Lak Lakshmanan
@lakluster.bsky.social
🌥️ Personal observations, not investment advice.
📚 O'Reilly: BigQuery, ML Design Patterns, Data Science 👨🏫Coursera 🌪️Ex: @googlecloud @NOAA
https://www.vlakshman.com/
📚 O'Reilly: BigQuery, ML Design Patterns, Data Science 👨🏫Coursera 🌪️Ex: @googlecloud @NOAA
https://www.vlakshman.com/
The Frye museum on First Hill has a couple of very good Americana exhibitions going on now. Strongly recommend. The alt-text in the images explains what they are
#seattle
#seattle
July 20, 2025 at 5:43 PM
The Frye museum on First Hill has a couple of very good Americana exhibitions going on now. Strongly recommend. The alt-text in the images explains what they are
#seattle
#seattle
The first five chapters of our 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 are up on the O'Reilly website. Labor of love from me and Hannes Hapke, but also a great learning opportunity as we got to explore things we didn't personally use.
www.oreilly.com/library/view...
www.oreilly.com/library/view...
Generative AI Design Patterns
Generative AI enables powerful new capabilities, but they come with some serious limitations that you'll have to tackle to ship a reliable application or agent. Luckily, experts in the field … - Sele...
www.oreilly.com
May 31, 2025 at 1:59 AM
The first five chapters of our 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 are up on the O'Reilly website. Labor of love from me and Hannes Hapke, but also a great learning opportunity as we got to explore things we didn't personally use.
www.oreilly.com/library/view...
www.oreilly.com/library/view...
Wildflowers now blooming in western Washington trails! L to R: Coltsfoot, Trillium, Streaming Violet, Salmonberry
April 13, 2025 at 11:34 PM
Wildflowers now blooming in western Washington trails! L to R: Coltsfoot, Trillium, Streaming Violet, Salmonberry
In this GenAI design pattern, I demonstrate how to use preference tuning to produce optimally performing content.
medium.com/data-science...
medium.com/data-science...
Optimizing to the Eval
GenAI Design Pattern #5
medium.com
February 25, 2025 at 9:00 PM
In this GenAI design pattern, I demonstrate how to use preference tuning to produce optimally performing content.
medium.com/data-science...
medium.com/data-science...
Reposted by Lak Lakshmanan
Hold on your outrage. They just show the map per the official edicts. Indian and Chinese users do not even see the same border.
February 11, 2025 at 3:22 AM
Hold on your outrage. They just show the map per the official edicts. Indian and Chinese users do not even see the same border.
Reposted by Lak Lakshmanan
They open sourced their entire training regimen. Deepseek trained their model from scratch using the same technique that AlphaGo used ("self-play") and that requires both less compute and less labeled data. They are legit.
January 24, 2025 at 4:25 PM
They open sourced their entire training regimen. Deepseek trained their model from scratch using the same technique that AlphaGo used ("self-play") and that requires both less compute and less labeled data. They are legit.
Hair ice that we saw on our weekend hike near Seattle.
It is a rare type of ice formation caused by a specific fungus releasinv moisture from a specific kind of rotting wood when the weather conditions are just right: www.discoverwildlife.com/plant-facts/...
It is a rare type of ice formation caused by a specific fungus releasinv moisture from a specific kind of rotting wood when the weather conditions are just right: www.discoverwildlife.com/plant-facts/...
January 23, 2025 at 11:05 PM
Hair ice that we saw on our weekend hike near Seattle.
It is a rare type of ice formation caused by a specific fungus releasinv moisture from a specific kind of rotting wood when the weather conditions are just right: www.discoverwildlife.com/plant-facts/...
It is a rare type of ice formation caused by a specific fungus releasinv moisture from a specific kind of rotting wood when the weather conditions are just right: www.discoverwildlife.com/plant-facts/...
LLM-powered workspaces are the next new office productivity tool. This excellent article clarifies how to organize your sources, transcripts, thoughts, etc. and extract insights into templated formats (like PRDs) using one such tool. The underlying ideas are applicable to any white-collar work.
"Supercharged AI Intern" for your Product Management Team with NotebookLM
Product Management is a demanding role. You are constantly juggling market research, stakeholder management, product roadmaps, user feedback, constantly changing engineering schedule, technology disru...
www.linkedin.com
January 3, 2025 at 9:36 PM
LLM-powered workspaces are the next new office productivity tool. This excellent article clarifies how to organize your sources, transcripts, thoughts, etc. and extract insights into templated formats (like PRDs) using one such tool. The underlying ideas are applicable to any white-collar work.
