Thomas Millar Profile Banner
Thomas Millar Profile
Thomas Millar

@thmsmlr

8,080
Followers
1,269
Following
376
Media
4,278
Statuses

Follow me for more Elixir in your feed formerly @stitchfix_algo instructor_ex ⬩ ⬩

Joined April 2009
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Pinned Tweet
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
Left Stitch Fix after 10 years built the data platform for 150 data scientists crunching PBs of data, launched about a dozen data products / algorithms. Built human-in-the loop ML products. Wild run Figuring out what's next. Anyone hiring? (retweet for visibility plz 🙏)
12
46
143
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
12ft is down, @vercel banned me No warning on a Friday night, while I was on vacation. Worst yet, they took down all my projects and confiscated all my domains. No response from support.
87
177
2K
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
Give me a follow I’ll reveal how 12ft works next week
22
13
495
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 years
I'm making it my mission to clean the web. It started with when 8 of the top 10 links on Google were paywalled when I was doing COVID research at the beginning of the pandemic. Unbelievable. But i'm not done
28
51
406
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
To set the record straight. I missed that email. Your man was on vacation I’m sympathetic to vercel if they don’t want to host 12ft. Taking all my other domains and projects and not just disabling 12ft is the weird part. You’d think a web hosting company would have site
@rauchg
Guillermo Rauch
10 months
@thmsmlr @vercel Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses. Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.
39
5
800
27
15
361
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
@rauchg @vercel I’ve received 4 emails from vercel support in 2023, I don’t think that constitutes hundreds of hours of work But tbf I get it if you want to be an opinionated hosting provider and not host 12ft. No worries here, just restore my other projects and give me my domains back and we
11
4
341
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
5 months
@_skris By my napkin math, you could easily make a top 1000 website with that
19
41
338
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
25 days
I think I solved it. The perfect scripting environment for Elixir. I call it Livescript. livereload of .exs files in IEX, only rerunning the code that changes. The longer your script, the more savings gained. #myelixirstatus
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
The perfect elixir scripting environment is elusive I've spent so much time trying to make one of these columns completely green any Elixir folks got a solution? #myelixirstatus
Tweet media one
3
3
27
18
37
209
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
5 months
The Inverse Fly-Stack Big Infra™ like wants you to rent GPUs from them. Elixir makes clustering with the cloud easy they say. ... it only costs you $1825/month Yeah? well, Elixir also makes it easy to have your cloud webapp cluster with the gaming PC
Tweet media one
21
27
195
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
11 months
Everyone’s building AI copilots for IDEs I built it for @livebookdev Here’s how you can use ChatGPT in livebook and not get left behind.
7
31
171
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
Upgraded from Cowboy to Bandit on a production service I manage that does 3M req/month. Reduced CPU utilization by 20% and request latency of static pages by 40%
9
23
171
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 year
@yacineMTB Most ovens have a limiter, but they have a self clean option which bypasses and gets to 800-900f. Problem is it locks the door while cleaning. You can just saw off the lock. Saw a guy do it on YouTube to make neopolitan pizza
4
0
166
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 years
Hey folks, if you found my Twitter because of Bill Clinton Swag, there is a chance that the selected album artwork doesn't work with the image generator. I'm working on a fix, it has to do with some encoding error. Otherwise it should work for most albums
42
4
154
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 years
Unplug the mouse boys, TIL j/k works on DuckDuckGo to shift focus down the search results.
Tweet media one
33
19
144
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 years
Wild that you can `git clone` a self driving car Openpilot is a game changer for me.
4
12
146
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
Coming soon ✨ Browser automation tooling in @livebookdev It's so tedious to find the right css selectors, so I built a little monkey-see, monkey-do browser recorder that generates Wallaby code. Enjoy! #myelixirstatus
7
26
150
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 years
Email captures, Ads, popups, interstitials. All of these things are killing the open web. The signal to noise ratio is way off. You should offended by the visual abuse and hoops these sites make you jump through. I'm not the only one who thinks this,
2
12
145
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 years
Starting in 2022, I'm going to be building you, the users of the internet, tools to combat this. I want to make your experience on the web enjoyable again.
