TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
The author reflects on their experience living in North Korea for 3 years as a foreigner, highlighting the challenges and unique aspects of life in the isolated country. The content discusses the lack of internet and media freedom, the struggles with obtaining goods and socializing, and the surprising opportunities for activities like golf and bowling. […]
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FlashAttention is a revolutionary algorithm that has transformed Transformer architectures by expediting the attention mechanism on GPUs, leading to significant advancements in Transformer training and inference. FlashAttention-3, the latest iteration, boasts up to 1.5-2x increased speed compared to its predecessor and allows for processing with lower precision numbers while maintaining accuracy, optimizing overall efficiency. Leveraging […]
Vallabh and her husband, Eric Minikel, are racing against time to find treatments for fatal familial insomnia, a neurodegenerative prion disease that Vallabh will likely develop. Collaborating with Jonathan Weissman, their CHARM technology epigenetically edits genes to prevent disease at its source, marking a new approach to drug development. The team successfully engineered CHARM to […]
StreamVC is a cutting-edge streaming voice conversion tool that maintains the essence of the original speech while adopting the voice characteristics of another. Unlike previous methods, StreamVC allows for real-time conversion, ideal for calls and video conferences, and even offers voice anonymization. By utilizing the SoundStream neural audio codec, this solution offers lightweight but high-quality […]
This post details the creation of the Floppy8, a microcomputer and cartridge system that fits inside a floppy drive. The system can play 4K movies and games on custom cartridges and features wireless controllers, motorized cartridge ejection, and more. The design process involved creating a new physical media format using SD cards attached to custom […]
This document is a practical guide to deep learning in the context of physical simulations, providing hands-on code examples in Jupyter notebooks. It goes beyond standard supervised learning to explore topics such as physical loss constraints, differentiable simulations, and reinforcement learning. The upcoming chapters will cover training networks to infer fluid flow around shapes, using […]
Maintaining a resume can be boring, but not for this author. They decided to overengineer the process, separating content and presentation for easy updates and multiple output formats. Avoiding LaTeX, the author used JSON Resume data, Zola, Tera templates, and Weasyprint for PDF rendering. The author emphasized using standard semantic HTML tags and CSS for […]
Security researchers from the CCC gained access to over 200 million SMS messages containing one-time passwords from 200 companies, including big names like Google and Amazon. By exploiting vulnerabilities in SMS-based two-factor authentication, attackers could intercept messages and potentially take over accounts. The Chaos Computer Club discovered that a provider of 2FA-SMS was sharing sensitive […]
Accounting practices have remained largely unchanged for centuries, leading to confusion around software development for financial systems. In this post, I’ll share insights from working on financial systems at major tech companies. Covering basic financial definitions, high-level goals, engineering principles, and best practices, it’s crucial for accounting systems to be accurate, auditable, and timely. Avoiding […]
Three years ago, we introduced Quickwit, a distributed search engine aiming to be more cost-efficient, easier to manage, and capable of handling petabytes of data than Elasticsearch. Recently, engineers at Binance, the leading cryptocurrency exchange, successfully migrated multiple petabyte-scale Elasticsearch clusters to Quickwit. Achievements included indexing 1.6 PB per day, handling 100 PB of logs, […]