Assorted links for Tuesday, July 2:

1. How to Measure DevSecOps Success: Key Metrics Explained

   Key DevSecOps metrics:

   1. Number of security vulnerabilities over time
   2. Compliance with security policies

2. “Energy-smart” bricks need less power to make, are better insulation

   According to the RMIT researchers, “Brick kilns worldwide consume 375 million tonnes (~340 million metric tons) of coal in combustion annually, which is equivalent to 675 million tonnes of CO2 emission (~612 million metric tons).” This exceeds the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of 130 million passenger vehicles in the US.

3. Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs

   In the new paper, titled “Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling,” the researchers describe creating a custom 2.7 billion parameter model without using MatMul ([matrix multiplication]) that features similar performance to conventional large language models (LLMs). They also demonstrate running a 1.3 billion parameter model at 23.8 tokens per second on a GPU that was accelerated by a custom-programmed FPGA chip that uses about 13 watts of power (not counting the GPU’s power draw). The implication is that a more efficient FPGA “paves the way for the development of more efficient and hardware-friendly architectures,” they write.

4. Enhancing Netflix Reliability with Service-Level Prioritized Load Shedding

   We implemented a concurrency limiter within PlayAPI that prioritizes user-initiated requests over prefetch requests without physically sharding the two request handlers. This mechanism uses the partitioning functionality of the open source Netflix/concurrency-limits Java library.

5. Explaining generative language models to (almost) anyone