Dan Gerlanc
dgerlanc.bsky.social
Dan Gerlanc
@dgerlanc.bsky.social
CTO & Cofounder @dottxtai.bsky.social Teaching and doing things with code and data
For LLM tokens or compute? Modal gives compute credits. AWS/GCP have credit programs for startups that you may be able to use on LLM tokens.
Is anyone aware of companies/people who give AI credit grants to early startups? One of our discord users works in edtech and is looking for support.
December 3, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Doing a slightly better documentation than just the README.md
alonsosilvaallende.github.io/litelines/ge...
Feeback?
September 27, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Some notes on httpjail - a really interesting new sandboxing proxy that lets you run a process (on macOS or Linux or in Docker) with strict restrictions on what outbound HTTP requests it can make, specified as JavaScript rules or a shell script simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/19/...
httpjail
Here's a promising new (experimental) project in the sandboxing space from Ammar Bandukwala at Coder. httpjail provides a Rust CLI tool for running an individual process against a custom configured …
simonwillison.net
September 19, 2025 at 10:01 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Awesome docker trick I didn't know about: "docker diff". Create a named container, and then list the files it has modified. Really useful to figure out why my container wasn't working in Azure Web App with WEBSITES_ENABLE_APP_SERVICE_STORAGE=false
July 16, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Reminder: The useR! @user-conf.bsky.social conference is having a free virtual event August 1, a week before the in-person one. Registration still open! #RStats
user2025.r-project.org/register
Registration – useR! 2025
user2025.r-project.org
July 6, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
I put together a post on how to do developer advocacy. Give it a peek. Let me know if you've got tips, other things you've noticed successful devrels do, etc.

cameron.pfiffer.org/blog/devrel/
A Guide to Developer Advocacy
cameron.pfiffer.org
June 18, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
This is a fantastic read about Cameron‘s work in developer advocacy.

The post is not only valuable for dedicated devrel folks, but also has many insights for all open source developers.

Check it out 👇
I put together a post on how to do developer advocacy. Give it a peek. Let me know if you've got tips, other things you've noticed successful devrels do, etc.

cameron.pfiffer.org/blog/devrel/
A Guide to Developer Advocacy
cameron.pfiffer.org
June 18, 2025 at 10:06 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Another example from our internal context-free grammar hackathon. You can force a model to generate an acrostic, i.e. make each line start with a letter in a word -- HELLO in this case.

Grammars are cool.
May 30, 2025 at 6:01 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
This could be used as an introduction to statistical analysis. It’s so hard to introduce entire fields like this while trying to make another point. Extremely well done.

pudding.cool/2025/04/birt...
Are you more likely to die on your birthday?
Yes. We’ll run a study to show you how, and why.
pudding.cool
May 10, 2025 at 9:16 AM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Some pictures from the AI User Conference last week
April 22, 2025 at 10:27 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
We're delighted to sponsor the AI User Conference!

It's next week, April 15th-17th. Find us at online or at San Francisco's delightful Fort Mason.

Tickets: www.aiuserconference.com

@cameron_pfiffer will be presenting a design for Minerva, a frontier space colony resource management system.
April 10, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
We are excited to announce our partnership with Andrew Ng and @deeplearningai.bsky.social!

Our advocacy team @willkurt.bsky.social and @cameron.pfiffer.org created a course on building AI systems using structured output from LLMs.

Oh, and it’s free.

bit.ly/4cdQlzG
Getting Structured LLM Output
Learn how to generate structured outputs to power production-ready LLM software applications.
bit.ly
April 2, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I got to teach a @deeplearningai.bsky.social course! I'm so happy. It was a really fun experience -- go take a look at the course and let us know how it went.

bit.ly/4cdQlzG
April 2, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
🦀 Do you like Rust?
🇫🇷 Do you like Paris?

Then you'll love the conference, Rust In Paris, that my colleague Yvan Sraka is delivering his talk, Beyond Procedural Macros: A Trait-Based Framework for Bindgen, at next month!

www.rustinparis.com
February 19, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Check out our stellar engineer Yvan at the Rust In Paris conference!

Discount link: https://buff.ly/3CMTE3E
Speakers: https://buff.ly/4b7fQlF
Schedule: https://buff.ly/4gKwc4P
February 18, 2025 at 10:59 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Come visit our weekly office hours on Discord! Tell us what you're working on and what you think is cool.

https://buff.ly/417gDhM
Join the .txt Discord Server!
Check out the .txt community on Discord - hang out with 1446 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
buff.ly
February 18, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Alternative rock is back
February 12, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
We're looking for a Staff Rust Developer! We're looking for people with

- Great communication skills
- Experience withlarge Rust projects
- Skills in performant parsing
- Understanding of automata/state machines, text indexing + search, serialization

Application here if you fit:
Staff Rust Developer
RESPONSIBILITIES - Initiate and lead the development of Rust projects - Write performance-focused parsing code backed by automated benchmarking - Research and implement efficient data structures for…
buff.ly
February 11, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Looking for great learning resources about structured generation? Check out this GitHub repo from Sacha Ichbiah, one of our Discord users.

Repo: https://buff.ly/4jOI3Bz
Our Discord: https://buff.ly/4fULKn9
February 11, 2025 at 2:02 AM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Big thanks to Outlines contributor multi-stager, who reduced the size of the Outlines docker container to 7.5GB to 957MB (!)

We love our contributors 🥰
Update Dockerfile to Multi-Stage by multi-stager · Pull Request #1401 · dottxt-ai/outlines
Hi, Thanks for maintaining outlines. I represent a research group investigating multi-stage builds. We recently refactored your Dockerfile to a multi-stage Dockerfile and found that it brings the f...
buff.ly
February 7, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Linux can have usability issues. This is not one of them
Linux is an excellent operating system if you enjoy rebooting your computer before it will recognize the very same USB drive you just formatted, used, dismounted, and properly unplugged
February 8, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
We're always looking for blog posts and writing demonstrating how to use Outlines and structured generation. If you've written anything you'd like us to read and share, please reach out!
February 6, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Here's ANOTHER excellent blog post by Romain Florentz (https://buff.ly/4hayY4hon using Outlines to understand the relationships between entities in Dune.

The Mentats are quietly updating their résumés.
Named Entity Recognition using structured generation
Structured generation is a method that enforces the output format of a language model. The idea is pretty smart and consists in representing the desired format (e.g. JSON) as a Finite State Machine…
buff.ly
January 31, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Want to talk about building AI systems?

People have been sharing all the cool things they're working on, and they'd like to see whatever you're working on too.

Come join our Discord!
Join the .txt Discord Server!
Check out the .txt community on Discord - hang out with 1375 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
buff.ly
January 30, 2025 at 2:00 AM
Reposted by Dan Gerlanc
Check out this demo from a Discord user (@romflorentz.bsky.social)

They use structured generation to constrain output to valid addition, and then used NanoGPT to learn how to add.

Code: https://buff.ly/3CoCclO
Blog post: https://buff.ly/4ggHEou
GitHub - v4nn4/gpt-add: Learning addition from text using a constrained transformer model
Learning addition from text using a constrained transformer model - v4nn4/gpt-add
buff.ly
January 27, 2025 at 9:20 PM