Assorted links for Thursday, June 27:
Assorted links for Wednesday, June 26:
In this section, we generalize the techniques we developed for binary search to static B-trees and accelerate them further using SIMD instructions. In particular, we develop two new implicit data structures:
- The first is based on the memory layout of a B-tree, and, depending on the array size, it is up to 8x faster than
std::lower_boundwhile using the same space as the array and only requiring a permutation of its elements.- The second is based on the memory layout of a B+ tree, and it is up to 15x faster than
std::lower_boundwhile using just 6-7% more memory — or 6-7% of the memory if we can keep the original sorted array.
Assorted links for Tuesday, June 25:
Pluvicto and Lutathera are both built around small protein sequences, known as peptides. These peptides specifically bind to target receptors on cancer cells—PSMA in the case of prostate cancer and somatostatin receptors in the case of Lutathera—and deliver radiation through the decay of unstable lutetium.
Administered via infusion into the bloodstream, these drugs circulate throughout the body until they firmly attach to the surfaces of tumor cells they encounter. Anchored at these target sites, the lutetium isotope then releases two types of radiation that aid in cancer treatment. The primary emission consists of beta particles, high-energy electrons capable of penetrating tumors and surrounding cells, tearing into DNA and causing damage that ultimately triggers cell death.
Back in 2019 after various speculation-based CPU vulnerabilities began coming to light, Amazon engineers proposed process-local memory allocations for hiding KVM secrets. They were striving for an alternative mitigation for vulnerabilities like L1TF by essentially providing some memory regions for kernel allocations out of view/access from other kernel code. Amazon engineers this week laid out a new proposal after five years of ongoing Linux kernel improvements for MM-local memory allocations for dealing with current and future speculation-based cross-process attacks.
Assorted links for Monday, June 24:
We introduce a novel framework, Video Annotator (VA), which leverages active learning techniques and zero-shot capabilities of large vision-language models to guide users to focus their efforts on progressively harder examples, enhancing the model’s sample efficiency and keeping costs low.
VA seamlessly integrates model building into the data annotation process, facilitating user validation of the model before deployment, therefore helping with building trust and fostering a sense of ownership. VA also supports a continuous annotation process, allowing users to rapidly deploy models, monitor their quality in production, and swiftly fix any edge cases by annotating a few more examples and deploying a new model version.
Parameter vulnerability factor (PVF) is a novel metric we’ve introduced with the aim to standardize the quantification of AI model vulnerability against parameter corruptions.
…[T]he researchers focus on what they call semantic entropy. This evaluates all the statistically likely answers evaluated by the LLM and determines how many of them are semantically equivalent. If a large number all have the same meaning, then the LLM is likely uncertain about phrasing but has the right answer. If not, then it is presumably in a situation where it would be prone to confabulation and should be prevented from doing so.
Assorted links for Friday, June 21:
After nearly two years of active development and testing, we are proud to announce Meta Low Bitrate audio codec, aka MLow, which achieves two-times-better quality than Opus (POLQA MOS 1.89 vs 3.9 @ 6kbps WB). Even more importantly, we are able to achieve this great quality while keeping MLow’s computational complexity 10 percent lower than that of Opus.
To make the most of their unstructured data, development teams are turning to retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, a method for customizing large language models (LLMs). They can use RAG to keep LLMs up to date with organizational knowledge and the latest information available on the web. They can also use RAG and LLMs to surface and extract insights from unstructured data.
LXC is not typically used for application development but for scenarios requiring full OS functionality or direct hardware integration. Its ability to provide isolated and secure environments with minimal overhead makes it suitable for infrastructure virtualization where traditional VMs might be too resource-intensive.
Docker’s utility in supporting rapid development cycles and complex architectures makes it a valuable tool for developers aiming to improve efficiency and operational consistency in their projects.
Clean architecture is a widely adopted opinionated way to structure your code and to separate the concerns of the application into layers. The main idea is to separate the business logic from the infrastructure and presentation layers.
Assorted links for Thursday, June 20:
A push triggers a Kafka event, which is fanned out via independent consumers to many isolated jobs that can process the event without worrying about any other consumers.
Rust’s ownership model is a fundamental feature that enhances both speed and safety. Every value in Rust has a unique owner, responsible for its cleanup when it’s no longer needed. This eliminates the need for a garbage collector and ensures efficient memory management. The ownership rules are enforced at compile time, which means there’s no runtime overhead.
Outside of special cases, Meta maintains its fleet of clusters using a technique called maintenance trains. This is used for all capacity, including compute and storage capacity. A small number of servers are taken out of production and maintained with all applicable upgrades. Trains provide the guarantee that all capacity minus one maintenance domain is up and running 24/7, thus providing capacity predictability. This is mandatory for all capacity that is used for online and recurring training.
Assorted links for Wednesday, June 19:
Developers can now take advantage of Arm-based hardware hosted by GitHub to build and deploy their release assets anywhere Arm architecture is used. Best of all, these runners are priced at 37% less than our x64 Linux and Windows runners.
Assuming an 8-hour workday and considering 260 workdays per year brings the annual energy cost of one person’s hour of daily work to around 6 kWh[a].
Now for the energy cost of running an LLM. We have set a target of 250 words in an hour. LLMs generate tokens, parts of words, so if we use the standard ratio (for English) of 0.75 words per token, our target for one hour of work is around 333 tokens. Measurements with Llama 65B reported around 4 Joules per output token [4]. This leads to 1,332 Joules for 333 tokens, about 0.00037 kWh.
