Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Perplexity.AI search engine alternative

What is Perplexity?

Perplexity is an alternative to traditional search engines, where you can directly pose your questions and receive concise, accurate answers backed up by a curated set of sources. It has a conversational interface, contextual awareness and personalization to learn your interests and preferences over time.

Perplexity’s mission is to make searching for information online feel like you have a knowledgeable assistant guiding you, it is a powerful productivity and knowledge tool that can help you save time and energy with mundane tasks for a multitude of use cases.
How does Perplexity accomplish this?

With the help of our advanced answer engine, it processes your questions and tasks It then uses predictive text capabilities to generate useful responses, choosing the best one from multiple sources, and summarizes the results in a concise way.





Perplexity AI is an AI chatbot-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text.[2][3] Launched in 2022, Perplexity generates answers using sources from the web and cites links within the text response.[4] Perplexity works on a freemium model; the free product uses its Perplexity model based on OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model combined with the company's standalone large language model (LLM) that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, while the paid version Perplexity Pro has access to GPT-4, Claude 3, Mistral Large, Llama 3 and an Experimental Perplexity Model.[3][4][1] As of early 2024, it has about 10 million monthly users.[5]

AI vs SW Security (cURL)

 The I in LLM stands for intelligence | daniel.haxx.se

"Having a bug bounty means that we offer real money in rewards to hackers who report security problems. The chance of money attracts a certain amount of “luck seekers”. People who basically just grep for patterns in the source code or maybe at best run some basic security scanners, and then report their findings without any further analysis in the hope that they can get a few bucks in reward money.


...When reports are made to look better and to appear to have a point, it takes a longer time for us to research and eventually discard it. Every security report has to have a human spend time to look at it and assess what it means.

...Right now, users seem keen at using the current set of LLMs, throwing some curl code at them and then passing on the output as a security vulnerability report. What makes it a little harder to detect is of course that users copy and paste and include their own language as well. The entire thing is not exactly what the AI said, but the report is nonetheless crap."

Daniel Stenberg - daniel.haxx.se

Monday, June 24, 2024

AI API deployment: NVIDIA NIM

 NVIDIA NIM Offers Optimized Inference Microservices for Deploying AI Models at Scale | NVIDIA Technical Blog


NVIDIA NIM, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise, provides a streamlined path for developing AI-powered enterprise applications and deploying AI models in production.

NIM is a set of optimized cloud-native microservices designed to shorten time-to-market and simplify deployment of generative AI models anywhere, across cloud, data center, and GPU-accelerated workstations. It expands the developer pool by abstracting away the complexities of AI model development and packaging for production ‌using industry-standard APIs.

NVIDIA NIM is designed to bridge the gap between the complex world of AI development and the operational needs of enterprise environments, enabling 10-100X more enterprise application developers to contribute to AI transformations of their companies.





Sunday, June 23, 2024

htmx 2.0

 </> htmx ~ htmx 2.0.0 has been released!

ends support for Internet Explorer and tightens up some defaults, but does not change most of the core functionality or the core API of the library.

All extensions have been moved out of the core repository to their own repo and website: https://extensions.htmx.org. They are now all versioned individually and can be developed outside of the normal (slow) htmx release cadence.
...






bigskysoftware/htmx: </> htmx - high power tools for HTML
 @GitHub

htmx allows you to access AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext

htmx is small (~14k min.gz'd), dependency-free & extendable


Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

 Amazon.com: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (with Quad-core CPU,Bluetooth 4.2,BLE,onboard Antenna,etc.) : Electronics

$21 (not a best price)

  • 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN (2.4 GHz only)c
  • Bluetooth 4.2 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
  • Small form factor, suitable for various DIY projects
  • Expansion – Unpopulated 40-pin HAT-compatible I/O header
  • Footprint-compatible with earlier members of the Raspberry Pi Zero family
  • Includes 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM


Raspberry Pi Zero is half the size of a Model A+, with twice the utility.
A tiny Raspberry Pi that’s affordable enough for any project!

AI: pgvector + RAG

The missing pieces to your AI app (pgvector + RAG in prod) - YouTube

with Suprabase 

A step-by-step guide to going from pgvector to prod using Supabase. We'll discuss best practices across the board so that you can be confident deploying your application in the real world. Learn more about pgvector: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/data...

