Brandon Rohrer

For the handful of you who are following along this journey, the artisanal language model I'm building to do proofreading is getting more mature. brandonrohrer.org/alms_blended...

One big step forward is the addition of additive smoothing (alpha) and upward-biased additive smoothing (beta) parameters. These helped to avoid false detections and increase precision - an important precursor to building ensemble models.

I recently published the redsho package for hyperparameter optimization. More than anything, I want it to be useful. I find it helpful to start with a working example. To this end I created a second repo called redsho-examples that walks through how to do it. codeberg.org/brohrer/reds...

As of right now, there are 4 examples, each in their own subdirectory: 1. sinc: optimizes a 2D variant of the sinc function, sin(x)/x codeberg.org/brohrer/reds... 2. perf: tests the execution time bottleneck in redsho and helps to streamline it codeberg.org/brohrer/reds...

I recently published the redsho package for hyperparameter optimization. More than anything, I want it to be useful. I find it helpful to start with a working example. To this end I created a second repo called redsho-examples that walks through how to do it. codeberg.org/brohrer/reds...

Usage 1. Start with an evaluation function def evaluate(*, a, b, c): return a * b**3 % c (The leading * tells Python that everything that follows is a required keyword argument) 2. Build a collection of values to try for each parameter values = {"a": [4, 7, 9], "b": [2, 5, 6], "c": [5, 8, 11]}

Cool Python trick: Sometimes you want functions to have keyword arguments, but you also want them to be required. This is especially useful when you're passing required arguments using dictionary expansion, like `function(**arg_dict)`.

This means that now when I write ``` def sum(*, a=None, b=None): return a + b ``` I no longer have to check that `a` and `b` are not `None` in the function, and I can call it with ``` arg_dict = {'a': 4, 'b': 9} print(sum(**arg_dict)) ```

Cool Python trick: Sometimes you want functions to have keyword arguments, but you also want them to be required. This is especially useful when you're passing required arguments using dictionary expansion, like `function(**arg_dict)`.

Optimizing models with lots of hyperparameters and options is a slog that usually requires a combination community wisdom, obscure blog posts, and tedious trial and error. Automated methods tend to rely on strong assumptions of smoothness or brute force their way through every permutation.

It looks through the parameter combinations it has tried already and picks one randomly, leaning heavily toward the best performers. Then it chooses one of those parameters and tries a few random values that it hasn't before. how it works explainer: brandonrohrer.at/evopowell.html

Optimizing models with lots of hyperparameters and options is a slog that usually requires a combination community wisdom, obscure blog posts, and tedious trial and error. Automated methods tend to rely on strong assumptions of smoothness or brute force their way through every permutation.

All of these options kind of suck. I couldn't find a solution I liked to this problem so I built one: redsho, a robust evolutionary direction set hyperparameter optimizer.

Hey US eng friends, if you want to give Patreon a shot: Staff SWE, Data Infrastructure jobs.ashbyhq.com/patreon/e8f0... Senior MLE, Infrastructure (on my team) jobs.ashbyhq.com/patreon/722d... Staff SWE, Backend Platform jobs.ashbyhq.com/patreon/c277...

My Artisanal Language Model for proofreading continues to evolve. Pairing forward and backward first-order Markov models is proving to be just good enough to merit further exploration. brandonrohrer.com/alms_composi...

RSS is the vinyl records of the web. And the Current RSS reader is the $5000 turntable whose clean design matches the medium. Except it’s only $10. www.currentreader.app Built by one designer with a vision ( @terrygodier.com ), Current shows what the web can be.

There are several command line incantations that I have had to look up at least a dozen times. Finding a string in Python files grep -r --include \*.py 'string I am looking for' . Find files by name find . -name '*partial_name*'

Heads up ruff users - with the release of 0.16.0 this week the number of default rules went up from 59 to to 413. This means that if you're ruff version auto updates, your CI pipelines might start failing on you all of a sudden.

My favorite thing to do is find a narrow problem that doesn't have a good solution, and then build one. Here are the highlights, from my blog. brandonrohrer.org/blog.html#al...

Efficiency maxxing is problematic for lots of reasons but a fundamental reason is that it always implies near term efficiency.