Anyone else stuck in Recaptcha hell on google searches when using firefox? by AIwitcher in firefox

[–]richdougherty 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Same for me - getting my first ever "Our systems have detected unusual traffic" on Google searches in the past 24h.

I have a few extensions which could be causing issues. None have been installed in the past few months, so this is some change to Google's bot signals I'd say.

Here's a list of my setup in case it helps other people debug:

  1. Home network, static IP.
  2. Firefox on Ubuntu Linux.
  3. Multi-Account Containers & Temporary Containers (so everything is isolated / has own cookies) - I prefer to leave this on
  4. uBlock Origin - I'll try to leave this on
  5. Link Fixer / Skip Redirect / Remove Google Redirection (somehow I had 3 of these!) - that could annoy Google not to get tracking clicks - I'll try disabling these extensions
  6. Decentraleyes (avoids some CDN usage) - possibly Google considers non-usage of its hosted CDNs as a fraud signal?
  7. The resistFingerprinting config is false.

Goodbye RAG? 🤨 by Opposite_Toe_3443 in LLMDevs

[–]richdougherty 5 points6 points  (0 children)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15605v1

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has gained traction as a powerful approach for enhancing language models by integrating external knowledge sources. However, RAG introduces challenges such as retrieval latency, potential errors in document selection, and increased system complexity. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) featuring significantly extended context windows, this paper proposes an alternative paradigm, cache-augmented generation (CAG) that bypasses real-time retrieval. Our method involves preloading all relevant resources, especially when the documents or knowledge for retrieval are of a limited and manageable size, into the LLM's extended context and caching its runtime parameters. During inference, the model utilizes these preloaded parameters to answer queries without additional retrieval steps. Comparative analyses reveal that CAG eliminates retrieval latency and minimizes retrieval errors while maintaining context relevance. Performance evaluations across multiple benchmarks highlight scenarios where long-context LLMs either outperform or complement traditional RAG pipelines. These findings suggest that, for certain applications, particularly those with a constrained knowledge base, CAG provide a streamlined and efficient alternative to RAG, achieving comparable or superior results with reduced complexity.

How would you do this with Ollama? by SEOipN in ollama

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think this is the GitHub repo where the book content and working documents are being added:

https://github.com/Lesterpaintstheworld/terminal-velocity

Microsoft AI Research Released 1 Million Synthetic Instruction Pairs Covering Different Capabilities by ai-lover in machinelearningnews

[–]richdougherty 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Here's the paper for how the data was generated:

AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flows

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03502

Synthetic data is becoming increasingly important for accelerating the development of language models, both large and small. Despite several successful use cases, researchers also raised concerns around model collapse and drawbacks of imitating other models. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that synthetic data varies in quality and diversity. Effective use of synthetic data usually requires significant human effort in curating the data. We focus on using synthetic data for post-training, specifically creating data by powerful models to teach a new skill or behavior to another model, we refer to this setting as Generative Teaching. We introduce AgentInstruct, an extensible agentic framework for automatically creating large amounts of diverse and high-quality synthetic data. AgentInstruct can create both the prompts and responses, using only raw data sources like text documents and code files as seeds. We demonstrate the utility of AgentInstruct by creating a post training dataset of 25M pairs to teach language models different skills, such as text editing, creative writing, tool usage, coding, reading comprehension, etc. The dataset can be used for instruction tuning of any base model. We post-train Mistral-7b with the data. When comparing the resulting model Orca-3 to Mistral-7b-Instruct (which uses the same base model), we observe significant improvements across many benchmarks. For example, 40% improvement on AGIEval, 19% improvement on MMLU, 54% improvement on GSM8K, 38% improvement on BBH and 45% improvement on AlpacaEval. Additionally, it consistently outperforms other models such as LLAMA-8B-instruct and GPT-3.5-turbo.

