Tootfinder

Another one bites the dust.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Hyperscan-Now-Proprietary

I noticed a few recent cameras (Fujifilm, Panasonic) are including network connectivity, which is good. Unfortunately this capability seems to be tied to Adobe’s proprietary Frame.io service, which feels really wrong.
Unfortunately camera makers are generally bad at software.
I’m not really sure what better option, as in not locked in to one vendor, to propose.
#photography

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13116 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models
In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), Knowledge Distillation (KD) emerges as a pivotal methodology for transferring advanced capabilities from leading proprietary LLMs, such as GPT-4, to their open-source counterparts like LLaMA and Mistral. Additionally, as open-source LLMs flourish, KD plays a crucial role in both compressing these models, and facilitating their self-improvement by employing themselves as teachers. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of KD's role within the realm…

Sources: the US Commerce Department is considering a new regulatory push to restrict the export of proprietary or closed source AI models to China (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-eyes-curbs-chinas-acce…

Are podcasts still RSS feeds with MP3 attachments or have they become commercialized proprietary crap? Or both? (I don't listen to podcasts.)

Imagine if there was such a thing as a proprietary spoken language.

Explaining EDA synthesis errors with LLMs
Siyu Qiu, Benjamin Tan, Hammond Pearce
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07235 https://arxiv.org/p…

Explaining EDA synthesis errors with LLMs
Training new engineers in digital design is a challenge, particularly when it comes to teaching the complex electronic design automation (EDA) tooling used in this domain. Learners will typically deploy designs in the Verilog and VHDL hardware description languages to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) from Altera (Intel) and Xilinx (AMD) via proprietary closed-source toolchains (Quartus Prime and Vivado, respectively). These tools are complex and difficult to use -- yet, as they are the to…

This is probably the first time I've DC fast charged the car in a year. I hate proprietary apps.

ExaRanker-Open: Synthetic Explanation for IR using Open-Source LLMs
Fernando Ferraretto, Thiago Laitz, Roberto Lotufo, Rodrigo Nogueira
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06334

ExaRanker-Open: Synthetic Explanation for IR using Open-Source LLMs
ExaRanker recently introduced an approach to training information retrieval (IR) models, incorporating natural language explanations as additional labels. The method addresses the challenge of limited labeled examples, leading to improvements in the effectiveness of IR models. However, the initial results were based on proprietary language models such as GPT-3.5, which posed constraints on dataset size due to its cost and data privacy. In this paper, we introduce ExaRanker-Open, where we adapt …

Malware in proprietary software - Latest Additions
#GNU #Malware

Toward Building a Semantic Network Inventory for Model-Driven Telemetry
I. D. Mart\'inez-Casanueva, D. Gonz\'alez-Sanchez, L. Bellido, D. Fern\'andez, D. R. L\'opez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06511

Toward Building a Semantic Network Inventory for Model-Driven Telemetry
Network telemetry based on data models is expected to become the standard mechanism for collecting operational data from network devices efficiently. But the wide variety of standard and proprietary data models along with the different implementations of telemetry protocols offered by network vendors, become a barrier when monitoring heterogeneous network infrastructures. To facilitate the integration and sharing of context information related to model-driven telemetry, this work proposes a sem…

After weeks of pain and me being dumb i was finaly able to launch Sunshine with the correct VA-API settings on debian (without reccuring to proprietary drivers and AMD AMF).
As a tip to those trying to use Sunshine/Moonlight: dont forget to check your firewalls and open the necessary ports.
Meanwhile i still have some work to do on the clientside.

"Upon reflection, I’ve come to realize that the #relicensing trend towards non-compete licenses has exposed single-vendor #OpenSource software for what it truly is: #proprietary software in hiding (…

Why single vendor is the new proprietary - OpenSource.net
it’s time to reassert the value of software developed in an open collaboration. Everything else is proprietary. Everything else is a relicensing time bomb.