2
7
125
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 years
@thesamparr Just drove from Austin to Montreal and back. 98% of the drive didn't touch the steering, gas or brake.
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 years
Wild that you can `git clone` a self driving car Openpilot is a game changer for me.
4
12
146
2
10
114
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 months
Yo Elixir folks, should I create Livebook showing you how to automatically optimize prompts with Instructor? Is that something you'd be interested in? #myelixirstatus
10
22
117
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
@wesbos Been daily driving this on the Meta Quest 3 for a month now. It's an awesome experience, peak ergonomics
Tweet media one
8
9
113
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
5 months
Wake up folks
@_skris
Sai Krishna
5 months
@thmsmlr 11MB/sec doesn’t have to be so hard. Thomas, this is brilliantly written.
2
0
43
8
22
116
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 years
Listened to the entire chat between @realGeorgeHotz @elonmusk and @t3dotgg last night Here’s the points made that are most fascinating 👇
Tweet media one
4
15
112
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
@jxnlco csv files in s3
4
3
107
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
using llama3-70b via @GroqInc is incredible Getting good at VIM was the first time I felt I was limited by speed of thought This, though.. is something else Only thing now is to figure out how to speed up my thinking
Tweet media one
8
5
109
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
@rauchg @vercel Chatted offline. Confirmed, I’m back into the account. Domains restored. Thanks for the help @rauchg
9
2
107
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 year
Remember how the AI people got all worked up that GZIP is a better text classifier than Neural Networks last week? I made a @livebookdev that walks you through why it's oddly effective, and how to implement it in Elixir. #MyElixirStatus 🧵for details
Tweet media one
2
22
97
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
In the next release of instructor_ex, you'll be able to use Ecto to extract structured data from images gpt-4-vision-preview is coming to Elixir!
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
6
21
96
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
8 months
The key to a good UX with LLMs is streaming That's easy when the response is just text, but are you really going to implement a structured json stream parser? No worries, I did it for you instructor_ex now supports streaming Ecto Schemas, enjoy!
4
7
87
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
18 days
Scraping YouTube transcripts, built in <10 mins The power of · LiveScript · Elixir · Wallaby · Claude · Instructor #myelixirstatus
Tweet media one
6
7
89
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
18 days
I built the data platform for stitch fix This is true. My new thing runs on SQLite and @duckdb
@archieemwood
Archie
18 days
every data team goes through this
Tweet media one
4
13
191
5
6
87
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
11 months
RIP Retool @livebookdev and Elixir is amazing. Systematically going through every Silicon Valley SaaS startup and building it into the ecosystem for free. 🔪Analytics Dashboard 🔪Internal Admin Tool What is Livebook coming for next?
0
15
83
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
@oldselfportrait @rauchg @vercel I was on vacation I wasn’t checking email. I’m sympathetic to vercel here. Honestly very reasonable to take down 12ft with no response in 2 weeks. Taking everything else is the weird part. Weird for a hosting provider to not have site level controls I just want access to my
4
0
77
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
8 months
PSA: Default Phoenix will hard refresh when LiveViews change, reseting scroll position making implementing design below the fold a pain! Fix is easy though, just update your config/dev.exs
Tweet media one
7
8
74
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
What if Livebook had Phoenix.LiveReloader? Right now there is a chasm between Mix projects and Livebook. While Livebook gives a REPL-like experience and visuals, Mix gives you testing, multiple files, etc. Often I find myself prototyping modules in Livebook, then refactoring
4
13
71
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 years
@rauchg I upgraded my account to a professional account, but my users are still hitting 429 rate limit errors on my serverless functions. Is there any way to get this bumped?
