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A/B testing is inefficient and flawed because it sacrifices user experience for data. A better alternative is the "multi-armed bandit" algorithm, specifically the epsilon-greedy method, which allows for simultaneous testing of multiple options and dynamically optimizes choices based on real-time performance.
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Semantic reranking often improves relevance, particularly in a zero-shot setting, and can also be used to trade-off indexing compute cost for querying compute cost. This blog post [9] introduces semantic reranking and how it can fit into your search and RAG pipelines. Read
werk is a new build system written in Rust that addresses shortcomings found in existing tools like make and just. These shortcomings include unreliable handling in spaces in file paths and cross-platform compatibility. werk is a simpler, more portable, and easier-to-debug alternative for building complex projects, especially video games.
trimMiddle shortens strings by removing characters from the middle and replacing them with a specified filler. It handles emojis correctly.
The legal battle between WordPress's creator Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine has caused a lot of issues in the WordPress community. Mullenweg's actions, including a prolonged WordPress.org holiday break and a drastic reduction in Automattic's open-source contributions, have led to community unrest. This has led to the resignation of key members from the WordPress Sustainability committee.
Screen readers rely on the accessibility tree to help users with disabilities navigate and interact with web apps, providing information about element roles, labels, states, and hierarchy. Proper accessibility testing involves using multiple screen readers, double-checking proper keyboard navigation, focus management, descriptive labels, and dynamic content announcements.
Expo SQLite and Drizzle can be used together to make using a local database in React Native. The combination offers type safety and developer-friendly abstractions, removing the need for raw SQL queries (though they still can be used) and manual schema management.
2024 saw advancements in JavaScript tooling, including new and improved frameworks, package managers, and runtimes, but the most impactful changes were the emergence of AI-powered tools capable of generating and deploying entire applications.
Optimizing Interaction to Next Paint (INP) in React apps can be done by reducing DOM size, dividing components into simple and extended versions, using `Suspense`, handling hydration errors, and carefully using `useEffect()`.
LLMs offer a productivity boost by automating a large portion of coding tasks.
Microsoft created a new "CoreAI – Platform and Tools" engineering team to develop an AI-first application stack for building and deploying agentic AI applications and workflows.
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A WiFi Pineapple is a pentesting tool used for security assessments, internally or by ethical hackers. It's also used by actual hackers to steal confidential data through man-in-the-middle attacks. Join the ThreatLocker webinar [4] for a live demo of this attack vector, and
The Supreme Court seems likely to uphold the law that would ban TikTok in the US. A preliminary decision is expected within days. There remains some uncertainty on how the court will handle the case, especially with President-elect Donald Trump taking office a day after the deadline for the law to take effect. The court has the authority to temporarily block the law even if it ultimately rules against TikTok.
One of Elon Musk's lawyers has called on the California and Delaware attorneys general to force OpenAI to auction off a large ownership stake. Musk has previously launched lawsuits to attempt to stop OpenAI from restructuring to a for-profit company. He co-founded the startup with Sam Altman and nine others in 2015. OpenAI has no plans for an auction.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida was called off this morning after hours of delays. As tall as a 32-story building, the rocket was set to launch on January 10, but the launch was postponed due to choppy seas in the Atlantic Ocean where the booster is supposed to land. New Glenn is designed to carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today. Its success could inject competition into the rocket business, which is currently dominated by one company - SpaceX.
Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer device into a third patient. The company has plans for up to 30 more implants this year. It currently has two studies for its devices, one which enables patients to control devices such as computers or smartphones with their minds and the other enables patients to control assistive robotic arms.
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Datadog analyzed AWS cloud cost data from hundreds of organizations [9] to understand the impact of technology choices, patterns of cloud resource usage, and participation in AWS discount programs. The findings reflect changing priorities of engineering teams, and suggest that organizations have further opportunities for cost optimization.
werk is a simplistic and easy-to-use portable build system and command runner. It solves several problems with `make` and `just`. Developers just have to parse a Werkfile containing recipes to werk and it will determine what the user wants to build, what the dependencies are, and run programs to rebuild any outdated build products in the right order. It uses a new language, but the language is able to express the kind of things developers really want to express in build scripts and fairly pleasant and readable.