Among my peers, I'm the one who always praises #OpenSource software. Recently, however, I was quite surprised when someone who usually uses proprietary programs told me they have completely switched from the official :youtube: app to #NewPipe. In disbelief, I asked why – of course the built…

The language of software licencing needs an upgrade, says Percona's Peter Zatsiev
Third-way models are proliferating
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4180994/language-software-licencing-upgrade-perconas-peter-zatsiev

The language of software licencing needs an upgrade, says Percona's Peter Zatsiev
Open source software practitioners tend to see everything in black and white: it’s open source or its proprietary.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02228 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

REASONS: A benchmark for REtrieval and Automated citationS Of scieNtific Sentences using Public and Proprietary LLMs
Automatic citation generation for sentences in a document or report is paramount for intelligence analysts, cybersecurity, news agencies, and education personnel. In this research, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating references based on two forms of sentence queries: (a) Direct Queries, LLMs are asked to provide author names of the given research article, and (b) Indirect Queries, LLMs are asked to provide the title of a mentioned article when given a s…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15721 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_…

Design and Implementation of an Analysis Pipeline for Heterogeneous Data
Managing and preparing complex data for deep learning, a prevalent approach in large-scale data science can be challenging. Data transfer for model training also presents difficulties, impacting scientific fields like genomics, climate modeling, and astronomy. A large-scale solution like Google Pathways with a distributed execution environment for deep learning models exists but is proprietary. Integrating existing open-source, scalable runtime tools and data frameworks on high-performance comp…

Dune 3D: Open Source 3D Parametric Modeler From the Maker of Horizon EDA
https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-2bff5933-2b19906af6335602
Dune 3D: Open Source 3D Parametric Modeler From the Maker of Horizon EDA When coming from the world of Autodesk…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15306 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arX…

A Scintillator Beam Monitor for Real-Time FLASH Radiotherapy
FLASH Radiotherapy (RT) is a potentially new cancer radiotherapy technique where an entire therapeutic dose is delivered in about 0.1 s and at ~1000 times higher dose rate than in conventional RT. For clinical trials to be conducted safely, precise and fast beam monitoring that can generate an out-of-tolerance beam interrupt is required. A FLASH Beam Scintillator Monitor (FBSM) is being developed based in part on a novel proprietary inorganic hybrid scintillator material. The FBSM provides larg…

Periodic Reminder: TechSoup is a organisation for which I have no respect or admiration. They launder proprietary software 'donations' for their own profit & work to hook not-for-profits on discounted-but-still-expensive proprietary software they neither need nor can afford. For example: https://…

Not surprised but still amazed by replies to me that proprietary software is “insecure and low quality (because it’s driven purely by ego and profit motive)” and in comparison “open source and free software isn’t”.
Seriously have people who reply with this ever used any software (proprietary or open) whatsoever?
lol

Mechanism for Decision-aware Collaborative Federated Learning: A Pitfall of Shapley Values
Meng Qi, Mingxi Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04753 https://

Mechanism for Decision-aware Collaborative Federated Learning: A Pitfall of Shapley Values
This paper investigates mechanism design for decision-aware collaboration via federated learning (FL) platforms. Our framework consists of a digital platform and multiple decision-aware agents, each endowed with proprietary data sets. The platform offers an infrastructure that enables access to the data, creates incentives for collaborative learning aimed at operational decision-making, and conducts FL to avoid direct raw data sharing. The computation and communication efficiency of the FL proc…

It really bugs me that the main place for 'communities' is closed source or proprietary platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, Discord etc. What if I don't want (or don't have) any of those because of their dirty dealings (looking at you Reddit!)?
I feel this is the reason that people so desperately want to federate with Threads: so they can get all the mainstream content without giving away their ideals.
Where can I find good Trombone community other than the abov…

If Apple had delivered that car project, at some point everyone would be angry they use their proprietary way of mounting wheels, effectively creating a whole market of 'Apple wheels' vs 'normal car wheels' and it would take EU to make them use a 'common' standard.
Also, EU would demand Apple to make it possible to refill washer fluid on one's own rather than visiting Apple's authorized dealership. As a retaliation, Apple would make wipers inactive for E…

So we are working on the last stages of the Vivaldi 6.6 desktop release. We are up to release candidate two.
Anyway… I am asking for a little favour not as an employee but in my unofficial role as the Vivaldi flatpak maintainer. 😉
Is there anyone around with x64 Linux, right now? If so I am wondering if one of you can install this flatpak 6.6 RC2 test build and confirm that proprietary media works

Some proprietary software lobbyists are trying to spin the xz story as an "anti open source" story, and I see demands like "you shall only use opensource software if you have a contract with someone guaranteeing support and security". I'd be curious: Can I see the contract those people have with Microsoft or whatever company you never heard of that wrote the firmware in their wifi card that guarantees the same for the closed source software they're using?

