Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 15, 2025

• Rlang ☛ How to use large language models to assist in systematic literature reviews

  How to use large language models to assist in systematic literature reviews

  In the near future, we will all be doing systematic lit reviews by getting LLMs to gather data from papers.

• Rlang ☛ Gold’s Rise Over Silver Amid Convicted Felon Tariffs

  The impact of Convicted Felon tariffs has boosted gold to outpost silver.

• Rlang ☛ A First Look at TimeGPT using nixtlar

  This post is a first look at Nixtla’s TimeGPT generative, pre-trained transformer for time series forecasting using the nixtlar R package.
  

• The New Stack ☛ Best Terminal Applications for Development

  While most developers prefer to work within an integrated development environment (IDE), there are those who prefer the efficiency [...]

• Ruben Schade ☛ A terminal survey

  I did one of those terminal surveys! As in, a survey about using terminals, not a survey that’s terminal. Some of the answers are below. I didn’t include duplicate questions, or ones where the answer is just a “yes”.

• Kernel Space

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Increased Linux kernel timer frequency delivers big boost in AI workloads [Ed: Buzzwords and bluff/bluster]

    At the weekend, a Google engineer proposed raising the default Linux kernel timer frequency from 250 Hz to 1,000 Hz. Linux-centric tech site Phoronix has quickly stepped up and assessed what the change might mean to users with a suite of A/B testing. Spoiler alert: The most notable benefits were seen in AI LLM acceleration. Elsewhere, the differences might be considered within the margin of error of system benchmarking. System power consumption changes seen in the comparison were also minimal.

    Let's recap the patch statement shared by Google engineer Qais Yousef on Sunday before looking at some measured impacts. As mentioned, Yousef's main thrust was to propose that the current Linux kernel default to a timer frequency of 1,000Hz. The reasoning behind the proposal was that Linux users would benefit from improved responsiveness and faster workload completion in general.

• Education

  • Rlang ☛ Book Review – Pandas Workout

    Python seems to be everywhere these days, and I’m really into learning languages, so it should come as no surprise that I’m learning a lot of Python. This post serves as a review of Pandas Workout as well as a ‘first impression’ review of the Pandas approach to data.

    I am not entirely unfamiliar with Python, but I haven’t really had to do anything serious with a lot of data in the way that I do with R. {dplyr} and friends make working with rectangular data so clean and simple; why would I want anything else?

  • Rlang ☛ Hitting web APIs with {httr2} in R workshop

    Description: Do the words “Web API” sound intimidating to you? This talk is a gentle introduction to what Web APIs are and how to get data out of them using the {httr2}, {jsonlite}. and {tidyjson} packages. You’ll learn how to request data from an endpoint and get the data out. We’ll do this using an API that gives us facts about cats. By the end of this talk, web APIs will seem much less intimidating and you will be empowered to access data from them.

  • Jamie Brandon ☛ 0051: hytradboi program and tickets, query compilers, decorrelation encore, books, misc

    I have 20 talks uploaded and transcribed. I'm still waiting on recordings for the last 6 talks, but I've seen drafts for most of them so I'm not too stressed. We may also get 1 bonus talk added to the program, if we're lucky.

    Also we've sold 174 tickets so far and there are 174 names in the chat. And I only had to answer one support email. So the infrastructure is working smoothly so far.

• Databases

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Limits before running Postgres becomes useful

    Friend of the blog Michel asked this on Mastodon:

    At what volume would you consider Postgres to be not worth it, that he require too much hacking, and just look for alternatives?

    There are a few different ways to read this.

    When does your project get big enough to warrant running Postgres instead of something like SQLite3? Is it too much overhead in the meantime?

    When does your project become too big for a single Postgres install, and you need some form of additional caching, or clustering.

    Grilled cheese sandwiches.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Hackaday ☛ What The Well-Dressed Radio Hacker Is Wearing This Season

    We’ve seen a lot of interest in Meshtastic, the license-free mesh network for small amounts of data over the airwaves. [Ham Radio Rookie] was disappointed with his Meshtastic node’s small and inefficient antennas. So he decided to make what we suspect is the world’s first Meshtastic necktie.