🧠 Signals & Noise - #3
things that I've read, watched, listened to, and created lately.
💭 Something to Think About
A quote, reflection, or question for you to ponder this week.
“He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever.” — Chinese proverb
Takeaways of this issue:
- Did you ever think about how LLMs protect themself from prompt injection? Read more in Simon’s beautiful blog post. link
- Kent Beck and The Pragmatic Engineer talk about TDD, AI agents, and coding. - link
📖 Deep Dives & Quick Reads
Articles worth reading — insights, essays, and web gems.
CaMeL offers a promising new direction for mitigating prompt injection attacks, Simon Willison - link
CaMeL is designed to safely carry out commands like “Send Bob the document he asked for." It does this by breaking the command down into steps in a code-like system, then verifying each step to ensure the data is directed only where it should be, thereby avoiding any malicious instructions. Simon walks you through these steps in great depth on his blog post.Best Simple System for Now, Dan North - link
My first encounter with Dan was at DevOpsDays Amsterdam. Since then, I’ve been following him online to learn from him. In this article, he explores the classic dichotomy of doing it quickly and dirty or making it robust and future-proof. His claim is;You do not have to choose between gold-plating dressed as craftsmanship or perfectionism and corner-cutting framed as pragmatism or realism. You can have the quality of the former at the speed and focus of the latter. I call this the Best Simple System for Now.
📚 Leaf by Leaf
Books I’ve recently finished or am currently reading, with a few reflections.
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, Annie Duke - link
Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, is an interesting profile. In this book, she offers a different perspective on the decisions we make in our lives. She challenges how we perceive the outcomes of our decisions. To her, everything is a bet, and this kind of thinking, you’ll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.
🖥️ The Watchlist
Films and TV series that stuck with me recently.
Nonnas, Netflix - link
Nonnas is a fun film from Netflix. You’ll see bunch of relatable scenes in it. I don’t want to describe it further to avoid giving any spoilers. Its IMDb score is not fair. I’d expect to see a score close to 7.5.
🎥 Frames of Thought
Compelling videos I stumbled upon — essays, interviews, talks, or short docs.
TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck, The Pragmatic Engineer - link
This one sits in my watchlist for a while due to its length. However, I don’t mind suggesting it without watching. The Pragmatic Engineer is someone I like to follow. Kent Beck is a well known seasoned software engineer. I'm super enthusiastic to find a time to go through this podcast and hear their takes on AI agents. Give it a chance.- John sits down with founders and builders over a pint—Greg Brockman (cofounder of OpenAI), Susan Li (chief financial officer at Meta), Kyle Vogt (founder of The Bot Company and cofounder of Twitch and Cruise), and Pieter Levels (indie hacker). As of today you can watch the episodes with Greg and Susan.
Camping Videos Here and There
These days we are watching bunch of camping videos in preparation to hiking/camping trip we want to plan with my friend Peter. Here are the ones I like:
