TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
The European Union and China are making moves away from Microsoft’s dominance on desktops by embracing open-source software like Linux and LibreOffice for digital sovereignty. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is switching 30,000 employees to Linux and LibreOffice for improved security, cost-effectiveness, and data protection. They aim to replace Microsoft Office, Windows, and other proprietary […]
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Big Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not only influencing our economy, but also shaping our society and raising concerns about privacy, monopoly power, discrimination, misinformation, hate speech, and mental health. These platforms are causing polarization and harming consumers, workers, and smaller businesses. Lobbyists are trying to sneak restrictive trade agreements through to […]
AI systems, particularly Machine Learning models, are transforming the Web by training on large amounts of content and generating new content at record speed and scale. This document explores the ethical, societal, and technical impacts of AI on the Web, highlighting the need for standardization and guidelines to manage these changes. Controversial issues include transparency […]
In this paper, the authors explore the challenge of algorithmic reasoning for large language models (LLMs) and propose a new framework called Think-and-Execute. This framework involves discovering task-level logic shared across instances, expressing it in pseudocode in the Think step, and then tailoring it to each instance and simulating execution in the Execute step. The […]
C++20 introduced minimal support for coroutines, which were inspired by C# coroutines but don’t align well with C++. Coroutines allow for non-blocking concurrent code and are essentially functions that behave differently when called multiple times. A struct in C++ can represent a coroutine, transforming traditional code into coroutine format. However, a major issue arises with […]
JetMoE-8B, created by Yikang Shen, Zhen Guo, Tianle Cai, and Zengyi Qin, surpasses Meta AI’s LLaMA2-7B despite costing less than $0.1 million to train, revealing that LLM training can be more affordable than believed. This model, with only 2.2B active parameters during inference, achieves superior performance to Gemma-2B. The unique architecture includes 24 blocks, each […]
The author reflects on the evolving sense of competition and productivity surrounding reading in the past decade. They discuss the influence of platforms like Goodreads on turning reading into a task and setting arbitrary goals. The author emphasizes the importance of reading for personal enjoyment and experience, rather than for meeting societal expectations or keeping […]
Matthew David Keirans, a former University of Iowa Hospital employee, admitted to living under another man’s identity since 1988, causing the real William Woods to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft. Keirans, who earned over $700,000 during his 10 years at the hospital, obtained loans and stored money in a bank under Woods’ name. The […]
The significance of tables in presenting information is explored, tracing their evolution from simple grids to complex data displays. The mid-1900s is hailed as a high point for tabular design, with advanced printing technologies allowing for precise typesetting. The democratization of computing brought about a shift in table creation, leading to a dilemma for data […]
FFmpeg 7.0 “Dijkstra” is the latest major release, introducing a native VVC decoder (still experimental), IAMF support, and a multi-threaded ffmpeg CLI tool. This release is not backwards compatible, removing deprecated APIs. The git repository boasts almost 2000 new commits and numerous new features and bug fixes. Previous releases such as FFmpeg 6.1 “Heaviside” brought […]