Another Dev's Two Cents

Another Dev's Two Cents

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Latest — 13 Sep 2025

How LLM Structured Decoding works

Last week I happened to be in a discussion that involved getting an LLM to generate JSON reliably. A major frustration expressed was that no matter how much they tried the model would often fail to follow instructions during generation. I pointed out that most major vendors support some variant

More issues

Notes on the phi-4-reasoning Technical Paper

Phi-4 Reasoning Microsoft recently released the phi-4 reasoning model as well as its technical report. They explore using supervised finetuning as well as synthetic dataset curation to train phi-4 a 14B parameter model to compete with and often outperform significanly larger models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B. We present Phi-4-reasoning, a 14-billion

Writing a backup service for Ubuntu in Rust

While performing some routine maintenance of my Ubuntu server, $ docker compose pull $ docker compose up -d I ran into an interesting situation where nginx-proxy-manager failed to serve my blog properly, I wasn't sure what the issue was but these types of issues are usually solved with a restart.

Adding Gaussian Noise to a signal in Python

Gaussian noise is data that is added to a signal in order to introduce a distortion. The data follows a Gaussian/Normal distribution. It's a well understood distribution often used to introduce noise to training data as an augmentation technique. Generating noise to add to a signal is

Building an Ubuntu service for my Antec Flux Pro

I recently put together a new PC build. It's primarily aimed at machine learning so I wanted to get a case that had really great airflow. I asked around and was directed to a list put together by GamersNexus[1] highlighting their top cases of the year. The

Notes on the DuckDB UI

DuckDB recently shipped with a new local UI package[1]. It allows users to visualize DuckDB databases as well as run SQL queries through embedded notebooks. You can start the UI by running duckdb -ui in the terminal which starts an http server on port 4213 by default. $ duckdb -ui

Vector Projection

Vector projection is the process of projecting one vector onto another. In simple terms, it is the adjacent side of a right triangle with the original vector as the hypotenuse.

Vector Normalization

Vector normalization is the process of scaling a vector to have a magnitude of 1 or unit length. In other words, we want to change the length of the vector to 1 while keeping the direction the same.

The Value of Expertise

I've been reading a lot about the impact that AI[1] has had and will have on the software industry. Some herald the death of Software Engineering as a profession[2], others claim it's a full-on paradigm shift in our work[3], while some hold mixed[

Notes on setting up Claude Desktop MCP servers

The model context protocol is a pretty awesome way to get more out of your LLM. Claude's desktop app has positioned itself as an easy way to get started exploring the space. Claude desktop works by launching servers declared in claude_desktop_config.json on startup and then