A new non-technical project is in the works for the spring and into the summer months. Click here to follow along - https://micahwalter.substack.com/p/fight-for-your-rite-of-spring
Micah Walter
Investigations in AI, Cloud, and Creativity ☁️🤖🖼️
Years from now it will be cool to write code again, like how it’s cool to shoot film now.
My short story, “Mike’s Place” is now available on Amazon for $5 or free on Kindle Unlimited.
https://a.co/74hq4Bq
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Hugh Howey & DeepSeek R1: The Algorithm that Learned to Listen
One of my favorite science fiction authors, Hugh Howey, has published a book of discussions with DeepSeek R1.
When DeepSeek was released to the public, I gave it a test I’ve given other AIs. The results were astounding. What emerged was a conversation — prompt and poetry — that felt different from anything I’d played with before. The Algorithm that Learned to Listen contains over two dozen poems written entirely by AI. Poems profound, lyrical, and deeply moving that explore what it means to exist, to create, and to connect in a world where the line between human and machine is increasingly blurred.
Check it out on Amazon Kindle (free for KindleUnlimited subscribers)
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Extended Thinking with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet on Amazon Bedrock is Wow!
I think the title of this blog post kinda sums it up. I’ve been testing out the new Extended Thinking capability with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet on Amazon Bedrock, and it’s just wow.
In Bedrock, just switch on “Model reasoning” in the playground and give it a whirl.
So many possibilities. I’m still collecting my thoughts. More to come.
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Chat-CLI and Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet
Anthropic released a major upgrade to their Claude Sonnet LLM today with version 3.7. Shortly after it was announced, Amazon announced availability via Amazon Bedrock, and shortly after that I went and made sure it works with Chat-CLI.
It works!
I didn’t have to update any code at all as I am using Bedrock’s Converse API. It just works as if it was always there.
One of the greatest album covers of all time. I mean, that’s graphic design at its peak!
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Anatomy of a AWS Lambda function in Go
Go (or Golang) is a great choice for building backends, APIs and all sorts of data processing programs for the cloud. Go is easy to learn, straightforward, and is surrounded by a vibrant and expansive community. It's also highly performant on AWS Lambda and has great support for concurrency. Go is awesome on AWS Lambda, but I always hear people complaining that it's difficult to get started. So, here is a super simple explainer post that will hopefully alleviate some of those […]https://www.micahwalter.com/2025/02/anatomy-of-a-aws-lambda-function-in-go/
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Aaron Straup Cope | Keynote Speech FACT Symposium
I was delighted to watch this Keynote address from my former colleague and long time pal, Aaron Straup Cope. In it he makes a number of nice references to the projects we worked on together and the things I worked on after he and Seb Chan left the team at Cooper Hewitt.
It’s been 15 years since and I’m amazed at how the work is still talked about across the sector. I’m really proud of that work and reflecting these days, I’m glad we did the things we did and in the way we did them, even when they wound up looking like “expensive mistakes.”
This talk is worth your time if you care about cultural heritage, museums, and the internet. It’s especially relevant today as we are continually asked to bear witness to the possible undoing of hundreds of years of American democracy!
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Mike’s Place – The photos
If you have been following, I previously wrote about a writing project I did at the start of the year. It wound up being a lot of fun (and hard work) and resulted in something I am somewhat proud of. You can read all about it over on my Substack, which I created just for these kinds of projects. You can also subscribe if you are interested in the next project I'll be working on this summer. For now, I thought it would be nice to put all the photos from the story here. Each one was assigned […]Micah Walter boosted:
This is a really useful and well explained blog post on how to apply the Principal of Least Privilege with Amazon Bedrock. This is a topic I get asked about on a regular basis. “How do I limit access to the LLMs available in Amazon Bedrock?” This blog post does a great job of explaining by example how to do just that!
The PoLP is a security concept that advises granting the minimal level of access—or permissions—necessary for users, programs, or systems to perform their tasks. The main idea is that the fewer permissions an entity has, the lower the risk of malicious or accidental damage.
Amazon Bedrock provides access to a variety of high-performing FMs from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon.
With a third-party FM, approval might include accepting a EULA. You can limit identities and the models that they can subscribe to in order to follow compliance with EULAs that have been reviewed by your legal department.
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A good place to write
Home. Winter. Fireplace. 🏠 ❄️ 🔥
Micah Walter boosted:
Meta SAM 2.1 is a state-of-the-art vision segmentation model designed for high-performance computer vision tasks, enabling advanced object detection and segmentation workflows. Building upon its predecessor, version 2.1 introduces enhanced segmentation accuracy, robust generalization across diverse datasets, and scalability for production-grade applications. These features enable AI researchers and developers in computer vision, image processing, and data-driven research to improve tasks that require detailed analysis segmentation across multiple fields.
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In two recent papers we published at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) and on ArXiv, we presented a native approach to this problem in the form of a specialized lightweight structured-object language model (SoLM). Unlike general-purpose LLMs, SoLM is trained to generate objects only in a specific schema. SoLM’s contributions include a special training method called self-supervised denoising and a special decoding method for use at inference time […]
https://www.micahwalter.com/2025/02/lightweight-llm-for-converting-text-to-structured-data/
Hot take: we don’t need separate apps for words and photos.
A great weight has been lifted after completing a long procrastinated and seemingly monumental task, which turned out to be not such a big deal after all.
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Generating a video of ducks with Luma AI Ray v2
Luma AI‘s Ray v2 is now available through Amazon Bedrock. So, I tried the following prompt:
“Generate a video of ducks swimming in a pond and someone rowing a boat by slowly.”
And here is the result.
Quite stunning, really. But, that poor duck at the end!
The final installment of “Mike’s Place” has landed. Hope you enjoyed this experiment of mine.
https://open.substack.com/pub/micahwalter/p/mikes-place-episode-5-of-5?r=ikkzq&utm_medium=ios
Episode 4 is here. We’re nearly there.
https://open.substack.com/pub/micahwalter/p/mikes-place-episode-4-of-5?r=ikkzq&utm_medium=ios
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