The language of software licencing needs an upgrade, says Percona's Peter Zatsiev
Third-way models are proliferating
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4180994/language-software-licencing-upgrade-perconas-peter-zatsiev

The language of software licencing needs an upgrade, says Percona's Peter Zatsiev
Open source software practitioners tend to see everything in black and white: it’s open source or its proprietary.

It's completely asinine that an instance I've defederated from that doesn't use "authorized fetch" (proprietary mastodon implementation) can see my posts and interact with them as if I can see them.
I'm basically giving promotions to asshats in my replies from gross instances because blocks don't work like they should...
This is why I don't see Threads federating with these platforms for very long. Every Fedi software that doesn't adopt Authorized Fetch, will be breaking their terms. There IS a few proposals on how AP could officially implement a similar feature, but as of right now, it's the wild west here.
#Fediverse #Fedi #Mastodon #Threads #Meta #Pleroma #Akkoma #Sharkey #IceShrimp #ActivityPub #FireFish #Pixelfed

🔗 Runtime compatibility across different JavaScript runtimes: https://runtime-compat.unjs.io/
We love a good compatibility table but I also want to see the proprietary non-standard additions of each platform documented too. This is the other side of vendor lock-in.

I think it is shameful that the Biden Campaign has created an account on TikTok, a proprietary, non-domestic service, while not having an account on any of the Federated SocialWeb systems that use open-source protocols and implementations.
The rule for government or political accounts should be: **Open, non-proprietary systems first!**

"lol hey guys": Biden campaign joins TikTok to reach young voters
As of Monday afternoon, the account's first video had 5.2 million views.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02608 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

LightFAt: Mitigating Control-flow Explosion via Lightweight PMU-based Control-flow Attestation
With the continuous evolution of computational devices, more and more applications are being executed remotely. The applications operate on a wide spectrum of devices, ranging from IoT nodes with low computational capabilities to large cloud providers with high capabilities. Remote execution often deals with sensitive data or executes proprietary software. Hence, the challenge of ensuring that the code execution will not be compromised rises. Remote Attestation deals with this challenge. It ens…

Open Source Language Models Can Provide Feedback: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Help Students Using GPT-4-As-A-Judge
Charles Koutcheme, Nicola Dainese, Sami Sarsa, Arto Hellas, Juho Leinonen, Paul Denny
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05253

Open Source Language Models Can Provide Feedback: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Help Students Using GPT-4-As-A-Judge
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential for the automatic generation of feedback in a wide range of computing contexts. However, concerns have been voiced around the privacy and ethical implications of sending student work to proprietary models. This has sparked considerable interest in the use of open source LLMs in education, but the quality of the feedback that such open models can produce remains understudied. This is a concern as providing flawed or misleading generated fee…

Really hard for me to care about a private company (aka a legal entity beholden to no nation) landing on the moon as part of an effort to develop new proprietary technologies for the enrichment of a few business owners and their investors.
Particularly when we need more investment in basic services for regular people.
The "progress of humanity" remains stalled here on Earth.
#intuitivemachines

“I just wanted a charging cable, and I found myself annoyed by one brand’s protectionism and another’s self-destruction.”
Nick Heer trying to buy a charging cable.
https://pxlnv.com/blog/garmin-amazon/

One Would Think It Would Not Be Too Difficult to Find a Charging Cable With 48 Hours’ Notice
What follows is a short complaint about a couple of things I have written about occasionally over the past couple of years: proprietary chargers and Amazon’s rapid decline in trustworthiness. I am prefacing it with this disclaimer because perhaps you do not want to read a complaint today or, very likely, ever. But maybe you […]

The FTC bans noncompete clauses that restrict job switching, potentially complicating hiring in Hollywood as firms try to protect trade secrets and other info (Winston Cho/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.co…

A Ban on Noncompetes Could Raise Pay — And Complicate Contracts — In Hollywood
The FTC on Tuesday voted to prohibit noncompete provisions in contracts, which could usher in a sea change to worker mobility and how companies structure contracts to protect proprietary information.

