Daniel Liden

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Notes and Drafts

This page includes miscellaneous notes and drafts. It provides a place for me to record things that I learn and to share work-in-progress posts. Assume everything here is half-baked, a work in progress, provisional.

(2024-08-21) Python Package Management with uv

Yesterday (<2024-08-20 Tue>), Astral released a bunch of updates to uv, their Python package/project manager, written in Rust. I've been using uv for the past month or two, mostly as a very fast drop-in replacement for venv and pip.

The new release expands uv into "an end-to-end solution for managing Python projects, command-line tools, single-file scripts, and even Python itself."

This post will very briefly explore the workflow I am most interested in—setting up an environment, installing packages, and specifying requirements.

(2024-08-18) Answer.ai, Claudette, and FastHTML

I just listened to the latest episode of the Latent Space podcast, which featured Jeremy Howard of fast.ai fame. Fast.ai was my introduction to deep learning—or at least re-introduction following a brief and theory-oriented treatment of the topic in grad school—and the course and book remain among the best learning resources I have ever encountered. The podcast was a good reminder to look into the projects Howard and his team have been working on at answer.ai, "a new kind of AI R&D lab which creates practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs."

(2024-07-09) Python interpreter doesn't seem to support readline error in Emacs on MacOS

I was encountering this warning when trying to use Python in Emacs on Macos: Warning (python): Your ‘python-shell-interpreter’ doesn’t seem to support readline, yet ‘python-shell-completion-native’ was t and "python3" is not part of the ‘python-shell-completion-native-disabled-interpreters’ list. Native completions have been disabled locally. I found years of discussions on this issue, but no solutions. I also found that using Python installed with Conda instead of with virtualenv worked fine. From this, I narrowed down the root cause and found a working solution: (1) install the gnureadline Python package with pip install gnureadline; (2) override the default readline in your virtual environment with python -m override_readline.

In the rest of this note, I will briefly review the steps of the investigation that led me here. Scroll down to the Solution sectionif you're (understandably) not interested in the rest!

(2024-04-18) Asynchronous Instructor

In this example, I was extracting a list of topics from a list of 1000 JSON objects loaded as a list of Python dicts.

I used the Anthropic Haiku model.

Using the instructor library with the asynchronous Anthropic client makes it much faster to make a large number of calls to the Anthropic API fairly quickly.

(2024-04-17) Logging and Loading a QLoRA Model with MLflow

This is a minimal example of how to log an MLflow qlora model. It does not show any actual model training or data processing, just the basic process of saving the model.

(2024-04-16) Troubleshooting Flash Attention Installation

I have repeatedly run into issues getting flash-attention working correctly with whatever version of PyTorch and CUDA I happen to be working with. I found a working pattern, at least for the platform I tend to be working on (Databricks). This note is a quick summary.

(2024-04-05) Intro to QLoRA

I have a basic understanding of what QLoRA is, but given its popularity and apparent success, I am not nearly familiar enough with it. These are my notes on the Hugging Face blog post about QLoRA and quantization. Later, I will also make a note with some examples.

(2024-04-04) DBRX with MLflow

This note shows how to access Databricks foundation model APIs via OSS MLflow deployments server and via the MLflow OpenAI model flavor.

(2024-04-03) Using the DBRX Model with Instructor

This note briefly demonstrates how to use the Instructor library with the Databricks DBRX model via the Databricks Foundation Models API.

(2024-04-01) MLX Quickstart

These are my notes on the MLX quick start guide and usage notes. It's a work in progress. Ultimately, I'm interested in learning what MLX will let me do with LLMs on my laptop. I might write something more substantial on that topic in the future. For now, you're probably better off consulting the docs yourself than looking at my notes on them.

(2024-03-31) PyTorch Review

This is a quick run through the appendix on PyTorch from Sebastian Raschka's Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) book, currently available via Manning's MEAP. I haven't spent an enormous amount of time with PyTorch in the last year or so, so it seemed worth the effort to work through it.

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