Tag: tutorials

A guide to generative AI and LLM (large language models), February 2025


I decided to go through all my posts on AI and pull out information that would be useful to anyone wanting to learn more about generative AI (often referred to as gen AI or genAI) and the LLMs they run. If you have used chatGPT, you have used genAI. But there’s much more to the technology than what you find on that site. To see what I mean, click on any of the blue underlined text and you will be taken to a site talking about something to do with gen AI.

Enjoy!

Tutorials/Introductions: for people just getting started with gen AI, I found these links useful: how generative AI works, what is generative AI, how LLMs works,  sentence word embeddings which kinda shows  how LLM works, best practices for prompt engineering with openai api,  a beginners guide to tokens, a chatGPT cheat sheet,  demystifying tokens: a beginners guide to understanding AI building blocks, what are tokens and how to count them, how to build an llm rag pipeline with llama 2 pgvector and llamaindex and finally this: azure search openai demo. (Some of these are introductory for technical people – don’t worry if you don’t understand all of them.)

For people who are comfortable with github, this is a really good repo / course on generative AI for beginners. (and check out these other repositories here, too). This here on the importance of responsible AI. and here’s a step by step guide to using generative AI in your business, here.

Prompts and Prompt Engineering: if you want some guidance on how best to write prompts as you work with gen AI, I recommend this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Finally:  Here’s the associated press AI guidelines for journalists. This here’s a piece on how the  Globe and Mail is using AI in the newsroom. Here’s a how-to on using AI for photo editing. Also, here’s some advice on writing better ChatGPT prompts. How Kevin Kelly is using  AI as an intern, as told to Austin Kleon. A good guide on  how to use AI to do practical stuff.

Note: AI (artificial intelligence) is a big field incorporating everything from vision recognition to game playing to machine learning and more. Generative AI is a part of that field. However nowadays when we talk of AI people usually mean gen AI. A few years ago it was machine learning and before that it was expert systems. Just something to keep in mind as you learn more about AI and gen AI in particular.

 

What is a prelude? (and more ways to learn about classical music…)

Then consider going to this blog. Here’s the piece there discussing: What is a Prelude? After you read that,  scroll to the very bottom of the post, where you will see they also have introductions to minuets, cantatas, operettas and more.

Saturday afternoons are a good time to learn such things. Then find some music to listen to.

A dozen good pieces on Kubernetes


Here’s twelve articles on Kubernetes, from introductory to advanced.

Some introductory pieces on getting started with Kubernetes:

  1. Getting Started with Kubernetes: Deploy a Docker Container with Kubernetes in 5 minutes
  2. Deploy a Python Flask application in Kubernetes – IBM Developer
  3. Play with Kubernetes Classroom
  4. Three quick ways to start with Kubernetes – Katsuhi
  5. How to deploy a NodeJS app to Kubernetes | Sean McGary
  6. A Kubernetes quick start for people who know just enough about Docker to get by

Some good tutorials from IBM:

  1. Kubernetes Tutorials: 5 Ways to Get You Building Fast | IBM
  2. Learning Path: Kubernetes – IBM Developer

Some harder pieces for if you are already well versed with Kubernetes:

  1. Kubernetes 202 — Making It Fully Operational – uptime 99 – Medium
  2. Kubernetes NodePort vs LoadBalancer vs Ingress? When should I use what?
  3. Kubernetes On Bare Metal

(Image from pexels.com)

The problem with carpentry and how it differs from IT

It is near impossible to learn how to do carpentry from either books or the Internet. I know because I’ve tried really hard.

Let’s say you decide you no longer want to buy bookcases from Ikea but you want to make you own. You decide a book case is simply a box and decide you want to learn how to make a box with a few tools and some simple instructions.

If you go search for help with your box, you may very likely come across instructions like this: www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/how-to/g1591/how-to-make-a-box/

It makes assumptions that you have lots of tools and you can do hard things like cut joints. After a few hours of searches, you will find most sites are like this: tailored to woodworkers making wood pieces that are hard to do and not anything near modern looking.

IT is different. For any technology out there, you can search for the name of the technology and “tutorial” and find something. You can be up and running using the technology in the time it takes you to give up looking for carpentry skills.

I am not sure why that is. Maybe there is more interest in IT so there are more tutorials on it. You could argue carpentry is harder but I have done both and I disagree.

I especially disagree because there is one site I could that actually does make it easy to make furniture and that is Ana White’s. Because of her I have made a wide range of furniture with basically a hammer, a jigsaw and a drill. The furniture isn’t fancy but it was cheaper and better and as modern looking as Ikea.

I think that is a problem with a lot of woodworking sites. They assume you want to do fine woodworking. Find woodworking is fine, but for people starting out, they likely want to make a simple table, a bookcase or set of shelves, perhaps a storage chest. A good joint may be best, but most Ikea furniture is held together with dowels and screws. If you make a book case with dowels and screws and glue, it will last and hold lots of books.

I wish there were more introductory sites on the internet that help people who wanted to learn how to make furniture and do carpentry, like there is with IT. Right now all I have found is Ana White’s site. I highly recommend it.

My favorite place to go for technical tutorials is DigitalOcean

If you want tutorials that are clear and understandable and work, then I recommend the Tutorials at DigitalOcean. You might think it is obvious, but I can’t count the number of how to technical guides on the Web that don’t work are hard to understand and confusing.  All the ones I’ve used from DigitalOcean have worked well. Plus they are a pleasure to read.

Now when I am searching on for a technical topic, I put in “DigitalOcean” as part of the search terms.

Installing and configuring and using IT is hard enough: make getting started that much easier by using their tutorials.