Arc Notes Weekly #88: Asha
This week, optimize AI VRAM usage with advanced quantization, explore Amazon’s new Aurora DSQL for scalable databases, and tackle the challenges of AI-assisted coding to build better software.
This week, optimize AI model performance with cutting-edge VRAM quantization techniques, dive into Amazon’s Aurora DSQL and its potential to revolutionize distributed databases, and uncover the hidden challenges of AI-assisted coding to enhance your software development practices.
Sponsor Spotlight: Start selling to enterprises with a few lines of code. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible, easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes instead of months. It's used by hundreds of the fastest growing companies in the world like Cursor, Vercel, and Perplexity.
Enjoy this week's round-up!
— Mahdi Yusuf (@myusuf3) or LinkedIn
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Articles
Concurrency Diagrams
Phil Booth discusses the importance of concurrency diagrams in system design, highlighting how they can prevent misunderstandings among engineering teams by making concurrency explicit. Learn how these simple yet effective diagrams can streamline your development process and ensure cohesive system architecture.Is Aurora DSQL your next database?
Paul explores Amazon’s latest offering, Aurora DSQL, a serverless and globally distributed SQL database aimed at providing high availability and Postgres compatibility. While Aurora DSQL promises impressive scalability and performance, it currently lacks essential relational database features and is limited to just two US regions. More on this next week once I have time to dive into it. Prompt Engineering Toolkit
Uber’s engineering team unveils the Prompt Engineering Toolkit, a centralized solution designed to streamline the creation, management, and evaluation of prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs). This toolkit empowers engineers to develop effective prompt templates with features like retrieval-augmented generation and runtime feature datasets, enhancing the efficiency and reliability of AI-driven applications at Uber.Unlock Enterprise Revenue Without the Hassle
Single Sign-On, Directory Sync (SCIM), Audit Logs, Fine-Grained Authorization — these are essential features when selling to enterprises. The problem is that building and maintaining them requires significant resources and can result in over $8M in lost revenue.
WorkOS simplifies this process with easy-to-use APIs that help you integrate complex enterprise features into your app in minutes. It's the fastest way to go upmarket while allowing your engineers to focus on building the core product.
Why pipes sometimes get "stuck": buffering
Julia Evans breaks down why terminal pipes can become unresponsive due to output buffering and offers actionable solutions to keep your command-line workflows running smoothly.The 70% Problem: Hard Truths About AI-Assisted Coding
Addy Osmani explores the paradox of AI-assisted development, where engineers report increased productivity but the quality of software remains unchanged. He also addresses the challenges faced by junior developers and offers practical patterns to leverage AI effectively without compromising software quality.Bringing K/V Context Quantization to Ollama
Discusses the latest enhancement to Ollama: K/V context cache quantization, which significantly reduces VRAM usage, enabling the use of larger models and expanded context sizes on existing hardware. This advancement not only optimizes resource utilization but also maintains minimal quality impact, making it a game-changer for AI model deployment.Projects
screenshot-to-code
“screenshot-to-code” tool seamlessly converts screenshots, mockups, and Figma designs into clean, functional code using advanced AI models like GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5. steel-browser
steel-browser offers an open-source browser API that streamlines the creation of AI-driven web agents and automation tools, featuring comprehensive browser control, session management, and anti-detection measures.
Every UUID
Nolen Royalty addresses the daunting task of managing over five sextillion UUIDs by developing everyuuid.com, a site that lists and allows users to search through every UUID. He dives into the technical challenges of rendering an astronomically large number of UUIDs, ensuring a random yet consistent ordering using Feistel ciphers, and implementing efficient search functionality.