Saturday, 3rd February 2024
The Engineering behind Figma’s Vector Networks (via) Fascinating post by Alex Harri (in 2019) describing FIgma’s unique approach to providing an alternative to the classic Bézier curve pen tool. It includes a really clear explanation of Bézier curves, then dives into the alternative, recent field of vector networks which support lines and curves between any two points rather than enforcing a single path.
Introducing Nomic Embed: A Truly Open Embedding Model. A new text embedding model from Nomic AI which supports 8192 length sequences, claims better scores than many other models (including OpenAI’s new text-embedding-3-small) and is available as both a hosted API and a run-yourself model. The model is Apache 2 licensed and Nomic have released the full set of training data and code.
From the accompanying paper: “Full training of nomic-embed-text-v1 can be conducted in a single week on one 8xH100 node.”