Boris
boris.bsky.social
Boris
@boris.bsky.social
Founder @getcensus.com with the quixotic goal of having every app & every workflow in a company run on the right data.
Alright fellow SQL nerds... Which of these 6 common table expressions are valid?
February 20, 2025 at 3:28 AM
Bay Area life means you see your friends in New York more often than the ones in the Peninsula.
February 12, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Has anyone created a standard format for structured *input* into LLMs? I'm thinking of a parseable json or markdown file that includes sections like examples, variables, system prompt, user prompt.
February 10, 2025 at 9:40 PM
been working on a site & repo to test apache iceberg (similar to caniuse.com). it executes a basic test by standing up combos of catalog, storage, and query engine. anyone want to contribute? sneak peek here: iceberg.fyi
Iceberg FYI
iceberg.fyi
February 6, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Fred Brooks is still underrated. I'm pretty sure people just *say* they've read Mythical Man-Month but often haven't.
January 23, 2025 at 10:51 PM
I judge agency presentations by how many words on a slide are specific to my company. Shockingly low sometimes!
January 16, 2025 at 7:08 PM
What is the word for when you’re debugging a data issue, you find one of the causes but it *increases* the scale of the discrepancy? 😂
December 15, 2024 at 2:11 AM
I know we all expect it but it’s wild to watch folks outside of tech transition from using the verb “Google” to the verb “ChatGPT” in regular conversation.
December 4, 2024 at 5:14 PM
Fun fact, Apple has the tiniest lobbying team in Washington. A fraction of the size of companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google.

Has anyone studied or written about this?
November 27, 2024 at 3:07 PM
tfw you stay home for a delivery and still somehow miss it because you had headphones on during a meeting.
November 22, 2024 at 9:55 PM
Our team has been playing Timeguessr at our weekly all hands and it's pretty fun. We had to retire Geoguessr because one of our teammates utterly dominated it.

Any other games we can try?

TimeGuessr #540 43,651/50,000
🌎🟩🟩🟨 📅🟩🟩⬛
🌎🟩🟩🟨 📅🟩🟨⬛
🌎⬛️⬛️⬛️ 📅🟩🟩🟨
🌎🟩🟩🟨 📅🟩🟩🟨
🌎🟩🟩🟩 📅🟩🟩⬛
timeguessr.com
TimeGuessr
TimeGuessr - the game that tests both your geography and history knowledge. Guess the right time and location of a historical photo.
timeguessr.com
November 22, 2024 at 7:32 PM
How long before AI companies try to use the DMCA to block publishing their internal prompts?
November 22, 2024 at 5:55 PM
Would anyone use Google Slides if the collaboration features were removed? It's no surprise that folks like Canva & Figma feel like competing here – all the best presentation tools are single-player.

Unbiased side plug: I think IA Presenter has a neat take.
November 21, 2024 at 12:15 PM
it's obviously not fun but i love the energy of a late night devops incident huddle
November 21, 2024 at 4:13 AM
Is anyone using Snowflake Cortex? Today's announcement makes it more compelling but my back of the envelope math is that it's between 4 to 20x the cost of using a generic Llama provider.

Feels like a high cost for keeping compute inside their walls no?
November 21, 2024 at 2:04 AM
Is there a German word for the combination of pride & sadness of having developed skills you don't love? (e.g. making slides)
November 20, 2024 at 12:50 AM
Starting to wonder if we should expand Rails rendering to include render_md to go along with render_json. The whole world is converting HTML back to Markdown so may as well share the right thing directly right?

Related: llmstxt.org

Thoughts? @chris.blue @simonwillison.net
The /llms.txt file – llms-txt
A proposal to standardise on using an /llms.txt file to provide information to help LLMs use a website at inference time.
llmstxt.org
November 19, 2024 at 2:19 AM

As everyone feels the emotional rush of building a following here, useful to revisit Alex Zhu's brilliant "New World" analogy to explain the rise of TikTok.

The key is social mobility. In established platforms like Twitter & Insta (ie. Europe), the social class system is already stabilized.
November 18, 2024 at 10:58 PM
We've been automating a lot of RevOps via LLM enrichments on our data (e.g. sentiment analysis, fit scoring for sales, account research for outbount, etc).

We've shared these prompts in docs/blog but feels like it should live in an open repo with contributions?

www.getcensus.com/blog/sentime...
Customer Sentiment Automation For Outbounding and Support
Discover how AI-powered message analysis transforms customer sentiment insights for support and sales teams, turning nuanced data into actionable strategies across channels.
www.getcensus.com
November 18, 2024 at 9:23 PM
After years of using Raycast, I still feel like I'm at the low end of "intermediate" user.

What's everyone's favorite Raycast extensions, shortcuts, quicklinks, workflows, etc?
November 18, 2024 at 5:57 PM
Does anyone else’s Tupperware lids mysteriously disappear?
November 4, 2024 at 2:47 AM
Agree it’s essential to embrace. But what is it about the data community that makes it resistant? Developers are a lot more comfortable embracing this.

One theory? Generally weak testing / review practices so it’s scarier to trust randomness.
I’m old enough to remember when data twitter got really really angry at the idea that AI would intersect their work.

Maybe #databs is ready for real talk?

Anthony Goldbloom nails it here with evidence, not hype:

blog.sumble.com/the-overlook...
The overlooked GenAI use case
Job post data reveals what companies plan to do with GenAI. The biggest use case is cleaning, processing, and analyzing data. A recent, widely circulated blog post by Sequoia Partner David Cahn asks...
blog.sumble.com
November 2, 2024 at 12:15 AM
What’s the right follow-up question to ask this candidate about their extra-curriculars?
October 30, 2024 at 6:57 PM
Homomorphic encryption always felt like something that would forever be for the distant future. Apple has found a great way to put it in practice here! Huge.

machinelearning.apple.com/research/hom...
Combining Machine Learning and Homomorphic Encryption in the Apple Ecosystem
At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. Our work to protect user privacy is informed by a set of privacy principles, and…
machinelearning.apple.com
October 28, 2024 at 12:58 AM