Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

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 fo...

A few interesting things I learnt about this week are 1. Coffee Stains in LaTeX - This package provides an essential feature that LaTeX has been missing for too long: It adds coffee stains to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding them manually. My Take: There is too much fun to be had with LaTeX. I guess the rest of the world missed this wonderful piece of tech completely. These small and sometimes pointless tools are what really make any technology platform stand out among others, not because of the tech but the fact that its users are emotionally invested to build these kind of tech nuggets 2. Meshtastic - Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source. LoRa uses license-free sub-gigahertz radio frequency bands EU868 (863–87...

This is second of my experiment series to compile a few interesting things which I read about during the week. I hope I can continue this for this year at least. 1. Eagle 7B   - The race for better models is on. Gemini from Google is there but its another closed source one. But this one is open source. It claims to have transformers with 1 Trillion Tokens Across 100+ Languages.  My Take: Models are going to be get better in the open source world with each passing day. Very soon we will have GPT4 level models running on our local laptops and phones. The open source is going to be a big part of it. How people build on top of these models is going to become even more interesting. I have not tried this model yet, but I am guessing it will be faster than llama2  2. Text Generation WebUI - This is an amazing tool which starts a webservice on your machines and makes loading and configuring various LLMs a breeze. It will autodownload models once you have given hugginface proje...