Hi, I'm Allen Pike. I’m currently building Forestwalk Labs, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.
A Score for Snacks
The Nutri-Score, and a calculator for it.
JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back
The new frameworks will continue until morale improves.
The Era of Tab Continuation
Press tab to complete your work.
An Unreasonable Amount of Time
A method for magic.
Link: The Talk Show, Ep. 415
On the most recent episode of The Talk Show, “A Good Duck Butt”, John Gruber and I discussed Apple Intelligence, Pixelmator, ChatGPT and Siri, the latest LLMs, and cursed faces.
Two developments since we recorded:
- iOS 18.2 was released, which added image generation and web search to Siri’s ChatGPT integration.
- Llama 3.3 70B was released, a new high-water mark for local models – if you have 64GB of memory.
It's Good for Apple, and Okay for You
Apple Intelligence, so far.
Link: Final Fact
After 82 episodes, the Fun Fact podcast has reached Final Fact – at least, for now. Good things don’t always get a satisfying ending, but this one turned out.
Fans of the show may enjoy It Shipped That Way, where I’ve been interviewing leaders from companies like Slack, Superhuman, and Shopify about how they’ve built great products and teams. More recently I’ve also been interviewing more founders, like this episode with Charity Majors, co-founder of Honeycomb.
Testing the Untestable
The four phases of automated evals for LLM-powered features.
Link: BC Votes
Voting is now open for BC’s election, which concludes in one week on Sat Oct 19.
I’ve done voting guides for Vancouver and Canada in the past, but I’ve never done a BC one since the decision here has traditionally been simple. There has long been two viable parties: one on the left, and one on the right. This continues, with no centrist party on the ticket and the Green Party unviable in almost every riding.
The main difference this time is that instead of the center-right BC Liberals, the NDP now faces the actually-right BC Conservative Party. While they might not have seemed electable only a few weeks ago, this recently-fringe party has been downplaying and walking back some of their more extreme statements in the hope of assuaging centrists who would have voted Liberal.
With such a close race between two very different choices, the outcome will ultimately come down to who turns up.
If you live in BC, make a plan to vote this week. Early voting continues on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with the final decision on Sat Oct 19.
Further reading:
Link: Infer, an AI Eng Meetup in Vancouver
Next week, we’ll be kicking off a new speaker series in Vancouver called Infer. The goal of the meetup is to bring together folks who are doing great AI engineering work, so we can learn from one another.
The format will be familiar to folks that have attended my previous meetups: two speakers, often one of whom will be visiting from out of town, with time to chat afterward. Events will happen roughly every two months, when we have compelling topics lined up.
If you’re building LLM-powered apps in Vancouver, you can subscribe to our event on Luma. There are still a few spots open for our first “beta” event on October 9th, and we’ll be hosting another during NeurIPS in December.
There’s something electric about getting smart people who are working in a rapidly-changing field in a room together. I recommend it.
Our Unevenly Distributed Future
How self-driving cars become mundane.
Starting Forestwalk
A wild startup appears.