Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 17, 2023

• Command Line Parsing - Are These Really Unique Strings?, (Thu, Aug 17th)

  There are occassions where data needs to cleaned prior to use. One example came to me while reviewing passwords submitted to one of my DShield honeypots. There appeared to be duplicate passwords, even when I attempted to export unique values from the command line.

• Sam Hartman: A First Exercise with AI Training

  Taking a hands-on low-level approach to learning AI has been incredibly rewarding. I wanted to create an achievable task that would motivate me to learn the tools and get practical experience training and using large language models. Just at the point when I was starting to spin up GPU instances, Llama2 was released to the public. So I elected to start with that model. As I mentioned, I’m interested in exploring how sex-positive AI can help human connection in positive ways. For that reason, I suspected that Llama2 might not produce good results without training: some of Meta’s safety goals run counter to what I’m trying to explore. I suspected that there might be more attention paid to safety in the chat variants of Llama2 rather than the text generation variants, and working against that might be challenging for a first project, so I started with Llama-2-13b as a base.

• Wouter Verhelst: Perl test suites in GitLab

  I've been maintaining a number of Perl software packages recently. There's SReview, my video review and transcoding system of which I split off Media::Convert a while back; and as of about a year ago, I've also added PtLink, an RSS aggregator (with future plans for more than just that).

  All these come with extensive test suites which can help me ensure that things continue to work properly when I play with things; and all of these are hosted on salsa.debian.org, Debian's gitlab instance. Since we're there anyway, I configured GitLab CI/CD to run a full test suite of all the software, so that I can't forget, and also so that I know sooner rather than later when things start breaking.

• Jussi Pakkanen: The least convenient way of defining an alpha value

  PDF's drawing model inherits from PostScript, which was originally designed in the early 80s. It works and is really nice but the one glaring hole it has is missing transparency support. The original PDF spec from 1993 has no transparency support either, it was added in version 1.4 that came out mere 8 years later in 2001.

• Remi Collet: PHP version 8.0.30, 8.1.22 and 8.2.9

  >

  RPMs of PHP version 8.2.9 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php82 repository for EL 7.

  RPMs of PHP version 8.1.22 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.

  RPMs of PHP version 8.0.30 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php80 repository for EL 7.

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 508

  Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!