Compiling Rust Is Testing
This post is a very short contemplation of Rust compilation (times). Don’t expect anything super insightful, just a bunch of thoughts that came up while I was listening to the Rustacean Station podcast. I’m currently analysing the results of the Rust 2023 annual survey (full results coming Soon™, hopefully sometime in February) and as usually, […]
How the codpiece flopped
Some codpieces were empty – while others were used to store potpourri. Some time around 1536, Hans Holbein the Younger was finessing Henry VIII’s crotch. With a fine brush in his hand and a palette of watercolour paints beside him, the master artist took pains to give his client’s ornately decorated bulge its due prominence. […]
Magnetic launching of black hole jets in Perseus A
First observations of the radio galaxy Perseus A with the Event Horizon Telescope The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has recently resolved the jet base of an evolving jet of plasma at ultra-high angular resolution. The international team of scientists used the Earth-size […]
Is Open Source a diversion from what users want?
When I started working on Ardour, it never occured to me to do anything other than use the GNU Public License (GPL), the most well-known way to release “open source” software. At that time, it was a choice driven by a combination of: my passionate belief in what is more appropriately called “free/libre software” an […]
Interpreting neural networks through the polytope lens (2022)
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Sid Black*, Lee Sharkey*, Leo Grinsztajn, Eric Winsor, Dan Braun, Jacob Merizian, Kip Parker, Carlos Ramón Guevara, Beren Millidge, Gabriel Alfour, Connor Leahy *equal contribution Research from Conjecture. This post benefited from feedback from many staff at Conjecture including Adam Shimi, […]
Digitopia is ruining our lives
Digitopia is not a well-known term because, well, I made it up. I wanted to find a way to group all the suffering I’ve experienced under one umbrella and, since certain parts of technology were the main drivers, I’ve decided to combine the words “Digital” and “dystopia” to describe the hole I’ve found myself in. […]
How do Transformers Work?
We will deep dive into understanding how transformer model work like BERT(Non-mathematical Explanation of course!). system design to use the transformer to build a Sentiment Analysis 👋 Hi, this isVenkat and here with a free, full issue of the The ZenMode Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover one topic explained in a simpler terms […]
Beyond self-attention: How a small language model predicts the next token
I trained a small (~10 million parameter) transformer following Andrej Karpathy’s excellent tutorial, Let’s build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out. After getting it working, I wanted to understand, as deeply as possible, what it was doing internally and how it produced its results. The original paper, as well every transformer tutorial I found, […]
Oxford PV sets new solar panel efficiency world record
Next generation tandem solar panel achieves 25% efficiency, delivering significant breakthrough to accelerate the energy transition. Oxford PV, a pioneer in next-generation solar technology, has set a new record for the world’s most efficient solar panel, marking a crucial milestone in the clean energy transition. Produced in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy […]
Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software
Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash Recent conversations about web browser extensions have focused on controversy: malicious browser extensions capturing web history, and Google limiting the capabilities used by ad blockers. These are important discussions, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the big picture: browser extensions are a special ecosystem worth celebrating. Among major software […]