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19h

2,352 karma · joined April 23, 2011

Software Engineer at Hex-Rays SA

https://github.com/19h

kenan [at] sly.mn ksulayman [at] hex-rays.com

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19h··on JetBrains Mono Typeface
Absolutely the best font I’ve ever used. I can easily read letters from far, from close, in bright light, in darkness.. used it since day one. Also using it in my terminal. Thanks JetBrains, I love it.
19h··on Llama 2
I signed up again with "country" being United States and I got it immediately -- apparently they're not auto-accepting other countries..
19h··on Classifying customer messages with LLMs vs traditional ML
Interesting idea! Can you elaborate a bit more?
19h··on Classifying customer messages with LLMs vs traditional ML
Apologies, that's a very semantic folding specific term -- with retina I refer to a word -> fingerprint database that gives you either fingerprints of single words or of blocks of text (by applying relevant heuristics to filter out irrelevant noise / heavily used words in a specific language).
19h··on Classifying customer messages with LLMs vs traditional ML
Yes, we don't actively cover this.

Our training dataset is composed of 12 different languages. The English corpus has a size of around 25TB -- ~18TB after a rather aggressive filtering process (char frequencies [i.e. https://gist.github.com/19h/b983769b7ec9c4a9528377d7819892a7], too many unusual features in the sentences, too short sentences, etc.).

Most common misspellings of words have nearly identical fingerprints, and we align the retinas across languages so that translated sentences result in similar fingerprints (via competitive learning).

19h··on Classifying customer messages with LLMs vs traditional ML
Care to elaborate? Not sure why this tone is appropriate.

The 92% is an average and not the exact accuracy across all categories; the accuracy varies by category as every category is represented by its own filter.

19h··on Classifying customer messages with LLMs vs traditional ML
We also trained on all of pushshift and have an average ”unknown” word rate of less than 0.007% — the Reddit corpus is rather amazing to capture pretty much all misspellings of a word.

We may only be using 16k vector values but that doesn’t mean we only have a vocab of 16k —- our vocab is more around 1.9 million words each described by a sparse fingerprint of 16k.

19h··on Classifying customer messages with LLMs vs traditional ML
Unfortunately, I can't. We have some projects bubbling around that may see the light of the day eventually but given the myriads of NDAs that stack on top of each other this is rather unlikely.

That said, here's some reading material on the underlying ideas:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_folding

- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.08855.pdf ("Semantic Folding Theory And its Application in Semantic Fingerprinting")

This is _not_ TF-IDF. Once you have built the "relation fingerprints" of each word, the fingerprint lookup complexity is o(1) as you'll essentially only load a massive LUT of type HashMap<String, Vec<u16>> (or u32 if you go above 255*255). [pro tip: our LUT has the type HashMap<Vec<String>, Vec<u16>> as our impl also considers bigrams, trigrams, quadgrams]

Unfortunately I can't get extremely specific, but we're also feeding these [u8; 16348] vecs into an HTM w/ spatial pooler; feeding one word-SDR aka fingerprint into the HTM at a time allows you to leverage the HTM to make predictions for the most likely next word-SDR aka the fingerprint of the next word -- if you generalise this on a sentence level, you can use the cosine distance between the actual text-SDR aka fingerprint of the next sentence and the predicted text-SDR out of the HTM to semantically segment paragraphs in a continuous stream of text.

This allows us to segment SOCMINT user2user conversations into individual semantically connected packages of text / messages that can be marked by scenario-specific heuristics to be additionally analysed by a downstream system.

19h··on Classifying customer messages with LLMs vs traditional ML
We’re classifying gigabytes of intel (SOCMINT / HUMINT) per second and found semantic folding or better in classification quality vs throughput than BERT / LLMs.

How it works — imagine you’re having these sentences:

“Acorn is a tree” and “acorn is an app”

You essentially keep record of all word to word relations internal to a sentence:

- acorn: is, a, an, app, tree Etc.

Now you repeat this for a few gigabytes of text. You’ll end up with a huge map of “word connections”.

You now take the top X words that other words connect to (I.e. 16384). Then you create a vector of 16384 connections, where each word is encoded as 1,0,1,0,1,0,0,0, … (1 is the most connected to word, 0 the second, etc. 1 indicates “is connected” and 0 indicates “no such connection).

You’ll end up with a vector that has a lot of zeroes — you can now sparsify it (I.e. store only the positions of the ones).

You essentially have fingerprints now — what you can do now is to generate fingerprints of entire sentences, paragraphs and texts. Remove the fingerprints of the most common words like “is”, “in”, “a”, “the” etc. and you’ll have a “semantic fingerprint”. Now if you take a lot of example texts and generate fingerprints off it, you can end up with a very small amount of “indices” like maybe 10 numbers that are enough to very reliably identify texts of a specific topic.

Sorry, couldn’t be too specific as I’m on the go - if you’re interested drop me a mail.

