August 5, 2025

I’ve recently started doing more yoga. Is doing even the right word here? Practicing yoga? Getting into yoga? Yoga-ing?

All the turns of phrase sound a little too much like what you overhear in a Bali cafe. But yes I’ll admit it. I understand the hype. You get a pretty great workout and you get to lie down and nap for a good 5 minutes of the class. Try finding that at Barry’s.

A few random things in case you missed them:

• OpenAI released their first open source model since gpt-2 in 2019. Six years later and we’re still using the Adam optimizer.

• The old diesel caltrains have finally made their way to Peru. I hope the locals soon get to experience a ride during Bay to Breakers.

• After only ever getting delivery, damnfine is a way better vibe in person. Who thought pizza would ever become a luxury dining experience?

Now on to the nerdy stuff.

Babe, new podcast just dropped [link]

Podcasting’s a funny skill. It’s a legitimate talent but when done best it doesn’t look much like a talent at all. When you watch Steph Curry sink a three-pointer, you know that you could never come close. But when you listen to Joe Rogan, it feels like that conversational skill is somewhere in all of us. We already have hundreds of them every week - what’s the difference of having a mic right in front of you?

Let me tell you, it’s very different. But sometimes you have to swallow your pride and just put something out there. Real artists ship and all. So here we are: an ML show, with a lot of technical details, but made accessible enough that my mom swears she understands most of it. We’re still iterating on the format so let me know if you have any feedback.

Our latest episode covered ChatGPT’s new study mode, augmented reality, and models starting to build other models. And if you would be so kind - do smash that subscribe button on your podcast client of choice.

My personal backup strategy [link]

I have an embarrassing confession. For a long time I wasn’t actually backing up my files. (cue gasps from the audience)

I used to be so diligent about doing these backups. I remember at ~8 years old buying my first LaCie tower (the design hasn’t changed much in the meantime). But as almost all of my work switched to Github/Figma, these single point backups felt a lot less necessary. After all they all have a much more sophisticated devops operation than my desktop external hard drive. Still, as I’ve defacto inherited the role of family archivist I thought it was time to get my backups ducks in a row.

Since everyone has different needs for their backups, I really like the idea of maintaining a little python library: just for you & what you need it to do. It can continuously run on your mac or on your home server if you have one. bungalo is what I’m calling ours: some design notes are in the post.

Until next time. May the tensors be good to you.

Pierce