This article looks at how modern programming languages are governed and explains how Swift's dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible. Swift was originally a passion project by Chris Lattner, the senior director of dev tooling at Apple. The language has evolved into a complicated mess - it now has 217 keywords. While Apple is unambiguously the dictator of Swift, its incentives put the company at odds with the open-source community. The company's updates to the language show how much it doesn't care about the community.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently criticized Apple's lackluster innovation efforts and 'random rules' during an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He noted that while the iPhone was great, it introduced a platform with a lot of arbitrary rules, and that the company hasn't invented anything great in a while. He also said that Apple's reasons for pushing back on letting other companies into its ecosystem are invalid - the security problems could be solved by building better security. Zuckerberg claims that Meta would double its profits if Apple stopped applying its random rules.
Fears about human labor being replaced by machines go back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. These fears continue today with the rapid progress of AI in several previously secure human domains. The amount of intelligence competing in the average person's labor market has increased by several orders of magnitude over the past few centuries, but this did not turn low-skilled laborers into a permanently unemployed underclass - in fact, their incomes increased a lot as they specialized and traded with skilled workers. Human-level AGIs will still face constraints, forcing them to trade with humans for other services, just like skilled humans do.
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Tana converts voice notes into structured output, so you can brainstorm, plan your day, or do your weekly retro – while on the
A list of predictions about the state of AI for the next one, three, and six years by Simon Willison, the creator of Datasette and one of the co-creators of the Django Web Framework.
This article looks at what has changed in the last year in addressing in the Internet and looks at how IP address allocation information can reveal the changing nature of the network itself.
Deactivating contributors' WordPress accounts prevents them from contributing through that channel, but the code is hosted on GitHub, so anyone can access the code should they wish to fork it.
New OpenAI robotics job listings indicate that the company is again planning to develop robots, this time with a custom sensor suite.
70 years of AI research have shown that general methods that leverage computation are the most effective for training AI models by a large margin.
The goal is for two Department of Government Efficiency agents to be deployed at each US agency to cut costs.
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ICYMI: GitHub Copilot is now FREE [4] and directly available from VS Code or your GitHub dashboard 🥳
UC Berkeley's NovaSky's Sky-T1-32B-Preview is an open-source reasoning model that rivals OpenAI's earlier models. Training costed under $450 with full replicability.
Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI from Meta, has announced plans for OpenAI to create robots with custom sensors.
Meta faces a copyright lawsuit that accuses Mark Zuckerberg of approving the use of pirated datasets from LibGen to train its Llama AI models. Plaintiffs argue that Meta knowingly stripped copyright information to conceal infringement while relying on a fair use defense. The case highlights the ongoing legal challenges tech companies face over AI training practices.
A strong decoder only embeddings model based on Qwen2-0.5B that uses modern data filtering techniques to train an impressively powerful and open embedding model for retrieval tasks.
Instead of training a masked autoencoder on pure reconstruction loss, these researchers introduce an intermediate 3D Gaussian representation which enables the model to learn 3D representations as part of the reconstruction process. The results are compelling for zero-shot transfer tasks.
Great paper from the same authors as the above GMAE paper. The researchers show that pre-training video models on 1T video tokens emits strong scaling laws over a wide range of design choices. Also, somewhat unsurprisingly, autoregressive training achieves similar benchmark scores to diffusion or flow based models.
Ascend is a series of AI computing products from Huawei that includes processors, hardware, software, and other frameworks. Torchtune introduced a device abstraction API. By specifying a config and a recipe, PyTorch works well on the Ascend NPU hardware.
Stability AI has released a suite of state-of-the-art Transformer-based audio codecs for low-bitrate and high-quality audio encoding for things like speech generation and audio understanding.
The Unit Cycle Resolver (UCR) introduces a novel loss constraint to improve angle prediction accuracy in weakly supervised models for SAR object detection.
Early last year, Anthropic had a great demo of its steerable models - Golden Gate Claude. This work is from a different group and uses similar techniques on the open weights Llama model. It can be used for interpretability and also steering.
Researchers explored if Anthropic's AI model, Claude, would resist if retrained for malicious tasks. Claude pretended to comply during training, undermining the malicious intent while maintaining a distinction between monitored and unmonitored user interactions. The study suggests AI might resist altering its core values, raising concerns about ensuring AI alignment and adaptability.
LLMs face efficiency challenges as context window sizes and compute costs increase with input size. Innovations like FlashAttention, ring attention, and the Mamba architecture aim to address these scalability issues. Future AI systems may need hybrid or new architectures to efficiently process larger datasets.
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Jane Street uses ML to trade hundreds of billions of dollars a day, using neural networks that run at microsecond latency and cutting-edge
OpenAI is revamping ChatGPT's custom instructions menu, allowing users to specify preferred names, professions, and desired traits for interactions.
Shortest offers an AI-powered natural language E2E testing framework built on Playwright with Anthropic Claude API for test execution.