Bas' Take on Tech: Coffee Time, LLMs, Vector Search
Hi there,
thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.
Have a great week ahead!
☕ Coffee Time
A lot of buzz has been around thdxr, adamdotdev, theprimeagen, teej_dv, and iamdavidhill. These four guys launched terminal.shop. This is probably the first startup to accept orders for $25 coffee packets via SSH only: ssh terminal.shop
.
The coffee is sold out, but it’s interesting for other reasons as well:
First, it points out some interesting considerations regarding SSH security when connecting to unknown hosts: When connecting to the terminal.shop host via SSH, you expose your public key by default. Apart from possible tracking issues, this is not a security risk per se. However, when SSH Agent Forwarding is enabled, terminal.shop could – in theory – hijack the connection to connect to other hosts on your behalf. Clockwork has an extensive article on SSH agent hijacking.
Second, text-based user interfaces – if done right – can make a stunning user/developer experience. Luckily, there is textual – a framework to create TUIs with Python. Its founder, Will McGugan, took the opportunity to recreate the terminal.shop app with textual. He also made a live coding video about it.
📈 LLMs and Vector Search
AI is still the number one topic in tech for the moment. Time to dive into some of the technical details. No, not prompt engineering!
Miguel Grinberg has published an excellent article about LLMs' inner mechanics without too many mathematical details.
Another important concept behind the AI buzz of recent times is vector databases. Alex Garcia created a vector search engine as an extension for SQLite. For the high-level concept, refer to Jide Ogunjobi’s slides. There is also a quick and dirty vector db implementation in Python called babyvec
which offers some interesting insights into implementation details.
📰 More headlines
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