Microsoft’s upcoming Recall feature in Windows 11 has generated a wave of controversy this week following early testing that revealed huge security holes. The initial version of Recall saves screenshots and a large plaintext database tracking everything that users do on their PCs, and in the current version of the feature, it’s trivially easy to steal and view that database and all of those screenshots for any user on a given PC, even if you don’t have administrator access. Recall also does little to nothing to redact sensitive information from its screenshots or that database.
First and most significantly, the company says that Recall will be opt-in by default, so users will need to decide to turn it on. It may seem like a small change, but many users never touch the defaults on their PCs, and for Recall to be grabbing all of that data by default definitely puts more users at risk of having their data stolen unawares.
The company also says it’s adding additional protections to Recall to make the data harder to access. You’ll need to enable Windows Hello to use Recall, and you’ll need to authenticate via Windows Hello (whether it’s a face-scanning camera, fingerprint sensor, or PIN) each time you want to open the Recall app to view your data.
Assorted links for Tuesday, June 18:
By providing a reusable, state-of-the-art execution engine that is engine- and dialect-agnostic (i.e, it can be integrated with any data system and extended to follow any SQL-dialect semantic), Velox quickly received attention from the open-source community. Beyond our initial collaborators from IBM/Ahana, Intel, and Voltron Data, today more than 200 individual collaborators from more than 20 companies around the world participate in Velox’s continued development.
A team of physicists has discovered that it’s possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: the vessel doing the warping can’t exceed the speed of light, so you’re not going to get anywhere interesting any time soon. But this research still represents an important advance in our understanding of gravity.
Windows 11 24H2 includes an updated compiler, kernel, and scheduler, all lower-level system changes made at least in part to better support Arm-based PCs. Existing Windows-on-Arm systems should also see a 10 or 20 percent performance boost when using x86 applications, thanks to improvements in the translation layer (which Microsoft is now calling Prism).
There are more user-visible changes, too. 24H2 includes Sudo for Windows, the ability to create TAR and 7-zip archives from the File Explorer, Wi-Fi 7 support, a new “energy saver” mode, and better support for Bluetooth Low Energy Audio. It also allows users to run the Copilot AI chatbot in a regular resizable window that can be pinned to the taskbar instead of always giving it a dedicated strip of screen space.
Minnesota this week eliminated two laws that made it harder for cities and towns to build their own broadband networks. The state-imposed restrictions were repealed in an omnibus commerce policy bill signed on Tuesday by Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat.
Minnesota was previously one of about 20 states that imposed significant restrictions on municipal broadband. The number can differ depending on who’s counting because of disagreements over what counts as a significant restriction. But the list has gotten smaller in recent years because states including Arkansas, Colorado, and Washington repealed laws that hindered municipal broadband.
The Minnesota bill enacted this week struck down a requirement that municipal telecommunications networks be approved in an election with 65 percent of the vote. The law is over a century old, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Network Initiative wrote yesterday.
Assorted links for Monday, June 17:
.NET Aspire brings together tools, templates, and NuGet packages that help you build distributed applications in .NET more easily.
Here’s a look at our updates & announcements:
- Artificial Intelligence: End-to-end scenarios for building AI-enabled applications, embracing the AI ecosystem, and deep integration with cloud services.
- .NET Aspire: for building cloud-native distributed applications, releasing today.
- C# 13: Improvements to much loved C# features to make them even better for you.
- Performance: Reducing memory and execution time with critical benchmarks.
- Enhancements to .NET libraries and frameworks including ASP.NET Core, Blazor, .NET MAUI, and more.
A new study by researchers at the UK’s University of Leeds, however, suggests that … renewables already produce more net energy than the fossil fuels they’re displacing. The key to understanding why is that it’s much easier to do useful things with electricity than it is with a hunk of coal or a glob of crude oil.
We recently launched a new tool to enhance Docker documentation: an AI-powered documentation assistant incorporating kapa.ai. Docker Docs AI is designed to get you the information you need by providing instant, accurate answers to your Docker-related questions directly within our documentation pages.
With making use of multiple queues, the VirtIO-FS file-system code can be up to 5~5.5x faster for read and write performance.
Assorted links for Friday, June 14:
It’s like magic with one line of code changed in the Linux kernel that Intel is reporting up to 19% performance improvement for Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” and up to an 11% improvement in performance per Watt. Or in another EPP mode, the power consumption during video playback can be reduced by 52%!
Light painting is a technique used in both art and science that involves taking long-exposure photographs while moving some kind of light source—a small flashlight, perhaps, or candles or glowsticks—to essentially trace an image with light. A UK collaboration of scientists and artists has combined light painting with low-cost air pollution sensors to visualize concentrations of particulate matter (PM) in select locations in India, Ethiopia, and Wales. The objective is to creatively highlight the health risks posed by air pollution, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
There were significant differences in SI between psychologists and AI’s ChatGPT-4 and Bing. ChatGPT-4 exceeded 100% of all the psychologists, and Bing outperformed 50% of PhD holders and 90% of bachelor’s holders. The differences in SI between Google Bard and bachelor students were not significant, whereas the differences with PhDs were significant; Where 90% of PhD holders excel on Google Bird.
NYTimes: Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark.
Those batteries play a pivotal role in California’s electric grid, partially replacing fossil fuels in the evening. Between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 30, for example, batteries supplied more than one-fifth of California’s electricity and, for a few minutes, pumped out 7,046 megawatts of electricity, akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors.