Sam Stowers 🫡

The first reaction on literally any X post I make is always a 0 followers porn bot 😅 I'm glad I'll always have someone supporting me ❤️

A man holding a bright yellow telephone handset in front of a macbook pro with an IDE pulled up

Typing into Cursor:
- Slow input speed
- Risks carpal tunnel
- Normie vibes

Dictating into Cursor with a physical (bright yellow) phone handset:
- EFFICIENT™
- Feel like an early 90s wall street trader
- Experience heft that tungsten cubes can only dream of

Hayes has weird burner-y art again!!

Look at this big mirror spine thingy

No adverse interactions as far as I can tell. However, they have similar mechanisms of action, so I’m unsure if you’d see any additional benefit

Proud to judge / advise at the conclusion of @aaronmayer.bsky.social's Impact Fellowship! The week-long program, hosted at the @hf0.bsky.social house, brought a bunch of college students together to build impactful tech projects. Lots of cool people and meaningful work 🙂

Evals Code Sprint: Add evaluation to your own app in one day · Luma You've been intending to add a proper evaluation system to your product for months. Swing by our office and get it done. You'll get expert instruction,…

We'll have W&B engineers onsite to support you along the way 🫡. Work on your own app, not a random colab notebook.

Tech skills required. Python or TypeScript app required. Sign up at lu.ma/bzqvsqaa

Want to add evals to your production AI app in one day? We're hosting a code sprint @weightsbiases.bsky.social on Jan 11th for that. Accelerate AI development, make your system more reliable, compare models in real-world use.

No more excuses. You need evals.🧐

Calling it EvalForge

Ooooh, I'm helping construct a prototype of this, actually—not specifically for productivity, but a continuously self-optimizing evaluation tool for AI apps. It's promising, but really hard to get right so far

Did you read the article you linked?

The "hard programming" guy in question publicly attributes most of the credit to Marc.

I'm not a fan of his in many ways, but non-technical roles also have value 🤷

Happy new year to you too!!

Thoughts on hydroxyapatite toothpaste - Sam Stowers Not Found File public/posts/Thoughts on hydroxyapatite toothpaste.md does not exist.

I now think fluoride toothpaste may be a worse choice for many than hydroxyapatite toothpaste. Fell down a rabbit hole and have emerged with whiter, smoother, less sensitive teeth 🦷

Wrote up thoughts about it: stowers.co/hydroxyapati...

Knight of wands: You're the fire nomad. Shows a pic of a dog frolicking in a field with the caption "going on an adventure, everyone's invited"

I like

Throwing an SF Decade Party™ in 2035

Pay $20 now, that gets put in the stock market, party budget is whatever comes out of that

Gets exponentially more expensive as we get closer to the date

Reply if you want in (or want to cohost)

Reminder that mobile UX is still a nightmare at times

You should! Doesn't seem too bad cost-wise, as long as you typically have your ipad near you

Though also, this is a giant ad industry merger. This man knows he’s communicating nothing. I wonder if they’re trying to hide their real intents in the merger, for antitrust reasons?

How I’m gonna pitch my company from now on

easy rules of thumb for designing consumer app onboarding:

・aggressively reduce the # of taps/clicks until first delight

・have one obvious next step per screen, reduce extra clickable elements

・imagine the user is not sober

your first 30 seconds determine the next 30 days

Someone stole my backpack in Vegas when I wasn't looking. I chased them down through four casinos via Find My to get it back.

That airtag has been complaining about low battery for months. Now I'm getting it the freshest, most artisanal coin cell battery I can find 🫡

Releasing SmolVLM, a small 2 billion parameters Vision+Language Model (VLM) built for on-device/in-browser inference with images/videos.

Outperforms all models at similar GPU RAM usage and tokens throughputs

Blog post: huggingface.co/blog/smolvlm

You know how it feels slow to move in dreams? Like you’re running through water?

I’ve discovered a way to teleport instead, and it’s so satisfying in contrast

Also, I am surprised you don’t have a custom oddly specific domain

I really like this idea

But now I also want to make sure I maintain the sammakesthings.bsky.social namespace. Hm

Are you talking about golang or bluesky

A chart labeled “Learning curve of generative AI observability”. It shows LLM tracing and Generalized function tracing as being pretty easy, but a dramatic spike in difficulty for useful datasets, custom scorers, and production guardrails. Stick figures are dying in the chart once they hit datasets.

Assembling good datasets is what separates the boys from the men

Screenshotted this for a presentation today lol

Evals are "too damn expensive" until you:

• can't migrate underlying models safely
• can't add new features with confidence
• can't ship without HITL evals, which takes >100x longer
• product development and iteration grinds to a halt
• lose customer trust due to poor user experience

Google Images is getting super polluted with AI generated fluff. Trying to find a funny image for a presentation and it's increasingly full of junk.

Which is saying something, because it was already kinda useless

same