veekaybee

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts of models in prod eagerly sought.

Foundational Concepts

Pre-Transformer Models

slikts

Advanced memoization and effects in React

Memoization is a somewhat fraught topic in the React world, meaning that it's easy to go wrong with it, for example, by [making memo() do nothing][memo-pitfall] by passing in children to a component. The general advice is to avoid memoization until the profiler tells you to optimize, but not all use cases are general, and even in the general use case you can find tricky nuances.

Discussing this topic requires some groundwork about the technical terms, and I'm placing these in once place so that it's easy to skim and skip over:

• Memoization means caching the output based on the input; in the case of functions, it means caching the return value based on the arguments.
• Values and references are unfortunately overloaded terms that can refer to the low-level implementation details of assignments in a language like C++, for example, or to memory

sebmarkbage

I heard some points of criticism to how React deals with reactivity and it's focus on "purity". It's interesting because there are really two approaches evolving. There's a mutable + change tracking approach and there's an immutability + referential equality testing approach. It's difficult to mix and match them when you build new features on top. So that's why React has been pushing a bit harder on immutability lately to be able to build on top of it. Both have various tradeoffs but others are doing good research in other areas, so we've decided to focus on this direction and see where it leads us.

I did want to address a few points that I didn't see get enough consideration around the tradeoffs. So here's a small brain dump.

"Compiled output results in smaller apps" - E.g. Svelte apps start smaller but the compiler output is 3-4x larger per component than the equivalent VDOM approach. This is mostly due to the code that is usually shared in the VDOM "VM" needs to be inlined into each component. The tr

ryanflorence

Everything I Know About UI Routing

Definitions

1. Location - The location of the application. Usually just a URL, but the location can contain multiple pieces of information that can be used by an app
   1. pathname - The "file/directory" portion of the URL, like invoices/123
   2. search - The stuff after ? in a URL like /assignments?showGrades=1.
   3. query - A parsed version of search, usually an object but not a standard browser feature.
   4. hash - The # portion of the URL. This is not available to servers in request.url so its client only. By default it means which part of the page the user should be scrolled to, but developers use it for various things.
   5. state - Object associated with a location. Think of it like a hidden URL query. It's state you want to keep with a specific location, but you don't want it to be visible in the URL.

sebmarkbage

The Rules of React

All libraries have subtle rules that you have to follow for them to work well. Often these are implied and undocumented rules that you have to learn as you go. This is an attempt to document the rules of React renders. Ideally a type system could enforce it.

What Functions Are "Pure"?

A number of methods in React are assumed to be "pure".

On classes that's the constructor, getDerivedStateFromProps, shouldComponentUpdate and render.

staltz

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

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This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

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mwhite

The Ultimate Git Alias Setup

If you use git on the command-line, you'll eventually find yourself wanting aliases for your most commonly-used commands. It's incredibly useful to be able to explore your repos with only a few keystrokes that eventually get hardcoded into muscle memory.

Some people don't add aliases because they don't want to have to adjust to not having them on a remote server. Personally, I find that having aliases doesn't mean I that forget the underlying commands, and aliases provide such a massive improvement to my workflow that it would be crazy not to have them.

The simplest way to add an alias for a specific git command is to use a standard bash alias.

# .bashrc