22
10
64
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
8 months
Figured out how to get gpt-3.5-turbo to output `Explorer.DataFrame` in Elixir Custom types landing in instructor_ex soon
Tweet media one
6
6
65
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 months
Starting to finally build out my .iex.exs file, this little guy is proving to be super useful #myelixirstatus
Tweet media one
7
8
63
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
18 days
Hetzner $5 VPS
Tweet media one
3
4
59
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
@t3dotgg Yo you can just tag me my man No need to misrepresent my statements
1
0
58
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
Goodbye `mode: :md_json` OpenAI released gpt-4-turbo with both vision & tools. You can now much more reliably extract data from images using instructor_ex. Update your pipelines to use the new model. No library update required
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
6
11
56
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 years
AWS λ is great, but Cache-Control headers are key to scaling. When Bill Clinton Swag was blowing up, @timer150 suggested I add: Cache-Control: s-maxage=86400 to search API responses, and errors stopped immediately. Don't take caches for granted. Thanks @vercel 🙏
Tweet media one
3
2
56
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
Streaming isn't just for arrays instructor_ex now supports streaming recursively at the Ecto field level. Perfect for rendering skeleton UIs around those long GPT-4 latencies!
4
5
52
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 year
@BenjaminDanard @yacineMTB That's way too hot for pizza
4
2
49
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
5 months
I use elixir btw
3
1
49
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
Maybe ironically I think this is what holds Elixir back as a language. Because you're so productive, engineering teams are smaller and there are fewer jobs. Entrepreneurship/new companies is the limiting factor to Elixir growth
@cigrainger
Christopher Grainger (fosstodon.org/@cigrainger)
6 months
Two here and this is basically it for us too. Consolidating on Elixir was the impetus for this but yes, for small teams it’s just so much better.
2
1
18
8
2
48
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 months
good lord, cursor with gpt-4o is getting really good w/ Elixir Outputs an entire step-by-step guide of what to do, I just click "apply" to each file edit and boom! feature is done.
Tweet media one
2
3
48
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
Livebook solved one of the biggest problems in Jupyter notebooks - cells are executed in order - but it's not all clear skies. While it solves tons of issues: 1. deterministic output from rerunning the Livebook 2. proper stale cell tracking for efficient re-evaluations 3.
Tweet media one
4
10
47
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 year
@NekomimiScience ty ty, I quite enjoyed that shitpost
1
0
46
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 years
📢 12ft is now on iOS! Ever scrolling through Twitter on the can, see a link to an article and immediately get hit with popups and paywalls? lets you easily get to a clean version of the site with no ads, emails captures, or paywalls.
12
4
44
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
@DalMinimal @rauchg @vercel Right? A little heavy handed I’d say, no? 🤷
1
0
44
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 years
Last month my college side project – – turned into an instagram challenge getting over 40M page views in a week. It was a fun 15 minutes. Here's how it went down.
8
3
42
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
I came to elixir for the genservers one day i'll write one i'm sure
5
0
43
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
6
4
42
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 months
Did any of you realize how livebeats handles file uploads? @chris_mccord built his own pseudo-object store that proxies requests to the fly node where the file is stored on disk. lmfao what a madlad #myelixirstatus
Tweet media one
3
5
41
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
v0.0.5 is a big release for instructor! - GPT-4 Vision support - @ollama and @togethercompute support - Better HTTP defaults for streaming Go check it out #MyElixirStatus
Tweet media one
1
11
40
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
@PJUllrich Idk the story on this guy specifically, but you should try to live in SF for awhile if you get a chance. It’s vulgar, it’s irreverent, it’s a local phenomenon that’s hard to understand from the outside. Unfathomable seeing it on Twitter but you’ll understand when you’re in
14
1
39
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
When someone ghosts me, I endorse them on linkedin for communication. I get a response within 48 hours guaranteed. hit rate is 100%
1
0
38
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
Hey you, did you start coding in the last 5-10 years? Let me bring you in on a secret We used to have this thing called a `vendor/` directory where we just plopped all our JS dependencies, raw files, unminified. Our build script was just to concat the files. No NPM, no ESM /
Tweet media one
5
1
38
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
llama3-8b-instruct pushing 1200 token/s on my RTX4090 I wonder how far I can take this thing, internet rumors suggest I can get to 2000 token/sec. are local llms poised to be the king of structured extraction? So far we're talking 103M tokens/day locally vs $24/day on
Tweet media one
4
3
38
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
5 years
In Thailand 🇹🇭 Tried loading my personal site, felt instant, even on a crappy 3g connection. ❤️ @zeithq and Next.js
@rauchg
Guillermo Rauch
5 years
I'm in Tokyo 🇯🇵 It's nice to experience first-hand how @zeithq sites are fast everywhere, every time… Hello Haneda edge!
