Category Archives: Technology

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

Apple M1

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It’s been in the rumor mill for some time but finally in November 2020 Apple made the official announcement – Apple Introduced the M1 processor and the very first batch of hardware based on it.

Not exactly sure what all the advantages of the new chip is, but I do feel it is here to stay. And with that I went ahead and got myself a laptop running the new M1 processor. It’s a MacBook Air with 16 Gb of memory and 500 Gb of flash storage. My initial plan is to avoid the Rosetta Translation Environment – as long as I can. I am running into a few issues and am trying to find workarounds. We’ll see how far I get.

– manzoor

Cloud Storage – Amazon S3 vs Google Cloud Storage

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I find myself at an interesting crossroad – for the first time I am considering Web Services from someone other than Amazon AWS. To be fair, I do find myself at this position because for the first time I am the one making these technological choices as opposed to being handed choices that were already made.

I have always wanted to try other services and this is the perfect situation.

I am choosing to deploy my react app on GCP with Firebase and will try to use both S3 and Google Cloud Storage to be able to compare.

– manzoor

  • Four critical differences between Google Cloud Storage AND Amazon S3 APIS
  • Google Cloud Storage vs. Amazon S3

    • Deploy React – on AWS

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    Deploy on to AWS EC2 running nginx

    1. ssh into the EC2 instance
    2. if npm is NOT installed, execute sudo apt install npm -y
    3. cd into <dev> dir
    4. git clone the repo
    5. cd into the repo
    6. execute npm install
    7. execute npm run build
    8. cp -R dist/* /var/www/<host>/html
    9. might have to re-launch nginx

    – manzoor

    React Hello World

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    Create the App

    1. cd into a new / clean dir
    2. execute – npx create-react-app <app_name>
    3. a new sub-dir with this app_name will be created
    4. cd into the new sub-dir with the new app_name
    5. execute npm start – this will eventually list a local URL Open a browser to this to verify the new app is running
    6. Edit the App.js file in src dir and clear most of the content and simply replace it with “Hello World”. The app should now show “Hello World” text.

    Customize the App

    1. stop the app (at least for the next step)
    2. Add bootstrap (for CSS styling)
      • execute npm install bootstrap
    3. at this point can re-launch the app by executing npm run dev

    – manzoor

    Deploy on to AWS

    Deploy on to Heroku