TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
On July 8, 2023, user accounts on the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance started disappearing. The incident began when the author noticed that their home timeline was empty after logging back in. They quickly reached out to colleagues who experienced the same issue. It was discovered that the affected accounts had been deleted and re-created as […]
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The author of this web content discusses their inspiration for the concept of a cyberdeck, which is a mobile computer with a cyberpunkish look and feel. They explain that the idea of a cyberdeck originated from the portrayal of decks in popular novels and role-play games. The author notes that decks are still attractive to […]
In this blog post, the author provides an update to their analysis of a paper that proposed a text classification method using gzip and k-nearest neighbors (kNN). The paper claimed that this “simple” method outperformed benchmarks, including language models like BERT. However, the author identifies several issues with the paper’s methodology, including contaminated datasets and […]
Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that Meta’s new social media platform, Threads, has lost more than half of its users. The platform gained over 100 million users within five days of its launch, but retention has been an issue. Zuckerberg acknowledged the situation as “normal” and expects retention to improve as new features are added. He […]
This web content provides a formal and executable specification for the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). It is written in F# purely functional style, with a deliberately elementary implementation to make it accessible to a wide audience. The specification is a work-in-progress and is part of the ISA Formal Specification Technical Group formed by The […]
On July 19th, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket, treating sky watchers in southern California and Arizona to a stunning spectacle. Photographer Jeremy Perez, located north of Flagstaff, captured an extra special sight. After the rocket passed overhead, a red fluorescent glow spread across the Milky Way, visible for almost 20 minutes. This glow is […]
New research conducted by the University of Washington highlights the importance of community engagement in the success of high-speed rail projects. With the Pacific Northwest facing increased population growth and a demand for better public transportation, the Washington State Legislature has allocated $150 million for a high-speed connection between Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. The […]
Together AI is releasing LLaMA-2-7B-32K, a 32K context model that can be used for tasks such as multi-document understanding, summarization, and question answering. This model is built using Position Interpolation and Together AI’s data recipe and system optimizations. The open-source ecosystem for LLMs has been progressing rapidly, with models like RedPajama and MPT catching up […]
The OS/2 Museum has a vintage Alaris Cougar board, manufactured by IBM for Alaris. The board features a DLC3 processor, also known as Blue Lightning, with a small IBM DLC3 processor and a Socket 2 for regular 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium OverDrive. If a ceramic-packaged 486 or OverDrive processor is installed, the on-board DLC3 […]
The Python Steering Council has made a significant announcement regarding the optional status of the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in CPython. PEP 703, the proposal for making the GIL optional, is expected to be accepted, possibly making its debut in the upcoming 3.13 release. However, the Council is exercising caution to ensure backward compatibility and […]