Workshop GitHub repo: https://github.com/supabase-community... It's easy to build an AI proof-of-concept (POC), but how do you turn that into a real production-ready application? What are the best practices when implementing: - Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) - Authorization (row level security) - Embedding generation (open source models) - pgvector indexes - Similarity calculations - REST APIs - File storage


Large language model - Wikipedia (LLM)


What Is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)? | Google Cloud

RAGs operate with a few main steps to help enhance generative AI outputs: 

  • Retrieval and Pre-processing: RAGs leverage powerful search algorithms to query external data, such as web pages, knowledge bases, and databases. Once retrieved, the relevant information undergoes pre-processing, including tokenization, stemming, and removal of stop words.
  • Generation: The pre-processed retrieved information is then seamlessly incorporated into the pre-trained LLM. This integration enhances the LLM's context, providing it with a more comprehensive understanding of the topic. This augmented context enables the LLM to generate more precise, informative, and engaging responses. 

RAG operates by first retrieving relevant information from a database using a query generated by the LLM. This retrieved information is then integrated into the LLM's query input, enabling it to generate more accurate and contextually relevant text. RAG leverages vector databases, which store data in a way that facilitates efficient search and retrieval.


What is RAG? - Retrieval-Augmented Generation Explained - AWS



pgvector/pgvector: Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres @GitHub

Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres

Store your vectors with the rest of your data. Supports:

  • exact and approximate nearest neighbor search
  • single-precision, half-precision, binary, and sparse vectors
  • L2 distance, inner product, cosine distance, L1 distance, Hamming distance, and Jaccard distance
  • any language with a Postgres client

Plus ACID compliance, point-in-time recovery, JOINs, and all of the other great features of Postgres

Saturday, June 22, 2024

Perplexity.AI: Seach, Answering

Perplexity.ai

"Where knowledge begins"

Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434 - YouTube

Arvind Srinivas is CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans find answers to questions on the Internet

#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast



Perplexity.ai - Wikipedia

Perplexity AI is an AI chatbot-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text.[2][3] Launched in 2022, Perplexity generates answers using sources from the web and cites links within the text response.[4] Perplexity works on a freemium model; the free product uses Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku model combined with the company's standalone large language model (LLM) that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, while the paid version Perplexity Pro has access to GPT-4, Claude 3, Mistral Large, Llama 3 and an Experimental Perplexity Model.[3][4][1] As of early 2024, it has about 10 million monthly users.


Perplexity - Wikipedia

In information theory, perplexity is a measure of uncertainty in the value of a sample from a discrete probability distribution. The larger the perplexity, the less likely it is that an observer can guess the value which will be drawn from the distribution.


rust-free concrete: Fiberglas Rebar | Owens Corning

Concrete: A Ticking Time Bomb. Can We Fix It? - YouTube

reinforced concrete has one dark secret, RUST, which we're taking a look at in this video, alongside multiple other problems. Is there a way to use concrete in better ways?


Owens Corning PINKBAR+ 0.5-in x 20-ft Fiberglass #4 Rebar in the Rebar department at Lowes.com



Fiberglas™ Rebar | Owens Corning

Leave the rust and weight of traditional steel behind for a lighter weight, stronger, rustproof concrete reinforcement.

Designed with DOTs (Department of Transportation), engineers and contractors in mind, Fiberglas™ Rebar by Owens Corning Infrastructure Solutions is setting a new bar in concrete reinforcement.

PINKBAR® Fiberglas™ Rebar vs. Steel

Fiberglass Rebar – also known as FRP, GFRP or Composite Rebar – is a more durable, proven and successful reinforcing alternative to steel.

STRONGER

2X the tensile strength compared to steel

LIGHTER

Up to 7x lighter in concrete flatwork applications

4x lighter compared to the same size diameter

RUSTPROOF

Fiberglass rebar will never rust, enabling more durable structures

AI On Your Local Machine: LLM Embeddings

Generate LLM Embeddings On Your Local Machine - YouTube

using

Ollama: https://ollama.ai/

ollama/ollama: Get up and running with Llama 3, Mistral, Gemma, and other large language models. @GitHub

ollama run llama3

4.7 GB download, it works with 32GB RAM


NeuralNine (NeuralNine) @GitHub

NeuralNine (NeuralNine) / Repositories

Friday, June 21, 2024

JavaScript AI Chat: NLUX



The Powerful Conversational AI JavaScript Library | NLUX
✔️ AI Chat Component
✔️ React Support
✔️ Next.js Support
✔️ Hugging Face Adapter
✔️ LangChain LangServe Adapters
✔️ Custom Adapters
✔️ Assistant and User Personas
✔️ Markdown Streaming
✔️ Syntax Highlighter
✔️ Event Listeners
✔️ Conversation History
✔️ Context-Aware Conversations
✔️ Conversation Starters
✔️ Advanced Theming


AI DB: Amazon Aurora Postgres + pgvector

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports pgvector for vector storage and similarity search

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports the pgvector extension to store embeddings from machine learning (ML) models in your database and to perform efficient similarity searches. Embeddings are numerical representations (vectors) created from generative AI that capture the semantic meaning of text input into a large language model (LLM). pgvector can store and search embeddings from Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and more.



Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres

Store your vectors with the rest of your data. Supports:exact and approximate nearest neighbor search
single-precision, half-precision, binary, and sparse vectors
L2 distance, inner product, cosine distance, L1 distance, Hamming distance, and Jaccard distance
any language with a Postgres client

Plus ACID compliance, point-in-time recovery, JOINs, and all of the other great features of Postgres


AI tool: text => SQL

Vanna.AI - Personalized AI SQL Agent

"Let Vanna.AI write your SQL for you
The fastest way to get actionable insights from your database just by asking questions"


The Vanna Python package and the various frontend integrations are all open-source.
You can run Vanna on your own infrastructure.

Thursday, June 20, 2024

Ultra-Processed Content / Food for Mind

On Ultra-Processed Content - Cal Newport

Ultra-processed foods, at their most damaging extreme, are made by breaking down core stock ingredients such as corn or soy into their basic organic building blocks, then recombining these elements into hyper-palatable combinations, rich in salt, sugar, and fat, soaked with unpronounceable chemical emulsifiers and preservatives.

...analogizing food to media content. ...passive text-based media, such as books and articles, to minimally processed whole foods. Linguistic encoding was the first information-bearing media our species developed; something we’ve been working with for over 5,000 years. ...culturally adapted to this format. As with whole foods, consuming writing tends to make us feel better, and we rarely hear concerns about reading too much.

 ...social media content draws on vast databases of user-generated information — posts, reactions, videos, quips, and memes. Recommendation algorithms then sift through this monumental collection of proto-content to find new, hard to resist combinations that will appeal to users...



Cody: AI coding assistant from Sourcegraph

Cody | AI coding assistant

"The only AI coding assistant that knows your entire codebase"

Cody uses AI and deep understanding of your codebase to help you write and understand code faster





Code Search makes it easy to find code, make large-scale changes, and track insights across codebases of any scale and with any number of code hosts.


Summer solstice 2024: the longest day

Summer solstice 2024 marks the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere | Space

Summer officially begins in the Northern Hemisphere today (June 20), marking the longest day of the year.

During the summer solstice, also known as the June solstice, the sun reaches its highest and northernmost point in the sky. It marks the beginning of the summer season in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere, with the Northern Hemisphere receiving the most daylight hours of the year, and the Southern Hemisphere receiving the least.

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Nvidia: the most valuable company! (AI)

Nvidia tops Microsoft as the most valuable public company - CBS News

Nvidia on Tuesday vaulted past Microsoft to become the most valuable publicly listed company in the world, highlighting its place at the forefront of Big Tech.

Nvidia's stock price rose nearly $5, or 3.7%, to $135.77, valuing the AI chip maker at $3.33 trillion, compared with $3.31 trillion for Microsoft and $3.29 trillion for Apple, which boasted the largest market capitalization until being surpassed by Microsoft earlier this year. A year ago, Nvidia's market capitalization had just crossed the $1 trillion threshold.


Mkt cap
3.34T
P/E ratio
79.35





AI:Ilya Sutskever: new AI company: Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist, launches new AI company | TechCrunch

Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, has launched a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just one month after formally leaving OpenAI.

Sutskever, who was OpenAI’s longtime chief scientist, founded SSI with former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and ex-OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy.


Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion

 Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion - Amazon OpenSearch Service





s3 source - OpenSearch Documentation

csv codec

The csv codec parses objects in comma-separated value (CSV) format, with each row producing a Data Prepper log event. Use the following options to configure the csv codec.

OptionRequiredTypeDescription
delimiterYesIntegerThe delimiter separating columns. Default is ,.
quote_characterYesStringThe character used as a text qualifier for CSV data. Default is ".
headerNoString listThe header containing the column names used to parse CSV data.
detect_headerNoBooleanWhether the first line of the Amazon S3 object should be interpreted as a header. Default is true.

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Texas energy grid, with home batteries: Base Power

it is becoming cheaper to produce electric energy than to transfer it to consumers.

solution: improving reliability and capacity of electric power grid by using batteries next to homes. 

in this case user pays fixed price for electric power, and $2K for installing battery.


