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...

Yo pull over the car, new Tunkelang just dropped! maven.com/p/0ab1e3/ran...

It's vector search Vern

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...

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!

Tomorrow I'll be talking about vector retrieval, continuing Cheat at Search Essentials. Full details on my blog article softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/07...

Agents will be a bigger paradigm shift than RAG for search RAG is a lot of the same old search we've always built. Agents that reason actually do quite well with simple search tools. They turn a dumb keyword search into something much smarter. softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

Recording for BM25 + Lexical Search now up maven.com/p/e9fbe4/che...

This Wednesday I'll be discussing how to Cheat at Query Understanding using LLMs with Jason Liu. If you want a taste of "Cheat at Search with LLMs", please come hang out! maven.com/p/eebe98

BM25F is an adjustment to BM25 that accounts for multiple fields, beating out naive summing of BM25 scores softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

Cheat at Search essentials begins Friday ! Lexical search from basic tokenization and term counts up to BM25F maven.com/p/e9fbe4/che...

A scapegoat's guide to transforming organizations softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

Guns are bad.

Give the reigns of Dem power to the hands of working folks to lead the fight and get out of the way. Stop being run by fancy pants educated/wealthy liberals. Let the working class run the Dem party, including strategy, etc and get out of the way Feels like that's the winning coalition

Some good Charlottesville news: UVA is going to lease the Oak Lawn site (next to the middle school) to the city schools! www.parentsquare.com/feeds/57220620

TIL there's rail service between different Florida cities? www.gobrightline.com

Do rules/instructions or few shot work best for tiny LLMs? softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

"Having our data in turbopuffer makes us feel ready for whatever comes next in AI-enabled software. It gives us the confidence to adapt quickly." — Tristan Homsi, co-founder of Readwise turbopuffer.com/customers/r...

Trey Grainger and I are offering an "AI Powered Search" course in November. Hope to see you there 30% off in Sept maven.com/search-schoo...

Can’t think of a clearer case of correlation != causation www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

My son can bike to school But he can't bike the mile out to an activity in the county So we get to brave traffic (create traffic) to move him a few minutes down the road. Then create traffic on the way back home. All because the biking/ped infra in the urban ring around Cville is abysmal

People get really touchy when you try to teach people how to use LLMs for research. People either assume because “reasoning” LLMs are to be trusted. Or because they know hallucinations happen, to never use an LLM. It’s very taboo in some circles to even bring up the idea

Last day to fill out this survey!

One frustration with left-leaning institutions -- they are sooo consensus driven. They spend 99% of the time collecting public feedback, 1% of the time implementing a change

Caring only about triangulating issue polling led to "Jeb!" Dems are basically having their "Jeb!" moment right now. Paralyzed and unable to step out of a tiny little box

Yep

Anyone else notice that with reasoning, there's a higher level of hallucination, even when the model searches and find relevant content? It's like a lot of extra complexity with much wider variation in outcomes.

we used to build household shrines to Going On The Computer and it's no coincidence that as we abandoned these we started straying further from god's light

Counterpoint: absolutely not

OpenAI lost the plot on boring LLM use cases softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/08...

This just seems plain wrong.

For a lot of boring, non-sexy LLM applications - like query classification, you don’t want reasoning. You want speed. But with GPT-5, at best you can set reasoning to minimal. And it’s 10x slower than the corresponding GPT-4.1 model with worse accuracy. :(

Good agents are good researchers Its not about 'reasoning', its about the agents ability to evaluate research (with your help) softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/08...

I have started to see the "roving posse" of (charismatic?) leader + their people as the actual core organizing principle of the tech industry

To summarize: 1) the plaintiffs went on a right wing radio show to make their case 2) they admit they aren’t actually mad about procedural issues - they just don’t like the new zoning code 3) they claim hundreds support them, but don’t acknowledge the thousands of residents who support the new code

I wonder how many prefab palette homes could be built and deployed at the cost of the National guard takeover of DC

Early bird for October cohort of my class ends in 15 hours maven.com/softwaredoug...

I wonder if Subaru realizes we can track the location of cars we’ve sold back to the dealer…

As a board member of the Charlottesville Economic Development Authority, I've been intrigued by the ways local EDAs are empowered by state law to promote local economic well-being. I'm thrilled that at tonight's meeting we approved a new program focused on affordable housing

"How I use AI build stuff" -- I let it code for a while. Then annoying bug happens. I dig in, realizing gave it way too much leeway. I swoop in restructure, fix, get to where I want it to. Then vow to hand code more. Eventually I get lazy, and rinse, repeat... Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk

(Speaking in my own personal capacity as a private resident, not as a representative of any quasi judicial board or committee) This sucks balls

As long as elite colleges remain "elite" they will be disliked by much of the population and remain a target Places like UVA should not take a GPA of 4.29 to get in. Let more students in, have a broader impact on society, and become democratic instead of elite

Why are you wearing that stupid man suit. Link below

Memento but with smartphones would be fascinating

The tradeoff between human and AI context | Discussion

Wish you could hack the system? Early bird pricing until Aug 15! maven.com/softwaredoug...

New artwork whodis maven.com/softwaredoug...

The consequence of the administration's environmental policies isn't as much about decarbonization. The real consequence is idiotic industrial policy where the administration has decided to lose a trade war and sacrifice our security by ceding energy infrastructure leadership to other countries.

I’ve spent most of the last decade doing candidate recruitment so I feel qualified to say this: If you do not like the person running, find someone to run against them or run yourself. Especially this far out from the election & filing deadlines, this is an option available to you if you so chose!