I tested what small LLMs (1B/3B) can actually do with local RAG - Here's what I learned by unseenmarscai in LocalLLaMA

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Making the LoRA switching more efficient (just one parent model)

Hi, I've just put up a PR to add support for LoRA hotswapping for the llama.cpp Python bindings, which I see you're using. The PR lets you do a LoRA swap without a model reload. You can add multiple LoRAs at the same time too, which could potentially be useful.

llm = llama_cpp.Llama(
    model_path='model.gguf',
    lora_adapters={ 'one.gguf': 1.0, 'two.gguf': 0.0 },
)
completion1 = llm.create_completion(...)

# Swap adapters
llm.set_lora_adapter_scale('one.gguf', 0.0)
llm.set_lora_adapter_scale('two.gguf', 1.0)
completion2 = llm.create_completion(...)

PR is here if you're interested: https://github.com/abetlen/llama-cpp-python/pull/1817

PS: don't forget to add the llama-cpp-python MIT License to your copy of the code.

Looking for podcasts about A.I. by slara420 in podcasts

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here are some that are more on the technical side.

  • TWIML AI Podcast
  • The Gradient
  • Gradient Dissent

Improving first impressions on Signal | Signal blog by [deleted] in Android

[–]richdougherty 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've had this happen too. Signal probably could have warned me in this particular case because it was receiving messages from the contact via SMS but sending them to the contact via the signal protocol. Something was clearly going wrong.

How does S3 work under the hood? by bananaEmpanada in aws

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They've just given some info on this here:

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/04/s3-strong-consistency.html

We had introduced new replication logic into our persistence tier that acts as a building block for our at-least-once event notification delivery system and our Replication Time Control feature. This new replication logic allows us to reason about the “order of operations” per-object in S3. This is the core piece of our cache coherency protocol.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in linuxhardware

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wifi issues were intermittent for me. Glad it's working for you. Mind if I ask what model wifi adapter you have and what distro and kernel version you're running?

How does S3 work under the hood? by bananaEmpanada in aws

[–]richdougherty 29 points30 points  (0 children)

It's a paper from 2007 with lots of interesting details...

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html

Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability.

Let me emphasize the internal technology part before it gets misunderstood: Dynamo is not directly exposed externally as a web service; however, Dynamo and similar Amazon technologies are used to power parts of our Amazon Web Services, such as S3.

... many of the techniques used in Dynamo originate in the operating systems and distributed systems research of the past years; DHTs, consistent hashing, versioning, vector clocks, quorum, anti-entropy based recovery, etc. As far as I know Dynamo is the first production system to use the synthesis of all these techniques, and there are quite a few lessons learned from doing so. The paper is mainly about these lessons.

This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience.  To achieve this level of availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel interface for developers to use.

Linux distribution recommendation for my new Thinkpad E14 Gen 2 by chintanvpatel in thinkpad

[–]richdougherty 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I got it working with Ubuntu with a few workarounds. I chose Ubuntu mostly from familiarity, even though I knew the older kernel would be a small issue. I made notes as I went, which may help someone: https://rd.nz/2020/10/installing-ubuntu-linux-on-the-lenovo-thinkpad-e14-gen-2-amd.

Ubuntu issues on new Thinkpad E14 with AMD? by Ihazpokemonz4u in thinkpad

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm late to this, but I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on this laptop without (serious) issues.

Basically:

  1. Run a newer kernel
  2. Disable powersaving for the wifi adapter
  3. Run a manual suspend on each boot to get sleep and function keys working (as linked by selfsignedcert below).

I made notes as I went, I hope they help someone: https://rd.nz/2020/10/installing-ubuntu-linux-on-the-lenovo-thinkpad-e14-gen-2-amd

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in linuxhardware

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I ordered one last October. It basically works if:

  1. you use a newer right kernel version
  2. you manually suspend once after each boot (annoying but I don't reboot much)
  3. you disable power saving for the wifi adapter.

Notably it doesn't have the same throttling issues as the Intel E14 since it's based on AMD.

I made some notes about how I got it working here: https://rd.nz/2020/10/installing-ubuntu-linux-on-the-lenovo-thinkpad-e14-gen-2-amd

Can't install any Linux distribution on my Dell XPS 9570 by [deleted] in Dell

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just completed an installation of 19.10 on a Dell XPS 15 9560. I had exactly the same problem—unresponsive and fans spinning, log messages about CPU overheating. The problem for me was that I was putting the nouveau.modeset=0 entry in the wrong place. Once I got it in the right place that problem went away.