Tweet media one
5
7
238
1
4
36
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
12 days
step 1: try AI step 2: read the docs step 3: to read source code It's wild how many times this website has got me out of a bind.
Tweet media one
3
1
39
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
For the first time ever, network and storage are faster than RAM So much core infra is about to be rewritten. 30 year-old pillars will be toppled. Who of you is bold enough to try?
Tweet media one
10
4
36
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
12 days
claude had a mini outage, had to fallback to GPT-4o. I can confirm Claude is wayyyy better at Elixir than GPT #myelixirstatus
6
1
36
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
18 days
I’m telling you anon, your stack could be getting simpler every day You just have to open your eyes
@_philschmid
Philipp Schmid
18 days
A small, portable vector database powered by SQLite for on-device RAG? 🤯 sqlite-vec is a new vector search SQLite extension written entirely in C with no dependencies, MIT/Apache-2.0 dual licensed.   sqlite-vec queries: - 1 million 128-dimensional vectors in just 17ms - 500,000
Tweet media one
31
311
2K
1
2
34
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
8 months
instructor_ex now can run entirely locally with mistral-7b-instruct-v0.2 using @ggerganov 's llamacpp 40 toks/sec on my M2 Releasing soon ✨
Tweet media one
3
4
34
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 years
Well that was unexpected... what should i build next?
Tweet media one
13
5
31
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
If you need anything more than a MacBook, SSH into it
@baileysimrell
Bailey Simrell
4 months
the truth will set you free
Tweet media one
214
873
12K
1
0
33
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
22 days
this livescript + cursor + claude 3.5 sonnet workflow is so good I wrote 3 webscrapers this morning, claude one-shot the third one after looking at the first two
3
1
32
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
9 months
I present to you the "double ReLU approximating any curve" demo from All in Elixir @livebookdev , made interactive with Kino
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
9 months
Going through the course so many good insights. Things I knew to be true, but really internalized after he explains it For example, the visual example of using n ReLUs to approximate any function I’m going to replicate his demos in Elixir
2
1
18
2
9
30
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
@wesbos Text is clear enough.. It’s not the big of an issue though I just make the screen and text larger and add more virtual monitors. New devices coming have much higher resolution Headset is heavy-ish but with a good headstrap it’s not really an issue for me. I use it 5+ hours a
7
0
31
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
8 months
The quickest way to level up as an engineer level 1: Read the docs level 2: Read the entire stacktrace level 3: Read the source code You'd be surprised how often people never get past level 1.
@casillias_mz
محمد زقلام 🇵🇸
8 months
@thmsmlr I think in coding in general you need to read code instead of documentation.