Texas energy grid challenges and solutions with Base Power’s Justin Lopas | E1960 - YouTube

by This Week in Startups - YouTube podcast




The reliable & affordable power company
Switch to Base and never worry about your power going out or your bill going up

by actual "rocket engineer" from SpaceX
Justin Lopas | LinkedIn 



Architecture: Greek Church by Frank Lloyd Wright

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation_Greek_Orthodox_Church

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, United States, was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1956, and completed in 1961. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The church is one of Wright's last works; construction was completed after his death. The design is informed by traditional Byzantine architectural forms, reinterpreted by Wright to suit the modern context.

https://franklloydwright.org/site/annunciation-greek-orthodox-church/



Wauwatosa, Wisconsin - Google Maps


More traditional, still very nice design:

St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church - Baker Ingram




AI for code: OpenDevin

 OpenDevin/OpenDevin: 🐚 OpenDevin: Code Less, Make More

a platform for autonomous software engineers, powered by AI and LLMs.

OpenDevin agents collaborate with human developers to write code, fix bugs, and ship features.





An interesting result from AgentCoder shows that having separate agents for writing code and generating tests results in better performance than letting a single agent do both tasks.

Monday, June 17, 2024

Kia EV3: $30K ?

 Kia to build $30,000 EV3 in Mexico, unlocking US EV tax credit




With expected starting prices around $30,000 to $35,000, the EV3 will be among the most affordable EVs in the US.

PlaceMost affordable EVs in Q1 2024Average selling price with discounts% off average transaction price
1Nissan LEAF$27,95619%
2Nissan Ariya$35,55631%
3Hyundai IONIQ 6$36,50622%
4Tesla Model 3$40,5477%
5Toyota bZ4X$40,64615%

AI Coding Assistant - Amazon Q Developer for VS Code

 AI Coding Assistant - Amazon Q Developer - AWS


Amazon Q Developer, now generally available, includes previews of new capabilities to reimagine developer experience | AWS News Blog


Amazon Q - Visual Studio Marketplace

Free Tier - create or log in with an AWS Builder ID (a personal profile from AWS).

Pro Tier - if your organization is on the Amazon Q Developer Pro tier, log in with single sign-on.



real estate: Redfin vs Zillow vs Trulia


Redfin vs Zillow vs Trulia: Honestly, Which Is Best?

A Zillow Zestimate or Redfin Estimate can give you a rough idea of what your house is worth, but even the best online home value estimator is typically thousands of dollars off the mark.

Some of the top home buying websites like Zillow include:

Sunday, June 16, 2024

AI: Anthropic's Claude 3: IQ 102

Anthropic's Claude 3 Hailed as Most "Human-Like" AI, Whatever That Means | BitsWithBrains

One recent approach was to administer a verbal IQ test adapted from the Norway Mensa matrix-style test to several AI systems, including Claude-3. The main finding was that Anthropic's Claude AI passed the 100 IQ threshold for the first time, scoring an estimated IQ of 102 based on getting 13 out of 35 questions correct on average across two test administrations. Previous versions of Claude and other AI systems fell below 100 IQ. GPT-4 scored 85. Using this metric, Claude-3 does represent a new leap in AI.






Anthropic PBC is a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup public-benefit company, founded in 2021. It researches and develops AI to "study their safety properties at the technological frontier" and use this research to deploy safe, reliable models for the public.[5][6][7] Anthropic has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.[8]

Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei.[9] In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion, followed by a $2 billion commitment from Google in the following month.[10][11][12]






MEI: Merit, Excellence, Intelligence (not AI, yet :)

new acronym "MEI"

Hiring based on merit, excellence, & intelligence (MEI) elicits muted response | Hacker News

Bravo: DEI Being REPLACED With MEI—‘Merit, Excellence, Intelligence’ - YouTube
the discussion mentions (very likely) incorrect observation that Elon Musk "inherited millions of dollars".

How much did Elon Musk inherit? - Quora

"Elon Musk did not inherit his wealth. He is a self-made billionaire who built his fortune through his various successful ventures, such as Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company."

"...don’t know much money Elon Musk has inherited, besides the $28,000 he and his brother used of his father’s money to start their first internet business (the equivalent of $47,500 today)."




security: Passkeys, Cross-Account Protection by Google

Google shares update on passkeys and new ways to protect accounts

In less than a year, passkeys have been used to authenticate people more than 1 billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts. Passkeys are easy to use and phishing resistant, only relying on a fingerprint, face scan or a pin making them 50% faster than passwords.



Mere days before Google proudly announced that over 400 million accounts have used passkeys, William Brown (developer behind webauthn-rs) penned Passkeys: A Shattered Dream, in which he describes how corporate greed from Apple and Google destroyed our passkey future. Juxtaposition! 🙃