Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 310 posts.

AI & Machine Learning
247

Using a LLM to compress text

Introduction Large language models are trained on huge datasets of text to learn the relationships and contexts of words within larger documents. These relationships are what allows the model to generate text. Recently I've read concerns about LLMs being trained on copyrighted text and reproducing it. This got me…

248

Listening with LLM

Overview # This is the first part of many posts I am writing to consolidate learnings on how to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) to process audio, with the eventual goal of being able to build and host a LLM able to describe human voices. I am motivated to gain hands-on experience tinkering LLMs so, as much as…

266

I'm going to keep opting out

Marketing, solicitations, advertising, political contact, direct mailers, email campaigns, cookies, ads — it's all opt out. It puts the burden on you to opt out of each communication each message, each outreach from a loyalty program. It can feel like weeding a garden, but that garden is your attention. The weeds keep…