Doug Turnbull
softwaredoug.bsky.social
Doug Turnbull
@softwaredoug.bsky.social
830 followers 130 following 330 posts
Search at Reddit, formerly Shopify and OpenSource Connections. Helped write Relevant Search / AI Powered Search http://softwaredoug.com
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Let me know if you want to grab coffee to chat at some point.
Like an e-commerce company might enumerate all their categories, subcategories, etc of the "things" you can find (Vehicle -> Car -> Miata), and try to classify their products -- and users queries -- to those categorize. LLMs can be great at that.
Yeah I would say what you describe is most of my work these days :)

"Synonyms" can mean many things. It's sometimes more precise to say alternate terms (like USA vs United States of America), vs hypernyms (parent concepts car -> vehicle), and hyponyms (more specific concepts, car -> miata)
LLMs are not a good tool for labeling. They're a tool for feature engineering.

(Use Traditional ML w/ LLM features for the labeling)

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/11...
LLM Judges aren’t the shortcut you think
After the LLM judge hype curve crashes, what will come after?
softwaredoug.com
I don't know what this means
Reposted by Doug Turnbull
EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in a 2022 interview warned supporters of reproductive rights that "one day it’s going to be your turn."

"Murder is murder. And one day it's going to be your turn."
All the defenses of Jay Jones are whataboutiism (the GOP said similar bad thing, so we shouldn't hold Jones accountable). You either follow a moral principle or it’s meaningless.

Threats of political violence should be disqualifying.
Reposted by Doug Turnbull
Same thing with pedestrian bridge by Stonefield. Or any number of patchwork projects
It's always the peak of absurdity when you see a nice, long stretch of protected bike path like 29N between Polo Grounds -- Hollymead. But that ultimately doesn't connect to anything. So it goes unused.

Nobody seems to plan these things from the perspective of getting bikes from A to B
Reposted by Doug Turnbull
You know who else went all week without driving? #weekwithoutdriving
Reposted by Doug Turnbull
Some good news in the City Council packet for Monday’s meeting: the city is planning to purchase 2000 Holiday Drive to use as a low-barrier homelessness shelter.

More here: charlottesvilleva.portal.civicclerk.com/event/2511/f...
It's vector search Vern
This place is a pedestrian deathtrap
Reposted by Doug Turnbull
With support from my university's Office of Strategic Communications, I wrote an op-ed about the importance of international students to research at US universities. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published it today. www.post-gazette.com/opinion/gues...
Shomir Wilson: American strength in AI depends on international students
Gasps and murmurs are unusual at the opening session of an academic conference, but I heard many this summer in Vienna, Austria, at the annual meeting...
www.post-gazette.com
Next 72 hours: Discount Code vectorsrock for 20% off my October course discussing LLMs and Agents to improve search relevance:

maven.com/softwaredoug...
Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven
Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search
maven.com
Reposted by Doug Turnbull
I can recommend this for understanding lexical search and BM25! I'm pretty new to search in general, and had only used BM25, not really understood it. Now I understand what it does. 😁 Really cool when you're building a RAG pipeline.

Looking forward to the vector search talk!