Mistral AI has released the Mistral Large 2 model, featuring a 128k context window and support for over 80 coding languages, optimized for single-node inference with 123 billion parameters.
The model achieves 84.0% accuracy on MMLU, outperforming previous models and rivals like GPT-4o and Llama 3 405B, with enhanced capabilities to minimize "hallucinations" and improve reasoning.
Mistral Large 2 is available under different licenses for non-commercial and commercial use, with weights hosted on HuggingFace and expanded cloud service partnerships, including Google Cloud Platform and Azure AI Studio.
Mistral AI's new model, Large 2, and Meta's Llama 3.1 405B were tested and found to be comparable, with no clear winner.
Users highlighted that Claude remains a strong option but expressed a desire for improvements such as smarter responses, longer context windows, and faster replies.
Despite some models struggling with simple tasks due to tokenization issues, the rapid development and competition in AI models remain exciting, with many users switching to models like Claude Sonnet 3.5 for better performance in coding and other tasks.
Individuals with diabetes are sharing personal experiences and strategies for managing their condition, emphasizing the importance of self-monitoring and data logging.
Various methods discussed include dietary changes, continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), and personalized tracking of food and exercise impacts on blood sugar levels.
The conversation highlights a common sentiment of self-reliance due to perceived inadequacies in the healthcare system's management of diabetes.
Google is now the only search engine that can display recent Reddit results, making Reddit content exclusive to Google.
Other search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Qwant cannot show recent Reddit results, with DuckDuckGo providing limited links without descriptions.
This situation underscores Google's near monopoly on search, affecting competition and drawing criticism over search quality, with speculation of a multi-million dollar deal allowing Google to scrape Reddit for AI training.
Google has become the exclusive search engine for Reddit due to a new AI deal, with Reddit's robots.txt file blocking other search engines from indexing its content.
This decision has ignited debates about its effects on search engine competition and the principles of an open internet.
Concerns have been raised about the anticompetitive nature of the deal and its potential adverse impact on user experience and content accessibility.
Travelers can opt out of airport facial recognition by standing away from the camera, presenting their ID, and stating, “I opt out of biometrics.”
The Algorithmic Justice League’s “Freedom Flyers” campaign aims to raise awareness of this right, especially as TSA plans to expand facial recognition to all US airports.
Facial recognition poses risks such as data breaches, misidentification, AI bias, and the normalization of surveillance, with significant privacy concerns over the retention and use of biometric data.
Experiences with opting out of airport face scans vary significantly, with some users facing resistance and others encountering no issues.
Advanced cameras at airports capture 3D images for high facial recognition accuracy, raising concerns about the retention of facial data and pervasive surveillance.
The debate continues on whether opting out is essential to resist the normalization of surveillance practices or if it's futile due to the ubiquity of such technologies.
CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, caused a global outage on July 19 due to a faulty update, affecting millions of computers and leading to significant disruptions such as airport delays and halted surgeries.
As an apology, the company offered $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its partners, but some recipients reported the vouchers were invalid.
CrowdStrike's CEO and chief security officer issued public apologies, acknowledging the severity of the incident and committing to transparency and future prevention measures.
CrowdStrike issued $10 Uber Eats gift cards to apologize for an outage, but many users found the vouchers invalid, leading to criticism and speculation about the company's competence.
Some users suspected the gift card issue might be a phishing attempt or a hack, further damaging CrowdStrike's reputation.
The gesture was perceived as inadequate and insulting, especially given the outage's significant impact on critical services like airlines and hospitals, sparking discussions about potential legal liabilities.
The DEA and TSA have been collaborating to seize travelers' money by targeting those carrying large amounts of cash, using informers and TSA checkpoints to identify individuals and claiming they "consent" to searches.
This practice, which extends to Amtrak trains with the help of US Customs and Border Protection, involves "civil forfeiture" where money is seized without a warrant, often ignoring passengers' refusal to consent.
An ongoing class-action lawsuit highlights the frequency of these illegal searches, with plaintiffs arguing that the volume of records indicates a systemic issue, despite the DEA and TSA's resistance to disclosing these records.
A wedding was disrupted by a flash flood, necessitating a rescue operation, though no serious injuries occurred.
Police detained attendees on buses with drug-sniffing dogs before moving them to a high school shelter, adding to their distress.
The incident sparked a discussion on law enforcement's misuse of power, civil asset forfeiture, and the war on drugs, highlighting the need for reform and its impact on public trust and safety.
A new C-based implementation for inference on Llama 2 and Llama 3/3.1 Transformer models has been released, featuring int8 quantized forward pass.
The code includes support for various environments such as Linux Kernel, Unikraft Unikernel, and embedded models via Zip Archive.
Users can customize parameters like temperature, top-p sampling, and model version through command-line arguments, enhancing flexibility for different use cases.
Meta's Llama 3.1 models can generate multilingual text, but the current implementation in C is still buggy and requires further refinement.
The project involves quantizing the model to 8-bit, which can degrade the output quality, humorously referred to as "brain damage."
The community is actively contributing to improving the implementation, with discussions around optimal quantization methods and extending context length using new scaling techniques.
EMACS, a text editor, was developed at the MIT AI Lab in 1976, with Richard Stallman (RMS) becoming the main developer by the end of that year.
RMS named "E" and "EMACS" and played a crucial role in transforming TECO macros into a powerful editor, with initial help from Guy Steele, David Moon, and John Kulp.
