Nicolay Gerold

Adrenaline protects you from infections and activated neuroplasticity in the brain. When you sense a stressor (wound, threat) the sympathetic chain ganglia and adrenals (body) and the locus cerulius (brain) release adrenaline all over the body.

A core research interest of mine is imagining new kinds of interfaces to text documents that are made possible by modern AI and software. I think an interesting place to look for such ideas may be interface designs for reading and writing legal documents .

Legal document-wrangling tools have a handful of properties that make it fertile ground for... See more

Things we readily use

There are a few types of k8s resources we use without hesitation. I’m only listing resources here that we create explicitly; most of these resources implicitly create other resources (like Pods) that I will not mention but which we of course (indirectly) use.

• Deployments : Most of our pods are created through deployments.

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Hopefully, at this point, you see where I’m going with this. What I’ve concluded, based on experience, is that positioning your project as an alternative implementation of something is a losing proposition. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. The problem is, when you build an alternative implementation, you’ve... See more

Reward prediction error: if you have an high expectation of something, it raises the dopamine expectation, and if you experience less released dopamine than expected you experience dissatisfaction.

Back-end

We use TypeScript and Node.js across our back-end applications. They are divided into serverless functions using Next.js API Routes and long running Express servers.

Our applications generally try to follow a single concern, for example, our public API is served from an Express server, our SMTP from another one, but we have a few others... See more

Some tasks are easier to improve via system design. While LLMs appear to follow remarkable scaling laws that predictably yield better results with more compute, in many applications, scaling offers lower returns-vs-cost than building a compound system. For example, suppose that the current best LLM can solve coding contest problems 30% of the

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The AI engineering framework

Marvin is a lightweight AI engineering framework for building natural language interfaces that are reliable, scalable, and easy to trust.

Sometimes the most challenging part of working with generative AI is remembering that it's not magic; it's software. It's new, it's nondeterministic, and it's incredibly powerful - but... See more

Participants noted that the impact on models was hard to assess when the ground truth involved live data—for example, Sm2 felt strongly about the negative impact of feedback delays on their ML pipelines: I have no idea how well [models] actually perform on live data. Feedback is always delayed by at least 2 weeks. Sometimes we might not have... See more