Category Archives: My Thoughts

Top Level Domain(s)

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I recently saw, more like noticed, the .so TLD on an email I got. First, this was a marketing email and I almost immediately was going to delete. But it just so happened that it was from this service I recently signed up for and have been evaluating. So I decided against deleting it right away and that is when I noticed the TLD.

I almost immediately checked to see if the service was using the same TLD for their website — it is not. it is a .com like any, most, other sites I interact with. Yes, there are a few .ai TLD that I have been dealing with more recently.

But going back to the .so TLD — why was I “bothered” by this. I have to assume that I am “bothered” because I can’t define feeling to it.

– manzoor

Large Language Models

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ChatGPT became publicly available in late 2022 and ever since there seems to have been a race in this AI domain. I have not really been really into the whole thing but am getting really interested.

A very high level timeline (will need to update / correct at some point)

2017 – some scientists at Google publish a paper, “Attention is all you need” proposing a new model called Transformer

2018 – GPT-1 with 117M Parameters

2019 – GPT-2 with 1.5B

2020 – GPT-3 175B

2022 – we have RLHF, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, and ChatGPT

2023 – GPT-4 1T

2024 – GPT-4o

– manzoor

How to become a ‘supercommunicator’

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Not that I personally am aspiring to become a “super communicator”, I can’t help wanting to better in this area. It is something I have wanted for a long time, if not always.

But my own desires aside, it is an interesting topic. Why are some individuals better at this than others? There probably is something about it that cannot be replicated / learned but maybe there is some aspects that can be. Also, what is it to be a super communicator?

A while back one of my managers, or maybe it was my CS Network Professor, told me that most communications fail because no one actually pays attention to what was said and what was heard.

– manzoor

wbur

Having Children

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Heard on the Radio on my morning drive (Monday Sept 16th, ’24) to work this program that was talking about couples, with more emphasis on women, deciding to have fewer children. Specifically their own biological children. This of course was / is interesting enough of a toipc for more details but the host hinted at how this was being played by the various political sides and also the implication a possible shrinking population, i.e., workforce, has on the Social Security payout.

But before going into all that the host, Meghna Chakrabarti, started the two day program by speaking with Catherine Ruth Pakaluk – author of “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth”.

I only got to the beging of the interview when I got to work and had decided that I would look up the episode and listen to it in it’s totality. While I have bookmarked the episode, I have yet to heave listen to it fully 😦 But I do plan to. Soon.

– manzoor

Birth Rates are Down – On Point