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I'm Alessandro Marrella, I'm a Software Engineer and a Swiftie from the Reputation Era.
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💭 random thought

val.town is really cool. I was able to quickly add a “backend” to push thoughts to this static site

2024-09-02 · 1 min
📜 long form blog post

The AI/ML concepts behind Apple Intelligence

On Monday, June 10, 2024 at their annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) Apple announced "Apple Intelligence", their own flavour of AI integration into their operating systems.

Emphasis should probably go into integration, as the experience that was demoed at WWDC felt like every feature we are used to on our devices was augmented in a way or another by AI. AI is also able to orchestrate those features and use multiple apps and functionalities to achieve what the user wanted.

As someone who has a love/hate relationship with Siri, this is only good news, Siri will become way more powerful and able to understand what you want to do.

This post is not going to be an overview of Apple Intelligence from the users perspective though (for which I suggest the excellent blog post from Simon Willison Thoughts on the WWDC 2024 keynote on Apple Intelligence) but will explore key concepts such as the Semantic Index, App Intents Toolbox, and foundational model adaptations utilized by Apple.

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📜 long form blog post

BigQuery performance best practice: use semi joins when possible

SQL is an amazing language, it lets you declaratively say what you want, and the engine figures out for you the best way to return it to you. Or should I say, it figures out the best way to return it to you given the information it has and the capabilities of the engine itself.

In this post, we’ll discuss a performance optimization technique for BigQuery (also other advanced enough Enteprise Data Warehouses and databases support SEMI JOINS, but I'll focus on BigQuery since it's the one I use the most these days): using semi joins.

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