Sharing and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 25, 2023

• Enjoy An Open-Source Espresso

  One of the core principles of the open-source movement is that anyone who wants to build on a piece of work, in whatever way they want, is easily able to. With source code freely available, the original project can be expanded upon, modified, updated, or simply looked at and used as inspiration. Usually we think about this in the realm of software freedom, but hardware is an important component as well. And not just electronics hardware, either. [Norm] demonstrates this espresso machine which was built on these open-source foundations.

• Spelunking Apple’s Open Source

  Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.

  This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.

• Databricks open-sources an AI it says is as good as ChatGPT, but much easier to train

  Instead of creating its own model from scratch or using LLaMA, Databricks took a much older and open-source LLM called GPT-J, which was created by EleutherAI several years earlier. GTP-J was the foundation on which Dolly was built. The model, Databricks said, “has not made a huge splash, presumably because it does not exhibit magical instruction-following capabilities.”

• Databricks pushes open-source chatbot as cheaper ChatGPT alternative

  Databricks wants enterprises to train their own AI models using its software. Ghodsi said the company's researchers had taken a two-year-old model that was freely available and trained it with a small amount of data for three hours on single computer that anyone with a credit card could rent.

• A steamy dream about a PL/pgSQL blog engine

  If you’ll stop interrupting me, I had a dream last night where I implemented a blog engine in PL/pgSQL, broadly the Postgres equivalent to PL/SQL. I wrote posts in pgAdmin on my desktop, and the stored procedures wrote out static HTML based on the posts in the database. Other queries were passed down from nginx to generate archive pages as needed.