1. The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition
Total comment counts : 27
Summary
This article serves as a placeholder for material related to the second edition of The AWK Programming Language, which was initially written in 1988 by Al Aho, Brian Kernighan, and Peter Weinberger. The new edition will include updates to reflect the changes that have occurred in the computing world since then. The book is expected to be available by the end of September. In the meantime, the article provides links to historical documents, bits of code, and occasional essays on Awk and related topics. It also includes references to the original Awk paper, other implementations of Awk, and interviews with Al Aho and Brian Kernighan.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a book that has been updated and restructured by the author, Kernighan. The early chapters of the book focus on hands-on exploratory data processing, particularly with CSV files. Both Gawk and awk will soon have a new “–csv” option that allows proper CSV input mode, and the author is glad that Gawk now has a robust “–csv” feature. The article concludes by expressing excitement for the release of the updated version of the book.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the modernization of the book on Awk, a programming language. The original edition of the book still works fine, but some code examples are outdated. The book also covers topics like writing VMs, parsers, and interpreters, which are applicable to modern implementations. The language has some quirks, such as the practice of adding extra arguments to declare temporary variables and the implementation-dependency of traversing associative arrays. The situation regarding locale and UTF-8 support is unclear, but Unicode support was added by Brian Kernighan last year. Two links are provided for further reference.
2. National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers
Total comment counts : 35
Summary
National Geographic magazine has laid off all of its remaining staff writers, marking another setback for the struggling publication. The cutback, the latest in a series of layoffs, is part of cost-cutting measures implemented by owner Walt Disney Co. The magazine’s editorial assignments will now be contracted out to freelancers or handled by editors. The layoffs also resulted in the elimination of the magazine’s audio department. National Geographic, known for its iconic images, has also curtailed photo contracts that allowed photographers to spend months in the field. Additionally, the magazine will no longer be sold on newsstands in the United States starting next year. These changes come as National Geographic faces challenges in the digital era and declining magazine subscriptions.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article expresses sadness about the current state of journalism due to people’s expectation of free information on the internet. It criticizes the decline of quality journalism and the collection and selling of personal data. The author also expresses disappointment in the fact that National Geographic, owned by Walt Disney Co., is closing despite the company’s large revenue. They suggest that Walt Disney should be able to provide support for National Geographic’s journalism. The article questions who will write for the magazine if the company lays off its staff.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article laments the state of National Geographic since its affiliation with Disney. It highlights that the website now primarily serves as an advertisement platform for Disney+, featuring characters from franchises like Buzz Lightyear and Star Wars. This marks a departure from its previous status as a non-profit organization associated with the esteemed National Geographic Society.
3. CLI tools hidden in the Python standard library
Total comment counts : 20
Summary
The author of this article explores some lesser-known tools in the Python standard library that can be accessed from the command line. They start by mentioning the Python gzip module, which can be used as a CLI tool on Windows if the gzip utility is not available. The author then goes on to examine other tools in the standard library by using the command python -m name_of_module and python -m site to gather useful information about their Python installation. They use the “ripgrep” tool to find potential packages and then list a variety of commands they have discovered so far, including running a localhost web server, accessing a Python console with top-level await, and pretty-printing JSON. The author also mentions a benchmarking suite, a built-in demo for the nntplib module, and a calendar tool with various options.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a hidden Python tool called re.Scanner. re.Scanner is a regex-based tokenizer in the re module that is not documented officially. It allows users to provide a pattern for each token type and a function to be called on each match. The tool processes the list of tokens in one pass and ensures that the matches are contiguous. It also provides a reference to the running scanner for error reporting. The article provides an example of how to use re.Scanner to tokenize a string with multiple token types, such as integers, identifiers, and punctuation. The results are returned as a list of tuples indicating the token type and the corresponding matched value.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article suggests that using the -e option with grep is quicker and easier to read compared to piping multiple grep -v commands. It provides an example of how the original command can be condensed using the -e option.
