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Google's Gemma Open-Source LLM Family Gets an Upgrade

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Meghanadh Vasireddy
August 19, 2024

Good Morning. This author had some nostalgia and actually described the process of writing a Tetris clone for the PlayStation 1 (PSX) using modern tools and libraries. The author talks about the history of PSX game development, the technical details of the graphics system, and the steps involved in creating the Notris game, including prototyping in JavaScript, learning C, and using the PSNoobSDK library.

Google's Gemma Open-Source LLM Family Gets an Upgrade

Context: Gemma is Google's answer to the growing demand for accessible, high-performance language models. Built on the same tech that powers the Gemini models, Gemma comes in various flavors to suit different AI appetites.

What's New:

  • Gemma 2 (2B, 9B, 27B): The star of the show, featuring updated text-to-text models. The 2B and 9B versions are trained through distillation from larger models, packing a punch in a smaller package.

  • RecurrentGemma (2B, 9B): This one's for the speed demons. It uses a mix of local attention and linear recurrences for faster inference on long sequences.

  • PaliGemma (3B): The multitasker of the bunch, capable of processing both text and images.

For the code connoisseurs, there's CodeGemma (2B and 7B), fine-tuned for code completion and generation. It even supports fill-in-the-middle capability, perfect for those tricky code insertions.

Curious about the nuts and bolts? Gemma uses some nifty tricks like GeGLU activation functions and rotary positional encoding (RoPE) to squeeze out extra performance.

Read More Here

🎒 Plugged In

Welcome to the fourth edition of PluggedIn Blog! For those who may not know, PluggedIn is a new venture by the team behind DevNotes, aimed at spotlighting the brightest teenage tech minds around the world! 

Today, we feature Daniel Rupawalla, a high school senior from Texas, who recognized the inequities in the college application process—where some students can spend thousands on consultants while others, who can’t afford them, are at a disadvantage—and decided to take action. He co-founded Sups.ai, an innovative AI-powered “virtual writing buddy” designed to assist students with their college essays. 

Daniel's journey from a middle school entrepreneur to the co-founder and CTO of Sups.ai is nothing short of remarkable. Now, Sups.ai has over 12,000 active users across 138 countries and has helped students gain admission to all the Ivies and 42 out of the top 50 colleges. With a passion for coding and a drive to introduce novel ideas that make a meaningful impact, Daniel has already helped thousands of students worldwide. Read more here about how this brilliant and successful high school entrepreneur is transforming the college application process and making a lasting impact on students' lives. 

GitHub's Recent Outage: A Lesson in Database Configuration

On August 14, 2024, GitHub experienced a total blackout for about 36 minutes. Yep, you read that right – all services on GitHub.com were down. The culprit? A sneaky database configuration change that went rogue.

What Went Down:

  • At 22:59 UTC, a config change rolled out that messed with the databases' ability to respond to health checks.

  • This led to the routing service failing to find healthy databases to direct traffic to.

  • Result: GitHub.com went dark at 23:02 UTC.

The GitHub team quickly jumped into action, reverting the change and getting things back online by 23:38 UTC. They kept a close eye on things before giving the all-clear at 00:30 UTC on August 15th.

GitHub isn't taking this lightly. They're beefing up their database change management process and prioritizing faster rollback capabilities. It's a solid reminder of how critical proper testing and failsafes are, even for tech giants.

Read More Here

Kubernetes 1.31 'Elli': Stability Boost for Cloud-Native Ops

Kubernetes, the go-to container orchestration system, keeps evolving. This release focuses on stability and reliability – music to the ears of enterprise users. With contributions from 113 companies and 528 individuals, Elli truly represents the diverse Kubernetes community.

What's New:

  • Networking: Kube-proxy got an upgrade for more reliable ingress connectivity. The best part? You don't need to change a thing in your deployments.

  • Storage: PersistentVolumes now include a timestamp for phase changes, giving you better visibility into your storage assets.

  • Memory Management: Swap memory support has finally arrived on Linux nodes. This opens up new possibilities for resource allocation and utilization.

  • Security: AppArmor support is now stable, bolstering your container security options.

Keep an eye on these features:

  • Dynamic Resource Allocation with Control Plane Controller: This could be a game-changer for AI workloads on Kubernetes.

  • VolumeSource from OCI Artifacts/Images: Simplifies using container images as volume sources.

TL;DR: Kubernetes 1.31 'Elli' focuses on stability and introduces features that make your cloud-native life easier. It's like a good cup of coffee – reliable, refreshing, and gets the job done without fuss.

Read More Here

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