Tim Asp timothyasp

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

So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand...

If you, like me, resent every dollar spent on commercial PDF tools, you might want to know how to change the text content of a PDF without having to pay for Adobe Acrobat or another PDF tool. I didn't see an obvious open-source tool that lets you dig into PDF internals, but I did discover a few useful facts about how PDFs are structured that I think may prove useful to others (or myself) in the future. They are recorded here. They are surely not universally applicable --
the PDF standard is truly Byzantine -- but they worked for my case.

What forces layout / reflow

All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout*. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.

Generally, all APIs that synchronously provide layout metrics will trigger forced reflow / layout. Read on for additional cases and details.

Element APIs

Getting box metrics

elem.offsetLeft, elem.offsetTop, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight, elem.offsetParent

Row	Season	No. in series	Company	Deal	Industry	Entrepreneur Gender	Amount	Equity	Valuation	Corcoran	Cuban	Greiner	Herjavec	John	O'Leary	Harrington	Guest	# Sharks	$ per shark	Details / Notes

2	1	1	Ava the Elephant	Yes	Healthcare	Female	$50,000	55%	$90,909	1								1	$50,000
3	1	1	Mr. Tod's Pie Factory	Yes	Food and Beverage	Male	$460,000	50%	$920,000	1				1				2	$230,000
4	1	1	Wispots	No	Business Services	Male												0
5	1	1	College Foxes Packing Boxes	No	Lifestyle / Home	Male												0
6	1	1	Ionic Ear	No	Uncertain / Other	Male												0
7	1	2	A Perfect Pear	Yes	Food and Beverage	Female	$500,000	50%	$1,000,000				1		1			2	$250,000
8	1	2	Classroom Jams	Yes	Children / Education	Male	$250,000	10%	$2,500,000	1	1		1	1	1			5	$50,000
9	1	2	Lifebelt	No	Consumer Products	Male												0

Facebook: Unfollow people and pages

See comments section for more up-to-date versions of the script. The original script is from 2014 and will not work as is.

Open news feed preferences on your Facebook menu (browser)
Click people or pages
Scroll down (or click see more) until your full list is loaded
Run the script in your browser console

Facebook will block this feature for you while you use it, depending on how much entities you try to unfollow. It automatically unblocks in a couple of hours and you will be able to continue.

	#include <stdio.h>
	#include <stdint.h>
	// Philips Sonicare NFC Head Password calculation by @atc1441 Video manual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPytrn8i8sc
	uint16_t CRC16(uint16_t crc, uint8_t *buffer, int len) // Default CRC16 Algo
	{
	while(len--)
	{
	crc ^= *buffer++ << 8;
	int bits = 0;
	do

	import os
	import pickle
	import warnings

	import numpy as np
	import pandas as pd
	from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
	from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import EarlyStopping
	from tensorflow.keras.layers import Dense
	from tensorflow.keras.layers import Dropout

	#include <time.h> // Robert Nystrom
	#include <stdio.h> // @munificentbob
	#include <stdlib.h> // for Ginny
	#define r return // 2008-2019
	#define l(a, b, c, d) for (i y=a;y\
	<b; y++) for (int x = c; x < d; x++)
	typedef int i;const i H=40;const i W
	=80;i m[40][80];i g(i x){r rand()%x;
	}void cave(i s){i w=g(10)+5;i h=g(6)
	+3;i t=g(W-w-2)+1;i u=g(H-h-2)+1;l(u

	package com.example.d_rom.supportdesigndemo.widget;

	import android.content.Context;
	import android.content.res.ColorStateList;
	import android.content.res.TypedArray;
	import android.support.design.widget.TextInputLayout;
	import android.support.v4.view.ViewCompat;
	import android.support.v4.view.ViewPropertyAnimatorListenerAdapter;
	import android.support.v4.view.animation.FastOutSlowInInterpolator;
	import android.text.TextUtils;

	* {
	font-size: 12pt;
	font-family: monospace;
	font-weight: normal;
	font-style: normal;
	text-decoration: none;
	color: black;
	cursor: default;
	}