0
0
1
5
3
27
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
With Ecto as the interop, instructor_ex let's you use your existing code to validate structured LLM outputs. But it works both ways, instructor_ex also lets you use the LLM to validate your Ecto structs We're fully bidirectional! Software 1.0 <~ instructor ~>
Tweet media one
3
3
30
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
21 days
I'm not smarter than you, I just have better tools 10 years ago it was VIM, today it's Cursor
6
2
30
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
🧵of some of my favorite Tech Talks (Bookmark, I’ll be updating over the next few months)
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
Some of the most forward thinking, top tier technical talks are free on YouTube and they only have 1.2k views It amazes me more of you don’t watch Your missing out on free alpha
3
0
17
1
5
29
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
5 years
We all know distributed tracing is useful, but it's hard to mobilize your engineering org to get it done. Here's how we did it @stitchfix_algo
3
7
29
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
16 days
I made a Twitter List of all the ElixirConf speakers See y'all there 🫡 #myelixirstatus
Tweet media one
0
6
29
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 years
Saturday is #BitcoinPizzaDay in this household Thanks @APompliano Fueling up for the decentralized future #BTC
Tweet media one
1
3
25
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 months
@jxnlco lmfao this has, "he dumped me, so i'm going to get super fit and make him jealous" energy Turns out the ladies were right all along
2
0
29
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
24 days
I love Twitter, you can just DM people you respect and they're happy to chat for a bit
2
1
29
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
lol, this town is hilarious
Tweet media one
1
2
28
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
In honor of all the homies at @ElixirConfEU I made some pastel de nata (Portuguese egg tarts) Wish I could be there #myelixirstatus
Tweet media one
3
0
29
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 years
@adamlaiacano FWIW, I built two of the IH systems at Stitch Fix. For the most part they are in house because nothing existed when we needed them, so I had to build them. We frequently joke that we should just push the deadline 3 years and buy something at the 11th hour
3
0
28
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
The perfect elixir scripting environment is elusive I've spent so much time trying to make one of these columns completely green any Elixir folks got a solution? #myelixirstatus
Tweet media one
3
3
27
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
llama3-8b-instruct is looking promising for instructor_ex
Tweet media one
5
0
27
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
I love the blog, they be dropping useful nuggets routinely every couple of days
@peregrine
Jason Stiebs
4 months
One of the biggest foot-guns with Phoenix LiveView is around forms and not using the built-in autoform recovery. This is also a great chance to talk about how modern web development has at a minimum 3 forms of state to manage!
1
21
98
2
0
27
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
3 months
annnnnd we're back to OpenAI gpt-4o hits the "fast-enough" but also is much smarter at coding Elixir / Erlang stuff
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
using llama3-70b via @GroqInc is incredible Getting good at VIM was the first time I felt I was limited by speed of thought This, though.. is something else Only thing now is to figure out how to speed up my thinking
Tweet media one
8
5
109
4
0
26
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
6 months
Guys, use Elixir so I can adopt you. @josevalim said it's chill
Tweet media one
2
1
26
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
@Jonathan_Blow 2-factoring for work every day kills me inside
1
0
26
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 year
@cto_junior I once sat in on a 2 hour debate about which of two postmortem templates should be the standard going forward. I was not popular when I said "who cares, no one reads them, that's not really the point"
1
1
25
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 years
This is huge for @opentelemetry @LightstepHQ has been a unbelievably useful tool @stitchfix_algo to help our team support over 500 services deployed by our data scientists Its useful at every scale, but now it’s free to start seeing value. Don’t take my word for it, try it
@austinlparker
austin parker
4 years
OK! Here's the work news - @LightstepHQ is now free for devs. 100GB/mo, 3 users. That's it! That's the tweet. ... ok, there's some more. (1/5)
2
35
96
1
13
25
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 years
For instance, on Facebook advertisers choose their targets, then facebook serves them. However wouldn't it be a better ads platform if you instead said, find the targets which my offer resonates best with, then tell me who they are? Invert the problem?
3
0
26
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 month
csv files in s3
@jxnlco
jason liu
1 month
Ok what’s a data lake.
102
5
243
2
3
26
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
Great chat w/ @bernheisel and @brainlid today about instructor_ex and the last missing tools to make elixir a powerhouse in the ML/ Data Science world The @ThinkingElixir episode should be out next week
1
4
25
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
7 months
I've been tweeting a lot about various features in instructor_ex over the past 2 weeks. I sat down today and wrote up tutorials and documentation for everything i've shipped. Check it out! I got more tutorials coming
Tweet media one
2
6
25
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
4 months
instructor_ex running against llama3-8b-dolphin-2.9 via @vllm_project out of box, no new version necessary. It's nice when you have a clean abstraction, new things just work ®
Tweet media one
0
0
24
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
10 months
@jxnlco @AdamRackis I’ll give you 30% affiliate commission on every sale you bring in
1
0
23
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
2 years
5. Tools versus Agents in AI. Don’t ask ChatGPT to write you a program to do something, get it to do the something directly. Seems like a common mental trap of engineers
2
1
23
@thmsmlr
Thomas Millar
1 year
Making GIFs with Elixir. Livebook proving quite useful for iterating on batch image processing. `|> dbg()` is king More ML Threads 🧵 coming soon!
Tweet media one
1
3
24