Things India could do to make itself friendlier to tourists:
(1) Enable easy access to UPI to foreigners or via credit cards
(2) Allow e-SIM purchases based on passport, i.e. without aadhar/PAN card
(3) Make websites accept foreign credit cards and send OTPs to foreign ph numbers to enable planning
(1) Enable easy access to UPI to foreigners or via credit cards
(2) Allow e-SIM purchases based on passport, i.e. without aadhar/PAN card
(3) Make websites accept foreign credit cards and send OTPs to foreign ph numbers to enable planning
Why you’re not on holiday in India right now
A fabulous destination for foreign tourists does little to lure them
www.economist.com
January 3, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Things India could do to make itself friendlier to tourists:
(1) Enable easy access to UPI to foreigners or via credit cards
(2) Allow e-SIM purchases based on passport, i.e. without aadhar/PAN card
(3) Make websites accept foreign credit cards and send OTPs to foreign ph numbers to enable planning
(1) Enable easy access to UPI to foreigners or via credit cards
(2) Allow e-SIM purchases based on passport, i.e. without aadhar/PAN card
(3) Make websites accept foreign credit cards and send OTPs to foreign ph numbers to enable planning
Ideally, you can evaluate agentic applications even as you are developing them, instead of evaluation being an afterthought. For this to work, though, you need to be able to mock both internal and external dependencies of the agent you are developing. Dependency injection in PydanticAI unlocks this.
Evaluation-Driven Development for agentic applications using PydanticAI
An open-source, model-agnostic agentic framework that supports dependency injection
towardsdatascience.com
December 21, 2024 at 4:59 PM
Ideally, you can evaluate agentic applications even as you are developing them, instead of evaluation being an afterthought. For this to work, though, you need to be able to mock both internal and external dependencies of the agent you are developing. Dependency injection in PydanticAI unlocks this.
Is this AI-generated? People have long wanted to see GNB sing and Palani play, but they were before the movie era. And then this clip shows up. What do you think?
youtu.be/S6bx-zWnuwI?...
youtu.be/S6bx-zWnuwI?...
Rare video of G.N.Balasubramaniam singing in a concert//Yochana kamala lochana//#gnb
YouTube video by Raghuraman.V
youtu.be
December 17, 2024 at 7:49 AM
Is this AI-generated? People have long wanted to see GNB sing and Palani play, but they were before the movie era. And then this clip shows up. What do you think?
youtu.be/S6bx-zWnuwI?...
youtu.be/S6bx-zWnuwI?...
"My agentic system can answer questions and call backend APIs" is the GenAI equivalent of "My program complies". You don't know whether the program works until/unless you evaluate against reference answers and actions.
December 10, 2024 at 6:28 PM
"My agentic system can answer questions and call backend APIs" is the GenAI equivalent of "My program complies". You don't know whether the program works until/unless you evaluate against reference answers and actions.
The changing face of America -- today, in Bellevue, WA, a Canadian Asian supermarket chain opened at the location of a Walmart that closed last year after struggling for years. This is now the largest grocery store in the state & is supposed to have excellent bakery, sushi, and dimsum made daily.
December 6, 2024 at 3:26 AM
The changing face of America -- today, in Bellevue, WA, a Canadian Asian supermarket chain opened at the location of a Walmart that closed last year after struggling for years. This is now the largest grocery store in the state & is supposed to have excellent bakery, sushi, and dimsum made daily.
This is the song I played most often in 2024. Definitely up there in my list of favorites, so not a surprise. Sanjay was the artist I played #2 most often.
open.spotify.com/track/46CFHW...
open.spotify.com/track/46CFHW...
Marukelara
Sanjay Subrahmanyan · Carnatic Vocal - Sanjay Subrahmanyan · Song · 1994
open.spotify.com
December 4, 2024 at 11:23 PM
This is the song I played most often in 2024. Definitely up there in my list of favorites, so not a surprise. Sanjay was the artist I played #2 most often.
open.spotify.com/track/46CFHW...
open.spotify.com/track/46CFHW...
College costs have been dropping, but "men and women were about equally likely to say that not being able to afford a four-year degree was a major reason why they hadn’t completed college." It's essential that we turn this perception around.
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
Fewer young men are in college, especially at 4-year schools
College enrollment among young Americans has been declining over the past decade, and it's mostly due to fewer young men pursuing degrees.
www.pewresearch.org
November 29, 2024 at 11:44 PM
College costs have been dropping, but "men and women were about equally likely to say that not being able to afford a four-year degree was a major reason why they hadn’t completed college." It's essential that we turn this perception around.
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
Thanksgiving is a day when my wife and I celebrate American food, which we define as anything my we didn't grow up eating, and learned to cook after we moved here. (Item names in alt text). Happy Thanksgiving!
