Training LLMs often feels like alchemy, but understanding and optimizing the performance of your models doesn't have to. This book aims to demystify the science of scaling language models: how TPUs (and GPUs) work and how they communicate with each other, how LLMs run on real hardware, and how to parallelize your…
President Joe Biden has announced that Ingrid Daubechies , James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics , will receive the National Medal of Science in 2025. She is being honored for her pioneering work on signal processing.
Economist Kenneth Rogoff’s new book entwines currency’s ascension, his own experiences, and looks at what looms ahead.
Ride in Zoox’s purpose-built autonomous robotaxi. Now serving Las Vegas. Download the app and ride in a Zoox.
One year ago, the Safe C++ proposal was made. The goal was to add a safe subset/context into C++ that would give strong guarantees (memory safety, type safety, …
Galaxy XR is now available today. Here’s what to expect.
The other day I wanted to look up a specific IBM PS/2 model, a circa 1992 PS/2 Server system. So I punched the model into Google, and got this:
There is always ongoing discussion about the future direction of the Scala language. How fast should it move? What needs to be improved? Should the language change at all? This article discusses how Scala must keep evolving , why that evolution is necessary, and what directions we expect that evolution to take. We…
Of course you want to design (and implement!) your own programming language! It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s empowering.
Discussing icon design, and commenting on some passages of Apple's Adopting Liquid Glass document.
The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it. We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful …
I retired from my IT career a couple of months ago after 43 years of commercial software product development and transitioned to the real…
Uncover deeper insights beyond ZIP codes with geospatial analysis. Explore the limitations of ZIP codes and discover alternatives for spatial understanding.
"Correct" doesn't mean "correct" when correctly using "correct"
Certificate Transparency (CT) has been one of the biggest advancements in web security, keeping users safe from threats such as certificate fraud and…
[UPDATE: Feb 8 2025] my amazing colleague Max Shen noticed a sign mistake in my derivation of the partial derivative of the log-harmonic function below.
Don't let AI erode your focus.
When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“ Multi-User Dungeons ” — the text-only predecessors of modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet ). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows…
Today we released a new CDL report: “Legal Entanglements: Mapping Connections of Anti-Offshore Wind Groups and their Lawyers in the Eastern United States,” a deep look into litigation efforts against offshore wind in the Northeast.
Taking the output of many dumb LLM search relevance judges and feeding the output to a decision tree to improve precision
Structured outputs on the Claude Developer Platform guarantee API responses match your JSON schemas and tool definitions. Now in public beta for Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1, this feature eliminates parsing errors and failed tool calls for production applications.
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an…
Postgres 18 brings a significant improvement to read performance via async I/O and I/O worker threads. Here we compare its performance to Postgres 17.
How LoRA matches full training performance more broadly than expected.
CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges.
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
Every night, right around midnight (mainly UTC), a horde of zombies wakes up and clamors for … digital certificates! The zombies in question are abandoned or misconfigured Internet servers and ACME clients that have been set to request certificates from Let’s Encrypt. As our certificates last for at most 90 days…
One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. Here's a glimpse of the clarity it provides:
