[Feb 25] Interesting Things I Learnt This Week

1. How a group of birds got their names - This is an article about the collective names of groups of birds. It discusses how these names came to be and how they have changed over time. The names are often based on the birds’ characteristics or behavior. Some examples are a “murder of crows” and a “parliament of owls”. The article also mentions a book called “The Boke of Seynt Albans” which contains a list of many of these collective names.

My Take: The evolution of names across centuries is a fascinating journey, often revealing a captivating rabbit hole of linguistic transformations. At times, it strikes me that we may become overly fixated on specific details that are destined to fade with the passage of time. In doing so, we risk losing sight of the broader picture. This phenomenon is particularly evident when exploring historical instances that highlight the intellectual contributions of women. Unfortunately, history illustrates how their brilliance was often stifled through forceful suppression—a pattern that, to some extent, persists today. However, amidst such adversity, some of the brightest minds managed to find a way forward. Shifting gears, it's intriguing to delve into the various names assigned to groups of birds. Personally, I find "sedge of herons" and the newer rendition, "siege of herons," to be particularly enchanting. Equally amusing are terms like "stare of owls" and "unkindness of ravens." Exploring these unique collective nouns adds an extra layer of delight to the narrative.

 

2. LLM Visualization - This explains about how a large language model works. It discusses the GPT-2 model, which takes a sequence of letters and predicts the next letter in the sequence. The model works by first embedding the letters into vectors, and then passing them through a series of transformers. The transformers predict the next letter in the sequence, and the model can then be fed its own predictions to continue generating text.

My Take:  As an engineer, it is crucial for me to comprehend the inner workings of various systems. This not only serves as an enjoyable learning experience but also offers a straightforward approach to mastering Language Models (LLMs). I believe that incorporating this understanding into textbooks for upcoming engineering courses would be beneficial.

 

3. Explanation of some terms of LLMs - A reddit user(u/StudyLocalLama) mentions that they were very angry with the takes on different LLM terms all over the web that they decided to summarize them all in this post. 

My Take: This Reddit post does a fabulous job of summarizing the various terms of LLMs. I would say, read this first before getting lost in the rabbit hole of LLM Visualization.

 

4. ESP32 Doorbell - This awesome project can help you build your own smart ESP32 doorbell. It takes you all the way to connecting your bell to Home Assistant. After that, the world is your playground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Take:  This is something I was planning to build. I think I had sorted all things for this, except for time and CT103C for detecting current. I was thinking of using an Optocoupler Isolation Module. But yes I still have to find time and evaluating between Optocoupler vs CT103C. Not sure what I will use, but will let you know. If you have specific thoughts on these, do let me know. There are other implementations which use camera as well, but right now I am more keen on just getting the signal out.


Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

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