peteristhegreat

Quick AI analysis of this funny history:

Original Post: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Original Post by James Iry on Thursday, May 7, 2009

https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html

Quick Analysis/Dissection for the Uninitiated

eylenburg

Step by step guide: How to install Microsoft Office in any Linux distribution

There are multiple options how to install MS Office on Linux.

VM-based - Integrate Windows apps running in a Windows virtual machine as native-looking in Linux

1. LinOffice - Microsoft Office Launcher for Linux, my own fork of Winapps which is focused on only running Microsoft Office, with some Office-specific improvements over Winapps and a fully automated setup. Eventually I would like to create a GUI for it. Decribed below
2. Winapps, based on KVM, QEMU, Docker/Podman and FreeRDP. Still actively maintained (getting Github commits). Decribed below
3. Cassowary, based on KVM, QEMU, libvirt/virt-manager, and FreeRDP. Last release in Feb 2022 and seems to be abandoned.

veekaybee

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts of models in prod eagerly sought.

Foundational Concepts

Pre-Transformer Models

lostintangent

Expandable Animated Card Slider

We have made an expandable animated card slider, it will expand and collapse based on card click. We used owl carousel and jQuery for variable width and responsive slider.

A Pen by Yudiz Solutions Limited on CodePen.

License.

yoavg

Reinforcement Learning for Language Models

Yoav Goldberg, April 2023.

Why RL?

With the release of the ChatGPT model and followup large language models (LLMs), there was a lot of discussion of the importance of "RLHF training", that is, "reinforcement learning from human feedback". I was puzzled for a while as to why RL (Reinforcement Learning) is better than learning from demonstrations (a.k.a supervised learning) for training language models. Shouldn't learning from demonstrations (or, in language model terminology "instruction fine tuning", learning to immitate human written answers) be sufficient? I came up with a theoretical argument that was somewhat convincing. But I came to realize there is an additional argumment which not only supports the case of RL training, but also requires it, in particular for models like ChatGPT. This additional argument is spelled out in (the first half of) a talk by John Schulman from OpenAI. This post pretty much

rain-1

Purpose

Bootstrap knowledge of LLMs ASAP. With a bias/focus to GPT.

Avoid being a link dump. Try to provide only valuable well tuned information.

Prelude

Neural network links before starting with transformers.

yoavg

Some remarks on Large Language Models

Yoav Goldberg, January 2023

Audience: I assume you heard of chatGPT, maybe played with it a little, and was imressed by it (or tried very hard not to be). And that you also heard that it is "a large language model". And maybe that it "solved natural language understanding". Here is a short personal perspective of my thoughts of this (and similar) models, and where we stand with respect to language understanding.

Intro

Around 2014-2017, right within the rise of neural-network based methods for NLP, I was giving a semi-academic-semi-popsci lecture, revolving around the story that achieving perfect language modeling is equivalent to being as intelligent as a human. Somewhere around the same time I was also asked in an academic panel "what would you do if you were given infinite compute and no need to worry about labour costs" to which I cockily responded "I would train a really huge language model, just to show that it doesn't solve everything!". We

veekaybee

ChatGPT Resources

Context

ChatGPT appeared like an explosion on all my social media timelines in early December 2022. While I keep up with machine learning as an industry, I wasn't focused so much on this particular corner, and all the screenshots seemed like they came out of nowhere. What was this model? How did the chat prompting work? What was the context of OpenAI doing this work and collecting my prompts for training data?

I decided to do a quick investigation. Here's all the information I've found so far. I'm aggregating and synthesizing it as I go, so it's currently changing pretty frequently.

Model Architecture

moyix

Using Linear Algebra to Convert a Large Code Model

Background

The SalesForce CodeGen models are a family of large language models trained on a large amount of natural language data and then fine-tuned on specialized datasets of code. Models of size 350M, 2B, 6B, and 16B parameters are provided in three flavors:

• nl, the base model trained on The Pile, a large natural language dataset compiled by EleutherAI
• multi, which is fine-tuned from the nl model on a dataset of code in multiple languages, scraped from GitHub, and
• mono, which is fine-tuned from the multi model on Python code only.

noraj

Moving gulpfile from CommonJS (CJS) to ECMAScript Modules (ESM)

Context

del v7.0.0 moved to pure ESM (no dual support), which forced me to move my gulpfile to ESM to be able to continue to use del.

The author sindresorhus maintains a lot of npm packages and does not want to provides an upgrade guide for each package so he provided a generic guide. But this guide is a bit vague because it's generic and not helping for gulp, hence this guide.

Guide