence which will replace business logic with AI.
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The Creative Act - Literature Notes
A book by Rick Rubin about creativity and how to let it happen.
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Gameboy Color OLED Mod
The Gameboy Color has a new (to me) mod to replace the screen with a repurposed Blackberry AMOLED screen.
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There Is No AI Strategy Without a Data Strategy
Startups typically have an advantage over incumbents when it comes to adopting new technology.
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When Does a Service-as-Software Model Make Sense?
The service-as-software model is nacsent but expected to be experimented with in different fields as artificial intelligence techniques improve and enable new applications.
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Service-as-Software
Service as software is the inverse of software as a service.
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Outcome-Based Pricing
Outcome-based pricing (or result-based pricing) is becoming popularized again due to services powered by artificial intelligence that are enable intent-based outcome specification.
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When to Be Directive
I was at a high-end clothing store the other day. I saw one of the workers on an iPad.
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DNA as Durable Storage
DNA is by far the most dense storage medium that we know of.
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Rust Memory Profiling on MacOS
Working on my personal indexing service, I noticed that large files were getting OOM killed.
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GraphRAG Combines Knowledge Graphs With Retrieval
One of the biggest criticisms of LLMs is that they don’t actually know anything.
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AI Doubles Productivity of Top Researchers
A study of artificial intelligence on productivity at a materials research lab found that the bottom third of researchers saw no improvement but top researchers doubled in productivity (as measured by materials discovered, patents, and “downstream product innovation”).
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Why I Like Incidents
A lot of tech company workers dread incidents. They are a high-pressure and often high-stakes ordeal that requires urgent attention.
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Use a Scenario Table to Organize Complicated Situations
When thinking in scenarios, I find it useful to lay it out as a table.
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Emacs Sticky Buffer
Sometimes I want an emacs buffer to always be visible but I want to ignore it when navigating between buffers.