PicoBlog

Welcome to It’s A Shanda, one Northeastern Jew’s quest to find a decent bagel in Seattle (and beyond). If you’re interested in taking this journey with me, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a review. If you want to ensure I review any specific bagels (or want to let me know why I’m wrong), you can email me at seanmatthewkeeley@gmail.com. “Before I began this newsletter, I already knew how it was going to end.

In May 2023, The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) of Abu-Dhabi released two pre-trained LLMs: Falcon-7B and Falcon-40B, and their chat versions. These two models demonstrated very good performance and were ranked first on the OpenLLM leaderboard. A third model released by TII just joined the Falcon family: Falcon 180B, a 180 billion parameter model. It has 2.5 more parameters than Llama 2 70B and 4.5 more than Falcon-40B. Here are some facts about Falcon 180B (source: Falcon 180B model card):

Your weekly guide to children's books, raising readers, and how to build a culture of reading in your home. By Sarah Miller · Over 4,000 subscribersI'd like to read it first“Every week Sarah curates a thoughtful collection of children's pictures books. I love her recommendations but I love her thoughtful, beautifully-written commentary even more.” “Sarah's newsletter is an interesting, engaging, and thoughtful ode to the magic of reading and her children's book recommendations are amazing.

Welcome to our weekend conversation! I’d like to talk about Submittable. What’s the dealie, friends? In my most recent interview with Whitney Koo, Editor of Gasher, I joked that editors sometimes describe Submittable as the lit mag mafia. (I want to give props here to Whitney, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that submissions to her magazine always remain free.) The truth is, I actually don’t know very much about the mechanics of Submittable.

In this piece, I will highlight the current landscape for viral organic content, map the key players and describes the financial side of meme creation. The slides pose a series of questions around the future of monetization on the Internet. These issues lead to a description of the dark reality for creators, meme maker success strategies based on building network effects, and ways to protect creatives who are under pressure from the content churn required by big social media platforms.

One thing about me: I’m cheap. There’s a term used in many industries to refer to certain consumers: “price-sensitive.” Typically, these consumers don’t buy anything full price (guilty), they’ll search high and low for the best price on literally anything from salad to surgery (check), and—and this is perhaps the most important trait—they’ll compromise on things like the look and feel of something in order to save a few bucks (not a chance).

Virginia Which we are recording in the same room! Corinne It’s really weird. I’m really used to looking at my computer screen to see you. Virginia I’m not in there.  Corinne It’s confusing. Virginia To paint the picture for everyone: I came to New Mexico. It’s my kids’ spring break from school. They’re on a trip with their dad. So I came to New Mexico so we could have the first official Burnt Toast offsite work retreat.

Last night I had dinner in Budapest with a Jewish academic visiting from the United States. I heard the familiar remark by Americans who come to Hungary — his version was, “I texted my wife to tell her that I couldn’t get over how normal it is here” (this, because he had assumed from all the negative media that it would be a semi-fascist hell… ncG1vNJzZmiqn5mxs7HHnqlnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wr8Cnmp6knJ67qHnAZqeemZOauqK3xKtkqJ5dqbWmecGrpqSdng%3D%3D

We open on a throwaway prop that Trek fans everywhere will come to know and giggle about, but for now we know nothing about this nor these two mysterious aliens who reek of time travel. Prologue aside, our first mission is to peer pressure a weary Captain Picard into going on vacation. Fortunately, the crew are up to the task, and Riker pushes him towards the pleasure planet, Risa. Riker has one additional prank to pull as he asks Picard to bring him back a horga’hn, with hilarious consequences a few scenes later.