[22nd September 2024] Interesting Things I Learnt This Week

1. The Genius Behind the Quantum Navigation Breakthrough - This is the World's First Unhackable Quantum GPS. Using the coldest atoms in the Universe, it may revolutionise the way we navigate. This Youtuber to got to go behind the scenes and see their device up close to try and understand just how important this breakthrough is.

My Take: This video goes into more details about how quantum navigation works as well hits the home run in explaining why its really needed. I had also mentioned about Quantum Navigation in a previous post where IEEE had covered it. This video goes to explain more details of it and if you are a physics nerd, you would enjoy it.

 

2. Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops -  This article talks about the different small and locally runnable LLMs which various scientists are using for not just poetry but also for medicine. The locally runnable LLMs have the distinct advantage of preserving privacy, fine tuning using the open weights for particular use cases and being cost effective by running on consumer hardware. 

My Take: I have been talking about local LLMs since the LLMs GPT4 started becoming useful. As with all things tech, they are big at the start and very soon become miniaturized and more efficient. Same is happening with LLMs. My guess is that the difference between mini local LLMs(irony?) running on your phone and on server would be insignificant for many use cases. All open weights and open source LLMs are significantly contributing to its progress. Llama is really leading the charge here and OpenAI should be more wary of them than any other AI competitor IMHO. Maybe that is the time when we do away with the GUI input mechanism and move to a more of a conversational model for most tasks.


3. A next frontier for spam and scams - This is an article about the new wave of spam and scams. Seth Godin argues that scammers are getting more and more sophisticated, and people should be aware of the different types of scams out there.

My Take: I love reading Seth Godin's blog because its always very interesting. I dont know how he generates this much content all of which are very interesting. But scams are really on the rise and they are going to get harder to spot. My worry is that most people will not recognise the real people and will be suspicious of them as well. We would definitely need more ways to confirm authenticity of all things used to connect including phone number, email id, url etc .


4. How Discord Reduced Websocket Traffic by 40% - Discord implemented a series of optimizations to reduce bandwidth usage, improving app performance. They switched from zlib to zstandard compression, which offers higher compression ratios and shorter compression times. Additionally, they introduced streaming compression and explored dictionary support to further enhance efficiency. These changes resulted in a significant reduction of gateway bandwidth used by clients, leading to a more responsive experience.

My Take: I love how they went through the journey of optimisation and comparing against the prod metrics at each stage. Their approach of "dark launch" for just collecting data was very intriguing to me. They found the theoretical and practical numbers did not match and found ways to fix the issues with their optimised implementation of zstandard instead of just giving up. With optimisations an engineer really needs to understand the internals very well and that is what really separates the mediocre from the real deal. This is one reason why I hate Leet Code and I dont really understand using that as a hiring criteria. Not just that same thing irks me about all these courses being offered which just help manage to land a job by answering the questions instead of teaching them the basics. I hope sanity prevails as these courses get kicked to the curb soon.

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