Sampled #1

My recommendations from the last week.

I’ve just been reconciling with my growing tendency to stash everything in my Safari reading list—a habit that’s now great at giving me plenty to read on a Sunday evening. Anyways, this is what my reverse chronological list of intrigue has worth sharing from the last 7 days, padded out with some of my own musings.

I think I’ve heard ‘mechanistic interpretability’ mentioned a thousand times over the last few weeks; not that I’m keeping tabs, but it does seem like an industry wide response to a wave of disillusionment with LLMs. As AI products reach critical mass, the need to explain how these systems ‘think’ is definitely becoming more apparent. On that note, and tangentially related, it was great to see another exciting model release in the shape of Alibaba’s QwQ; this is the first big open source release doing o1 style reasoning and chain-of-thought. Also of note, Amazon’s $4 billion investment in Anthropic is a smart move IMO—Claude has been my favourite AI assistant to date, and Anthropic is doing a lot to make AI both useful and accessible. Also in this vein, very timely to see them drop something called Model Context Protocol this week.

Switching gears entirely, I stumbled across a brilliant visualisation of the European power grid on HN and I also found myself drawn to a post about a Dutch urban intersection. It’s a very tangible example of thoughtful design, where every detail works to make daily life smoother. If you’re into well-designed systems, the prior is worth an explore and the latter is worth your undivided reading attention.

That theme of rethinking systems extended into other areas, too. Quanta Magazine had a fantastic piece with David Bessis on mathematical thinking. He makes the case for mathematics being about more than just solving equations; it’s about seeing the world differently. So much of building useful systems is about how we frame problems, not just the tools we use to solve them.

It’s been great to see microblogging platforms (is that a term people still use?) outside of you know what get a boost in popularity during the recent mass X-odus. Of particular note to me is Bluesky. I commend their push for customisable algorithms and even simple features like starter packs. If you want to follow me over there, you can find me here: https://bsky.app/profile/bnjmnr.bsky.social

And finally, back to the slightly more technical side, I went down a couple of rabbit holes, but I really liked this breakdown of the BM25 algorithm—a great read if you’re into search tech.