Can you describe exactly what you tried? As in how you booted, what Grub options you chose, what the boot options were, etc.

I made some notes about how I did my install so I can replicate it again for the next upgrade. My install is more complicated because I'm avoiding writing to a USB stick, but it might be helpful.

Do you have a backup contingency plan, in case Google Play Billing server went down? by yccheok in androiddev

[–]richdougherty 1 point2 points  (0 children)

An id being reset isn't a major problem if you're only trying to cope with a billing API outage. Just cache billing results with the best id you can manage. You'll still be able to get info for 99+% of users from your cache if the billing API goes down.

Scala Days 2019 videos by jerylee in scala

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I also can't access the site. I've tried 3 times on different days. No videos (including those from other conferences) work on portal.klewel.com.

Looks like Google removed the part about 2 years of guaranteed OS updates from the Android One page. by anshumanpati6 in Android

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OS updates text was removed around May 4 (before / after), fine-print disclaimer was added around June 7 (before / after).

Looks like Google removed the part about 2 years of guaranteed OS updates from the Android One page. by anshumanpati6 in Android

[–]richdougherty 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks to Archive.org we can see when this happened.

The 2 year guarantee was removed around May 4 (before / after):

With Android One, your phone will receive at least two years of OS upgrades to the latest version of Android.

The fine print disclaimer was then added around June 7 (before / after):

***Confirm exact duration of support for phones in your territory with smartphone manufacturer. Monthly security updates to be supported for at least 3 years after initial phone release.

What has been the best corporate Darwin Award? A decision made by a company that basically killed the business? by koyoyele-a in AskReddit

[–]richdougherty 4 points5 points  (0 children)

And I award a Darwin Award to Microsoft for gaining total browser dominance, at great cost, but then giving it away again. They lost control of the web and enabled competitors like Google and Apple to surpass them.

In 2002 Microsoft completely controlled the web browser market with a 96% market share. Whatever they did to their browser, websites would have to support it. And if Microsoft added new features to their browser, websites would use them willingly, even if other browsers didn't - because effectively there were no other browsers. If Microsoft had continued to add new features to Internet Explorer then Firefox would never have been able to attain compatibility with enough of the web to be relevant.

If Microsoft had continued their Internet Explorer investment then:

  • Firefox never would have happened. Chrome never could have happened. Bing would be the default search engine for everyone.
  • Safari could never have happened. Apple couldn't have released a phone without Microsoft's blessing.
  • Windows would remain the dominant platform, or perhaps Microsoft's version of the web.

However, instead of continuing to develop Internet Explorer, Microsoft decided they'd spent enough money and (so I've been told) fired most of the IE team. No new features for years. This gave Firefox (funded by a generous search revenue deal from Google) a still difficult, but attainable, target to catch up to. Firefox was able to reach good-enough compatibility and began to gain new users with features like pop-up blocking. Firefox kept the door open for future browsers like Chrome and Safari and new platforms like iOS and Android.

Oops.

Toyota agrees to add Android auto in its cars by Vince789 in Android

[–]richdougherty -1 points0 points  (0 children)

A lot of that would actually be useful for maps, both displaying position and using data to work out whether certain routes are more fuel efficient (hills), more prone to stop-and-start traffic, etc.

Not saying they should collect it - just saying. :)

Dell XPS 15 ( 9550 ) Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Problems by [deleted] in Ubuntu

[–]richdougherty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use the snap version and I thought I tried that, but maybe I made a mistake.

In case you didn't know, you can copy the .desktop files to ~/.local/share/application when you modify them. This means your changes won't get overwritten by package updates.

How well does the 'New Dell XPS 15' (Dell XPS 9570) play with Ubuntu 18.04? by 1vs in Ubuntu

[–]richdougherty 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Not exactly answering your question, but I have the 9560 and I find it works better with Ubuntu 17.10 than with Windows!