Maria Khalusova
@mariak.bsky.social
Always growing, she/her, RAG builder, LLM whisperer, tech generalist
Just entered my next decade and I think it’ll be the best one yet.
Once again, I completely forgot that I have this account. Oops
Things move fast in AI. Every week brings new models, new capabilities, or new ideas to chase. It’s exciting, but also easy to get swept up in the pace and forget to pause, to touch grass, to zoom out and see the bigger picture. 🧵
Asking “What is the best chunk size for RAG?” without any additional context is like asking, “What’s the best thing to wear?” Wear where? What’s the weather like? What size are you? Are you going to a wedding or hiking a trail? There’s no single answer that works for every situation. 🧵
Do the thing that you will regret not doing when you're old.
I went to check what new courses deeplearning.ai has, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the short course Marc Sun, Younes Belkada, and I have built over a year ago is still featured as one of the Top Rated courses 😍
I'm taking this whole developer becoming a farmer dream way too far, am I?
If you've been prioritizing urgent work, make sure to prioritize important work.
Nothing starts a Wednesday morning quite like your dog getting sprayed by a skunk 🤢
I have some epic plans for this summer and none of you’ll be able to guess what they are.
I'm starting a series of blog posts on RAG beyond the basic set up. In the first part, we're setting the stage. Why naive RAG is not enough, and how a lot of the issues can be traced back to data processing choices. Part 1: unstructured.io/blog/level-u...
Level Up Your GenAI Apps: RAG Beyond the Basics – Unstructured
Learn why naive implementations fall short—and how smarter data preprocessing lays the foundation for reliable, high-performance RAG.
unstructured.io
What you're not changing, you're choosing. This is a gentle reminder for the next time you're prioritizing a cool new shiny thing over building the foundation or addressing tech debt.
Word of the day seems to be "sycophantic". Thanks AI community for increasing my vocabulary :)
32 pages - is it still a blog or do I call it a book now?
I don’t like the term “AI-assisted coding”. AI is just another tool in the box. We've had code completion and refactoring features in IDEs for a hot minute now, do we call it “IDE-assisted coding”? We just use these things to make our lives easier. 🧵
Apropos of nothing, here's a tip. Some embedding models are robust against typos, and others are sensitive to them. That's a whole rabbit hole on its own 🤓, but long story short - this will matter if your users are fat-fingering the queries.
Today I learned that Postgres doesn't delete columns. Not from the catalog and not from data files. Deleted columns are only "soft deleted". But they still exist. And now I wonder if this is why the logo is an elephant. As in, it never forgets.
I think I pissed off Live Demo gods at some point, they were not on my side today.
I may need to travel to the US soon, and this genuinely worries me.
Dr. Jessica M. DeWitt@jessicamdewitt.bsky.social · last yr.I just attended a conference in the US. We had one speaker detained and two others turned away at the border.
I'm looking for incredible people to join my team! If you're excited about AI and know that great AI starts with great data - If you love building, learning, and helping others do the same - DM me. Let's talk. And if this sounds like someone you know, feel free to RT!
We use RAG to look up context for an LLM, next step should be looking up available MCP Servers and their tools. We need a middle layer between the LLM and servers, to look up available tools based on the request instead of having all of that info blow up the context window.
April appears to be a good month for hitting milestones.
Years of breaking down complex concepts to a broad audience turn out to be rather useful in vibe coding.
Figuring out Jira automations is not something I had envisioned for myself, but here we are 🤣
Lol. I just saw on LinkedIn a photo of a person giving a talk (from a meetup this week), and on a screen behind them there was a slide, word for word exactly the same as I have in my deck from a talk I gave in February. I'm choosing to be flattered and amused rather than pissed off.
Even in the AI age, the hardest things are still naming, and auth. 🫠