And it is not as interesting as you might think — The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was perceived as a breakthrough in AI by the public. It resulted from using Transformers in Large Language Models (LLMs) and using way more training data than ever before. Chatting with ChatGPT feels natural. If you don’t explicitly poke it, you might not…

An analysis of PyPI download statistics — The Python Packaging Index (PyPI) tracks the downloaded packages. I’ve checked the monthly statistics for the two time frames: 1st of June to 30th of June and 1st of July to 31st of July and compared them. It’s important to realize that download statistics do not tell you anything about…

You are playing the association game “Code Names”. The words are: Blue: ski, star, fish, blind, tip, file, cotton, scarecrow Red: bond, sound, park, penny, bee, tokyo, walrus, hospital, suba diver Black: boil neutral: angel, captain, bass, casino, day, goldilocks, field You are the red spy master. It’s your turn…

How long can you heat your home with a Tesla? — Modern electric cars have huge batteries and modern homes heat using heat pumps and thus electricity. Theoretically, you could heat a home using a Tesla. But how long would it last? Heat Energy Usage

The Monkey-Ladder Experiment is a parabel from Competing for the future by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad (1996) and goes like this: 4 monkeys in a room. In the center of the room is a tall pole with a bunch of bananas suspended from the top. One of the…

People don’t make security advisories. They might not even explicitly state that there was/is a security issue. — This is a warning to my fellow software developers. I’m writing this article as the current maintainer of pypdf and PyPDF2, probably the most widely used PDF packages in the Python ecosystem. …

Focusing purely on the economic view — When I started investing, I read a lot about ETFs, stocks, and the stock market. I started with a time deposit as I felt super insecure. Once I understood ETFs and the stock market better, I continued with that. Now that I own a house, I’m thinking about investing in…

One of my favorite articles is “Is it worth changing the lightbulb”. The article contains the following table that shows rather clearly that it’s pretty much always worth replacing old incandescent light bulbs by LEDs: However, even within the category of LEDs there are differences. The EU has given us…

Cooking is a common analogy to programming. You have to write down instructions in a very clear way as the computer just executes those instructions — not more, not less. We are not used to make such precise instructions, which is hilariously shown in the “exact instructions challenge”: Computers…