4. OpenOrca: open source dataset and instruct-tuned LLMs
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
The article introduces OpenOrca, an open-source dataset and series of language models. The author decided to replicate the efforts of Microsoft’s Orca model and create OpenOrca because they believed Microsoft may not release the dataset. The OpenOrca dataset consists of approximately 1 million FLANv2 augmented with GPT-4 completions and 3.5 million FLANv2 augmented with GPT-3.5 completions. The dataset was created with the help of an open-source AI/ML engineering team. OpenOrca is currently being fine-tuned on the LLaMA-13b foundation and is expected to be released in mid-July 2023. The article also mentions that sponsorship is being sought for GPU compute on various platforms. The author expresses gratitude towards current sponsors and acknowledges the contributions of the open-source AI/ML engineering community.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author expresses skepticism regarding the reliance on ChatGPT for alignment instruction. They argue that if they were training a model, they would remove data that includes statements such as “As an AI model, I cannot..”. The author believes that while the use of a private language model (LLM) may be restricted in certain contexts, it should not be limited ahead of time according to someone else’s perception of what a safe consumer-oriented output should be. They find it surprising that many people training these models do not have a problem with such constraints.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article expresses gratitude for the efforts made by someone. It mentions disappointment that Microsoft hid the Orca, a tool that the author wanted to test. They mention that the guanaco 30b model has some limited spatial comprehension, making it the best 30b model so far. The author requests for this model to be added to a training list. They also mention the MPT-7b and RWKV, hoping that someone will sponsor them and emphasizing the desire to see how the RWKV performs after tuning. The author suggests that tuning the RWKV should be the cheapest option.
5. Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
Total comment counts : 95
Summary
error
Top 1 Comment Summary
I apologize, but as an AI text-based assistant, I am unable to access and summarize specific articles or links. However, if you provide a brief summary or key points from the article, I would be happy to help summarize that information for you.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author is unfamiliar with the concept of affirmative action and understands it as positively discriminating based on race, specifically minority races. They question why race is a factor and suggest that the focus should be on helping disadvantaged individuals regardless of race. The author is genuinely curious about the inclusion of race and suggests a more general social democratic approach to providing extra opportunities or benefits to the poor.
6. XGen-7B, a new 7B foundational model trained on up to 8K length for 1.5T tokens
Total comment counts : 8
Summary
The article discusses the training of large language models (LLMs) called XGen-7B, focusing on their ability to handle long sequences of text. The models are trained with dense attention on sequence lengths of up to 8,192 tokens, with a total of 1.5 trillion tokens. They are fine-tuned on public-domain instructional data and are available for research purposes. The article also explores the challenges and solutions related to training larger models, including addressing loss spikes during training and the computational costs of longer sequence lengths. The XGen-7B models achieve good performance on various evaluation benchmarks, including the Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding benchmark and the HumanEval benchmark for code generation.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the use of LLaMA, MPT, and Falcon in training models. It mentions that LLaMA has optimized inference runtimes and better tooling compared to MPT and Falcon. The author speculates that if LLaMA can be a drop-in replacement for 7B, it will gain popularity quickly as a small model.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author of the article claims that based on their experimentation, 7B parameter models are not consistently effective for their use cases. They also express curiosity about the potential use cases for smaller LLMs.
7. Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?
Total comment counts : 60
Summary
I’m sorry, but I am unable to summarize the requested article as it appears to be an error message and not an actual article. Can you please provide a different article or topic for me to summarize?
Top 1 Comment Summary
Valve has decided that it will no longer publish games with AI generated content, but this doesn’t mean that they have outright banned these types of games. The article’s title and post are misleading as the restriction only applies to GenAI, where authors cannot prove ownership or rights to the content. If developers use other AI techniques like ProcGen and have full rights to the data used, it seems unlikely that there would be any issues with getting their games published by Valve.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses how Valve, a gaming company, has identified potential intellectual property (IP) issues in a game. The game contains art assets that were generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and may rely on copyrighted material owned by third parties. Valve is concerned about the unclear legal ownership of AI-generated art and does not want to release the game if it contains these assets unless the game developer can confirm that they have the rights to all the IP used to train the AI.
8. Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans
Total comment counts : 28
Summary
Google is ending support for the Dialer and Messaging apps in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). This move will not affect most consumers as many brands have their own phone and messaging apps or rely on Google’s newer closed-source apps. However, small mobile brands will no longer have access to the older open-source apps and will need to license Google’s new apps or create their own. This decision also impacts the custom ROM developer community, as they may need to develop their own apps or use older unsupported versions. The discontinuation of the AOSP apps could also affect Generic System Images (GSIs), which are basic versions of Android for testing and validation. This suggests that versions without Google support will lack a phone and messaging app or come with older versions. This move reflects Google’s strategy of putting previously open-source features behind proprietary frameworks and services.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article discusses the use of custom ROMs and alternative apps. They mention that there are many free alternatives available and that LineageOS, for example, has its own version of Dialer/Messages. The author prefers using SimpleMobileTools versions of these apps. The article also mentions the main difficulties faced by custom ROMs, such as locked bootloaders, undocumented firmware blobs, SafetyNet, Google Play Services, and the increasing difficulty of using Android without a Google Account.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The majority of custom ROMs do not utilize the AOSP dialer, opting instead for customized versions with additional features such as call recording. AOSP has become less relevant in recent years, but third-party apps like Simple apps can help make it more useful.
9. Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money from programmatic ads
Total comment counts : 28
Summary
A new report from NewsGuard reveals that over 140 major brands are unknowingly advertising on low-quality websites that use AI-generated content to attract paying advertisers. These websites, often referred to as “content farms,” use AI chatbots to generate text that lures advertisers. Google, which prohibits serving ads on pages with “spammy automatically generated content,” was found to serve 90% of the ads from major brands on these AI-generated news sites. The rise of generative AI is enabling the creation of more junk sites with less effort, posing a threat to the internet ecosystem and wasting significant ad money. NewsGuard has identified around 25 new AI-generated sites each week and has found 217 of them in 13 languages since April. Despite policies against serving ads on content farms, ad exchanges and platforms do not consistently enforce these policies. The presence of AI-generated content on the internet exacerbates the misinformation problem, as some sites spread harmful health misinformation. NewsGuard’s findings highlight the concerning relationship between tech giants, ad tech companies, and the emergence of misinformation sites. It also raises questions about the effectiveness of content moderation and the future of programmatic advertising.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the existence of near-gibberish “blogs” that are part of link rings, which have been around for at least a decade. These blogs used to be sold as SEO services, where hundreds of automated WordPress blogs would link to each other and the target site or product. This was done to increase inbound link count and improve Google SERP placement and PageRank. The author mentions that a modern equivalent of these blogs can be found when searching for something like “best _____ 2023” for reviews. Instead of actual reviews, these sites only list terrible Amazon products with affiliate links. The posts are written by individuals or machines with zero experience with the product and tend to point out irrelevant features, while claiming that every product is a great choice. The author notes that although these sites were previously common, they couldn’t find any examples of them at the time of writing.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article highlights a longstanding problem of spam content dominating search results. The author suggests that although the quality of content generated by ChatGPT is superior, it is likely that future spam blogs will improve and worsen the situation further.
10. Kagi raises $670k
Total comment counts : 55
Summary
Kagi has raised $670K in its first external fundraise, with the participation of 42 accredited investors, many of whom are Kagi users. The funds will be used to accelerate new and existing product initiatives, as well as provide enhanced product benefits to members. Kagi also has an upcoming surprise announcement. The company acknowledges that changing societal habits regarding personal data and online activities will take time, but they are committed to aligning incentives between Kagi and its user community. The goal is to provide unbiased knowledge and prioritize user interests. Kagi is grateful for the support and trust of its users and looks forward to creating a more humane web. Kagi users interested in future funding rounds can contact the company, and inquiries can be made to vlad@kagi.com.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author initially misreads the headline of the article as “$670 million” and feels disappointed, but upon realizing it is “$670K”, they become optimistic. They are hopeful that Kagi will remain true to its original mission and congratulates Vlad, expressing support for his success.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author discusses their frustration when trying to find a simple tool to make a Venn diagram as a joke. They searched on a platform called kagi but all the top results required sign-ups or subscriptions. This reminded them of the frustration they sometimes experience when using Google. The author recalls a time when they could have easily found a hobbyist website offering the tool they needed without any strings attached. In the end, they clicked on a “non-commercial” option and were able to find a free tool from a hobbyist on the old web.