November 29, 2024 at 1:54 AM
Thanksgiving is a day when my wife and I celebrate American food, which we define as anything my we didn't grow up eating, and learned to cook after we moved here. (Item names in alt text). Happy Thanksgiving!
Spotify has no clue about Indian languages or music genres. I mostly listen to carnatic music, mostly in Tamil but some of whose 19th century classics were composed in Telugu. Spotify will go on a jog where it seamlessly transitions from them to Telugu film songs (A) Wrong language. (B) Wrong genre.
November 28, 2024 at 2:47 AM
Spotify has no clue about Indian languages or music genres. I mostly listen to carnatic music, mostly in Tamil but some of whose 19th century classics were composed in Telugu. Spotify will go on a jog where it seamlessly transitions from them to Telugu film songs (A) Wrong language. (B) Wrong genre.
Familiar trails in Cougar Mountain look very different in the aftermath of the "bomb cyclone". Debris, fallen tree trunks that you have to limber below or vault over, newly uprooted trees, dead trees sliced in the middle, others that have slid down the hill slide, a lone madrona stripped of bark ...
November 25, 2024 at 1:13 AM
Familiar trails in Cougar Mountain look very different in the aftermath of the "bomb cyclone". Debris, fallen tree trunks that you have to limber below or vault over, newly uprooted trees, dead trees sliced in the middle, others that have slid down the hill slide, a lone madrona stripped of bark ...
What a difference a week makes! Salmon pair spawning last week in Issaquah Creek. Those streams are probably water logged now, after the bomb cyclone -- the salmon wouldn't have been able to make it there now.
November 23, 2024 at 4:41 AM
What a difference a week makes! Salmon pair spawning last week in Issaquah Creek. Those streams are probably water logged now, after the bomb cyclone -- the salmon wouldn't have been able to make it there now.
Reposted by Lak Lakshmanan
i'm sorry to say this but if you send me a tiktok of a person telling a story into the camera for 3 minutes i'm not fucking watching it. just in general ever. people need to start typing things up again because i can read so much faster than you can talk and i'm not wasting my precious time on this
November 11, 2023 at 6:49 AM
i'm sorry to say this but if you send me a tiktok of a person telling a story into the camera for 3 minutes i'm not fucking watching it. just in general ever. people need to start typing things up again because i can read so much faster than you can talk and i'm not wasting my precious time on this
Thru-hikes are logistically hard, but can offer outsize rewards. Hiking along Rattlesnake Ridge, from Snoqualmie to North Bend, you get great vistas, glimpses of Rainier, looking down on Rattlesnake Ledge. It's a great 11mi walk with unusual viewpoints. See if you can swing the logistics. #pnw #hike
October 8, 2023 at 12:42 AM
Thru-hikes are logistically hard, but can offer outsize rewards. Hiking along Rattlesnake Ridge, from Snoqualmie to North Bend, you get great vistas, glimpses of Rainier, looking down on Rattlesnake Ledge. It's a great 11mi walk with unusual viewpoints. See if you can swing the logistics. #pnw #hike
Reposted by Lak Lakshmanan
Always good to reflect on the unfortunate truth that there all sorts of discoveries we'll never witness due to the finicky and sometimes regressive nature of peer review and hollow demands to do research attractive enough to get grant funding.
#NobelPrize #Kariko
#NobelPrize #Kariko
October 2, 2023 at 2:29 PM
Always good to reflect on the unfortunate truth that there all sorts of discoveries we'll never witness due to the finicky and sometimes regressive nature of peer review and hollow demands to do research attractive enough to get grant funding.
#NobelPrize #Kariko
#NobelPrize #Kariko
Views from a cross continent flight into Seattle around sunset.
(1) Lake Washington and Puget Sound
(2) Rainier and Baker
(3) Glacier Peak
(1) Lake Washington and Puget Sound
(2) Rainier and Baker
(3) Glacier Peak
October 2, 2023 at 3:13 AM
Views from a cross continent flight into Seattle around sunset.
(1) Lake Washington and Puget Sound
(2) Rainier and Baker
(3) Glacier Peak
(1) Lake Washington and Puget Sound
(2) Rainier and Baker
(3) Glacier Peak
The trail to Heather Lake is steeper, shorter.and wilder than its better known neighbor, Lake 22. And the lake is just as spectacular. Was lucky to catch fall colors and a calm reflection.
#seattlehike
#seattlehike
September 17, 2023 at 2:14 PM
The trail to Heather Lake is steeper, shorter.and wilder than its better known neighbor, Lake 22. And the lake is just as spectacular. Was lucky to catch fall colors and a calm reflection.
#seattlehike
#seattlehike