Doug Turnbull

The tradeoff between human and AI context | Discussion

Wish you could hack the system? Early bird pricing until Aug 15!

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Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven Vibe-code your way to Relevant Search

New artwork whodis

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The consequence of the administration's environmental policies isn't as much about decarbonization.

The real consequence is idiotic industrial policy where the administration has decided to lose a trade war and sacrifice our security by ceding energy infrastructure leadership to other countries.

I’ve spent most of the last decade doing candidate recruitment so I feel qualified to say this:

If you do not like the person running, find someone to run against them or run yourself. Especially this far out from the election & filing deadlines, this is an option available to you if you so chose!

The tradeoff between AI and human context AI coding requires a tradeoff between human and AI context, and your job is now to decide where to best spend your limited attention vs to let the AI do work

AI coding is about navigating the tradeoff in human -- AI context moment-by-moment. If you can master knowing when to delegate, you can be really effective. If you rabbit-hole the wrong areas, or don't let the AI do some things, you'll be sub-optimally productive

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/07...

AI Chat Startups - Is the bubble about to pop? Investor money chases chat-style interfaces for every domain. I believe this is wrongheaded: ChatGPT and pals will do your domain better as they address more and more long tail-use cases, and better i...

First the VectorDB bubble plateaud
Next, ChatGPT for X is going pop

We're about 2 years after the inception of "AI idea" to its collapse

Agree? Disagree?

maven.com/p/3ad9c7/ai-...

I’m noticing an uptick in e-bike commuters to the hospital. I really think there will be a ten fold increase in people biking around Charlottesville once some protected bike lanes go in.

AI Chat Startups - Is the bubble about to pop? Investor money chases chat-style interfaces for every domain. I believe this is wrongheaded: ChatGPT and pals will do your domain better as they address more and more long tail-use cases, and better i...

@jnbrymn.bsky.social and I are going to have a controversial discussion where maybe we don't agree

maven.com/p/3ad9c7/ai-...

Must be propaganda or something from that liberal rag, the Financial Times. Nothing to see here, just your tax dollars at work 🙄

Petition: Make the Free Bridge Lane Promenade Permanent The community has enjoyed and benefited from temporarily closing Free Bridge Lane to cars — a flat, calm place, close to town to walk, bike and easily enjoy the outdoors. We hope to make Free Bridge L...

Make the Free Bridge Lane Promenade Permanent!

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"Why don't kids roam like the 80s". Meanwhile

It would seem a fairly obvious/simple messaging from a US political party - “No tax dollars going to kill kids in Gaza”. But what the fuck do I know.

It seems the end game will be some type of redacted / (fake?) Epstein files that removes Trump. MAGA gets in line. Then they label everyone questioning the release as “conspiracy theorists”

A lot of people think mastering your craft is about learning a new topic

But it's actually about relearning something you "know" from first principles (and repeating this every now and again, going deeper each time)

I raaaarely trust point-wise search evals without a lot of work

However pairwise evals I almost always start with some trust. Despite the work, humans and LLMs almost always do better at "is A more relevant than B" than "rate A's relevance from 1-5"

Hot take, 2025 is the end of the chat (not AI) bubble. Nobody wants a different chat app for X, they want to literally use ChatGPT (Claude, Gemini, ...) for that.

...also few of these companies figure out how to do search well, which is the real death knell...

a man in a suit and tie is saying " boom easy as that " ALT: a man in a suit and tie is saying " boom easy as that "

Paramount+ sub = $60 a year

Shift that $ to your @pbs.org station instead and you’ll do two good things at the same time. Do it.

With your Paramount Plus subscription, it's important to ask -- What Would Picard Do?

Wilhoit's Law captures so much: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

The rest of the thread is also worth knowing

🧵Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) (also known as blind feedback) is a technique of first retrieving/re-ranking top-k documents and adding some of their words to the initial query. Then, a second retrieval/ranking stage uses an updated query. ↩️

… and then turn around and give that money to PBS

I hope anyone subscribing to paramount plus takes the time to cancel today

ML Powered Search by Doug Turnbull on Maven Systematically improve search relevance with learning to rank, active/reinforcement learning, and a bit of vector search

I used to have an ML-Powered Search course that basically was about Learning to Rank and Rerankers. I've been told people enjoyed it

If that interests you, please add yourself to the waitlist, and I might do it again...

maven.com/softwaredoug...

From the PoliticalOptimism community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the PoliticalOptimism community

Sad and seems to ring true

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Also quite good: Katydid symphonies

I wish this perspective had a political home. An unapologetically pro immigrant perspective

It just invariably has something that goes wrong that hurts the audiobook experience. Or it has a video pop up that I have to close….

Happy Fourth of July.

The story behind Caesar salad Caesar salad celebrates its 101st birthday in July 2025. We look at the origins of the popular dish — surprisingly, it doesn’t involve a certain Roman emperor.

TIL Caesar salad is Mexican food

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