The early user community, including Moon, contributed to key bindings and command names, highlighting the collaborative and community-driven nature of EMACS's development.
In 1976, MIT-AI used "at" instead of the @ symbol for email addresses due to the absence of DNS (Domain Name System).
Early computer scientists preferred clear date formats like "dd MON yy" and discussed early network file systems and protocols such as MLDEV and SUPDUP.
Emacs, a text editor initially written in TECO, evolved with contributions from developers like James Gosling, who created a Unix version in 1981.
Scrapscript is a programming language with an interpreter available for Python 3.8+ and Cosmopolitan, and it supports Docker for containerized execution.
The syntax of Scrapscript is set to be updated soon, and users can refer to scrapscript.py and its tests for understanding the language.
An experimental compiler is available, capable of producing outputs in ELF, Cosmopolitan, and Wasm formats, with specific commands provided for each.
Scrapscript is a new functional, content-addressable programming language designed to address software sharability issues using JSON-like types, functions, and hashed references.
Unlike Unison, which uses a git-based paradigm, Scrapscript is more ambitious and focuses on IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) for code identification and serialization.
The language has gained attention due to its public development and the personal journey of its creator, who overcame alcoholism while working on the project.
Researchers face challenges in publishing null results, which show no significant relationship between variables, leading to a bias favoring positive findings.
This publication bias distorts the scientific record and wastes resources, as seen in evolutionary biologist Natalie Pilakouta's inconclusive study on fish preferences in Iceland's hot springs.
Efforts to address this issue include journals encouraging pre-registered reports, but slow adoption and the perception that null results indicate flawed research remain significant hurdles.
The discussion highlights the challenges and lack of incentives for publishing null results in scientific research, despite their potential value.
A significant portion of scientists are willing to publish null results, but very few are able to do so due to systemic barriers and lack of demand from high-tier journals.
Suggestions include creating dedicated journals for null results, integrating null results as appendices to main publications, and improving the peer review process to include pre-registration of methods.
A new website, https://glhf.chat/, allows users to run almost any open-source LLM (Large Language Model) on autoscaling GPU clusters for free during the pricing determination phase.
The service supports any model compatible with the open-source vLLM project, offering up to ~640GB of VRAM, and aims to be more cost-effective than other GPU services by running models multi-tenant.
The platform launched on Llama-3.1-405B Launch Day and supports efficient models like Llama-3-70b finetunes, with plans to improve support for larger models and address current limitations.
glhf.chat allows users to run almost any open-source LLM (Large Language Model) on autoscaling GPU clusters, currently free as they determine pricing.
The service supports any model compatible with the open-source vLLM project, including popular models like Llama-3-70b finetunes, with some limitations due to NVLink issues.
Launched on Llama-3.1-405B Launch Day, the platform aims to be cost-effective by running models in a multi-tenant environment and welcomes user feedback.
Pnut is a C to POSIX shell transpiler that converts C programs into human-readable shell scripts, ensuring high portability across POSIX-compliant shells.
It allows developers to write scripts in C without needing to learn a new language, and the output is easy to inspect, debug, and maintain.
Pnut runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, macOS, and Windows, and is licensed under the BSD-2 Clause License.
Pnut is a C to POSIX shell compiler that can be distributed as a human-readable shell script, enabling reproducible builds from source files.
It can compile itself and, with effort, the Tiny C Compiler (TCC), which can then bootstrap the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), creating a full build toolchain.
While praised for its innovation, Pnut faces critiques regarding practical limitations, such as handling binary I/O and certain C constructs, and varying opinions on its trustworthiness and completeness.
MPPP (1-methyl-4-phenyl-4-propionoxypiperidine) is a designer drug first reported in 1947, intended as a painkiller but found to be no better than existing options.
In 1976, Barry Kidston synthesized MPPP and developed Parkinson’s-like symptoms due to an impurity, MPTP, which selectively kills cells crucial for motor control.
The 1982 outbreak of Parkinson’s symptoms linked to MPTP-contaminated synthetic heroin led to significant scientific insights into Parkinson’s disease and highlighted the dangers of amateur drug synthesis.
The discussion centers on the dangers of designer drugs, particularly MPPP and its by-product MPTP, which have been linked to Parkinson's-like symptoms in users.
Emphasis is placed on the risks associated with synthetic drugs, the importance of drug purity, and the potential benefits of legalizing and regulating drugs to ensure safety.
Users share personal experiences and stress the need for caution and proper testing, while also addressing the broader implications of drug prohibition and the challenges of ensuring safe consumption.
Micromouse is a robotics competition where small autonomous robots solve a 16×16 maze, originating in the late 1970s and popular in several countries including the UK, U.S., and Japan.
Robots use algorithms like Bellman flood-fill, Dijkstra's, and A* for navigation, with top speeds exceeding three meters per second; the current world record is 3.921 seconds by Ng Beng Kiat.
Recent advancements include using fans for additional downforce, enabling accelerations over 2.5g, and a variant called Half-Size Micromouse uses a 32×32 maze with smaller dimensions.
Micromouse is a robotics competition where small robots navigate a maze, with a recent video by Veritasium highlighting the topic.
The competition includes a reconnaissance phase for mapping the maze, and different strategies like wall-following and maze-mapping are used.
The event engages young people in programming and engineering, with categories like LEGO robots and more advanced robots, demonstrating the evolution of technology over decades.