We’re using this to categorize literally tens of gigabytes per second with 92% precision into more than 72 categories.

19h··on IntelliJ Rust
It’s improved a lot the last year. Check it out again
19h··on IntelliJ Rust
Using it everyday and I can’t confirm this at all.

Worst case you can enable clippy to run in the background.

19h··on PhD Simulator
I actually got the PhD so it’s not all ways leading to failure — just accept when your advisor offers you to take time off.
19h··on A site to share LLMs APIs via Tor
Unrelated to the actual site — we’ve been testing a tuned version of airoboros-64b on a H100 cluster as a drop in replacement for Claude-100k and GPT4-32k. It’s performing rather well in the generation of text but the 2k context definitely shows, also the reasoning capabilities just as in LLaMA are suboptimal.

For instance, obtaining JSON structured data from freetext is a rather impossible task.

That said, for summarization of leq 2k token texts the model performs extremely well.

This is mostly due to its unfiltered nature, where there would be clear biases visible in models like falcon-40b-instruct or other LLaMA derivatives.

19h··on Nvidia’s H100: Funny L2, and Tons of Bandwidth
I’d be careful with H100 on clouds right now — we ran Onnx & PyTorch payloads an ran into issues that haven’t been addressed yet.

For instance, onnx & PyTorch just died randomly and a few thousand dollars later we figured it was directly caused by incorrect assumptions made in the underlying implementations where the developers almost definitely did not have access to an H100 yet.

19h··on Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
„These estimates are derived from the number of directory requests counted on directory authorities and mirrors.“

Depending on how these numbers are obtained, there is a non-zero chance at least part of this increase is caused by us.. note that this number is not indicative of the amount of users or origins (i.e. physical source addresses), but only count directory requests.

19h··on How long can open-source LLMs truly promise on context length?
Try falcon-40b-instruct, that’s optimized for better interaction with instructions and performs A LOT better
19h··on Pi.ai LLM Outperforms Palm/GPT3.5
"You can talk with me anywhere." -- and yet no Telegram or Signal :-)
19h··on Pi.ai LLM Outperforms Palm/GPT3.5
falcon-40b also outperforms GPT3.5 -- is it powering Pi.ai?
19h··on Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro
Something I find hilarious is that the visionOS disk image is called “xrOS” (the name that leaked before the keynote).
19h··on Turkish citizens' personal data offered online after government site hacked
Is that old information? I’m sure I have a dump on most Turkish civilians from a few years back… it also includes data on Erdogan, his birth place and ID number.
19h··on Apollo will close down on June 30th
Can’t Apollo be open-sourced and the tokens of the original app be used?

I’d absolutely donate on a monthly basis.

19h··on HashiCorp just let go 8%
I’m confused — how is this legally binding?

In Germany, a termination is valid IFF the termination has been submitted to the employee in writing in a timely manner — that is, they need to have been able to receive it before end of month or it’ll delay the notice period by a month. The standard notice period is 3 months. (I had to do this quite a few times recently unfortunately).

Are worker rights really this bad in the US?

19h··on RGBWatermark – protect art against machine learning
If you're afraid of crawlers that will feed into AI datasets, why not just render images into canvas elements?

This kind of watermark makes images bad for everyone, not just the AI. Do you really want to see this on every website you visit?

19h··on Chatbot Arena Leaderboard
Claude+ is only called like that by Poe -- it's actually Claude v1.3 and Claude Instant v1 (as reflected on the site).
19h··on Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift
Yes, existing files are not updated.
19h··on Should we normalize ephemeral businesses?
No we should not, at least for businesses that sell physical things. It’s been bugging me a lot that many Chinese vendors bypass the EU‘s 2 year warranty laws by simply ceasing to exist.
19h··on Bun 0.6
Funny to see improvements in crypto.createHash… I was totally caught off guard yesterday noticing most of crypto has been removed in Node 20 and replaced with the exclusively-async „subtle“ WebCrypto. Quite a pain to work with when you need synchronous code.
19h··on Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
You can configure Copilot to not return code that appears verbatim in public repositories. In that case it at least won't produce code you could legitimately argue would be covered by any individuals' specific license.
19h··on Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
What a ridiculous article. Copilot does not violate antitrust law. GitHub is not a monopoly just because open source devs choose to host there. Devs are free to use GitLab or whatever.

Comparing this to Google Books is silly. Google stole copyrighted books. Copilot uses freely shared open source code. No copyright issue.

The article claims "Open source code on GitHub might be thought of as 'open and freely accessible' but it is not." Lol what? The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse. Copilot can absolutely use open source data.

This is typical hype and FUD. No evidence Copilot even used all of GitHub's data or violated any licenses. Baseless speculation.

There's no real antitrust argument here. Nothing to see, move along. yawn

19h··on 100K Context Windows
That's just wrong. We ran metric tons of questionable content before being approved for anything.
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