September 2022
81 posts: 9 entries, 28 links, 9 quotes, 35 beats
Sept. 20, 2022
I Resurrected “Ugly Sonic” with Stable Diffusion Textual Inversion (via) “I trained an Ugly Sonic object concept on 5 image crops from the movie trailer, with 6,000 steps [...] (on a T4 GPU, this took about 1.5 hours and cost about $0.21 on a GCP Spot instance)”
Wasmtime Reaches 1.0: Fast, Safe and Production Ready! The Bytecode Alliance are making some confident promises in this post about the performance and stability of their Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime. They also highlight some exciting use-cases for WebAssembly on the server, including safe 3rd party plugin execution and User Defined Functions running inside databases.
Fastly Compute@Edge JS Runtime (via) Fastly’s JavaScript runtime, designed to run at the edge of their CDN, uses the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine compiled to WebAssembly.
Sept. 21, 2022
Introducing LiteFS (via) LiteFS is the new SQLite replication solution from Fly, now ready for beta testing. It’s from the same author as Litestream but has a very different architecture; LiteFS works by implementing a custom FUSE filesystem which spies on SQLite transactions being written to the journal file and forwards them on to other nodes in the cluster, providing full read-replication. The signature Litestream feature of streaming a backup to S3 should be coming within the next few months.
Sept. 24, 2022
Running training jobs across multiple nodes scales really well. A common assumption is that scale inevitably means slowdowns: more GPUs means more synchronization overhead, especially with multiple nodes communicating across a network. But we observed that the performance penalty isn’t as harsh as what you might think. Instead, we found near-linear strong scaling: fixing the global batch size and training on more GPUs led to proportional increases in training throughput. On a 1.3B parameter model, 4 nodes means a 3.9x gain over one node. On 16 nodes, it’s 14.4x. This is largely thanks to the super fast interconnects that major cloud providers have built in: @awscloud EC2 P4d instances provide 400 Gbps networking bandwidth, @Azure provides 1600 Gbps, and @OraclePaaS provides 800 Gbps.
Sept. 25, 2022
Sept. 26, 2022
Sept. 28, 2022
Sept. 29, 2022
Exploring 10m scraped Shutterstock videos used to train Meta’s Make-A-Video text-to-video model
Make-A-Video is a new “state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text” from Meta AI. It looks incredible—it really is DALL-E / Stable Diffusion for video. And it appears to have been trained on 10m video preview clips scraped from Shutterstock.
[... 923 words]Sept. 30, 2022
A tool to run caption extraction against online videos using Whisper and GitHub Issues/Actions
I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online videos.
[... 1,362 words]nat/natbot (via) Extremely devious hack by Nat Friedman: opens a browser using Playwright and then passes a DOM representation to GPT-3 in order to power a chat-style interface for driving the browser. Worth diving into the code to look at the prompt it uses, it’s fascinating.
Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations
This week I finally started sending out invitations for people to try out the preview of the new Datasette Cloud, my SaaS offering for Datasette.
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