Takeaways from hundreds of LLM finetuning experiments with LoRA
From the PyTorch Lightning creators. Own your AI, don't rent it. Lightning is the AI cloud to build, train, and deploy your own models on 36,000+ NVIDIA GPUs.
95% of Bay Area Cities Lost Zoning Authority
In 105 jurisdictions of the Bay Area, anyone can build any residential projected at any height or density so long as 20% of the units are for low income.
FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations
The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce…
Should you be scared of Unix signals? (2016)
Should you be scared of Unix signals?
Money Laundering and AML Compliance
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
Chili Oil Notes
I’ve been getting a little obsessed with chili oil. A little…lost in the sauce so to speak. Here’s some notes and general thoughts on chili oil.
The part of Postgres we hate the most: Multi-version concurrency control
Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University,
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to join SRI International
Signaling a new chapter for Silicon Valley, two veteran R&D leaders are combining minds to advance and accelerate world-changing science and technology.
How Equifax Was Breached in 2017
On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be…
New Hampshire on the cusp of enshrining software freedom into law
Libreboot – New Hampshire once again on the cusp of enshrining Software Freedom into law. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED.
What are embeddings?
A deep-dive into machine learning embeddings.
I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)
I originally posted this on Reddit so I could get a good sample of opinions from other engineers to see how they compared to mine before…
What the Goddamn Hell Is Going on in the Tech Industry?
Sweet merciful Jesus, I woke up this morning and my inbox was flooded with horrific stories about how employers treat people. I knew things were fucked, but this was so much worse than I imagined, and that's not even getting into the comments on Hackernews. I am going to dig into some of those emails, but first...
Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future
Google has set a date for the introduction of Manifest V3 which will hurt the capabilities of many ad blockers.
How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should
Google has rolled out "Privacy Sandbox," a Chrome feature first announced back in 2019 that, among other things, exchanges third-party cookies—the most common form of tracking technology—for what the company is now calling "Topics." Topics is a response to pushback against Google’s proposed...
Zig Quirks
Little things you'll notice and need to learn when learning Zig
There’s more than one way to write an IP address (2019)
There's more than one way to write an IP address: decimal, hex, octal, overflowed octets and omitted zeroes all resolve to the same host. A fun trick to mess …
Your tech stack is not the product
Early stage technology decisions must be, uncomfortably, a means to an end.
Base64 Encoding, Explained
Base64 is an elegant way to convert binary data to text, making it easy to store and transport. This article covers the basics of Base64 encoding, including what it is, how it works and why it's important. It also shows how to encode and decode Base64 data in various programming languages.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS servers and phased apt updates
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Storing OpenAI embeddings in Postgres with pgvector
An example of how to build an AI-powered search engine using OpenAI's embeddings and PostgreSQL.
Google open-sources Rust crate audits
We hope that by sharing our work with the open-source community, we can make the Rust ecosystem even safer and more secure for everyone.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
The Development of the C Language (1993)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
Cosmic DE update: System76's new Linux desktop environment
Alex shares more progress on the work-in-progress COSMIC DE for Pop!_OS. This one’s got new mockups for you to poke around in!