Better late then never, Apple makes great products but it's ecosystem is too proprietary and closed. #Apple

Apple lawsuit: US accuses tech giant of monopolising smartphone market
In a landmark lawsuit, the justice department alleges the company uses its power to limit competition.

Not surprised but still amazed by replies to me that proprietary software is “insecure and low quality (because it’s driven purely by ego and profit motive)” and in comparison “open source and free software isn’t”.
Seriously have people who reply with this ever used any software (proprietary or open) whatsoever?
lol

NetHSM – A hardware security module with open hardware and open source code: «Unlike proprietary HSM products, NetHSM is the first HSM available as open source, which enables independent security audits, easy customization and avoids vendor lock-in. Only open source allows to verify the absence of back doors.»
https://www.nitr…

NetHSM - The Trustworthy, Open Hardware Security Module That Just Works

South Korea's SK Telecom partners with Perplexity to access its proprietary models and to offer Perplexity's paid version of its AI-based search engine for free (Krystal Hu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/sk-tele

SK Telecom partners with AI search startup Perplexity in Korea
SK Telecom, South Korea's largest telco, is partnering with U.S. AI startup Perplexity to offer the artificial intelligence-based search engine to its users as an alternative to Google and Naver , the companies told Reuters.

A Landscape Study of Open Source and Proprietary Tools for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)
Mehdi Mirakhorli, Derek Garcia, Schuyler Dillon, Kevin Laporte, Matthew Morrison, Henry Lu, Viktoria Koscinski, Christopher Enoch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11151

A Landscape Study of Open Source and Proprietary Tools for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)
Modern software applications heavily rely on diverse third-party components, libraries, and frameworks sourced from various vendors and open source repositories, presenting a complex challenge for securing the software supply chain. To address this complexity, the adoption of a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has emerged as a promising solution, offering a centralized repository that inventories all third-party components and dependencies used in an application. Recent supply chain breaches, …

I lurk on an NZ-based school IT manager email list. It's fascinating to watch these poor folks wrestle every day with the proprietary rubbish they've had foisted upon them - it's all they know, actually - complaining about vendor policy & pricing changes, bad support, EOL'd systems, byzantine licensing headaches, proprietary non-standards compatibility issues, and the lack of capabilities & money to afford stuff they need. They're trying their best, but the school…

Honestly, I find the decision in #Wine 9.0 to force #HidRaw by default for specific gamepads a very bad one. Apparently, it was done because these devices use "a proprietary HID protocol", and so they full functionality cannot be exposed via XInput. Well, okay. Except that there are two problems.
Firstly, using them via HidRaw requires special device permissions. In #Gentoo, this means installing games-util/game-device-udev-rules. If you don't do that, the controllers simply don't appear at all, and you don't know why. You have to look for answers. Even if you do, I have some doubts about giving extra permissions to stuff.
Secondly, it requires all software to support these gamepads explicitly. I mean, I've tried this with DualShock 4 in two games. In "Saints Row V", the gamepad work but the Y axis would be reversed for no apparent reason. In "A Plague Tale", the gamepad wouldn't be detected at all.
I prefer a gamepad that works over theoretical support for some fancy hidden features. So it's back to XInput for me:
wine reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\winebus" /v "DisableHidraw" /t REG_DWORD /d 1
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56306

Open Source Language Models Can Provide Feedback: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Help Students Using GPT-4-As-A-Judge
Charles Koutcheme, Nicola Dainese, Sami Sarsa, Arto Hellas, Juho Leinonen, Paul Denny
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05253

Open Source Language Models Can Provide Feedback: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Help Students Using GPT-4-As-A-Judge
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential for the automatic generation of feedback in a wide range of computing contexts. However, concerns have been voiced around the privacy and ethical implications of sending student work to proprietary models. This has sparked considerable interest in the use of open source LLMs in education, but the quality of the feedback that such open models can produce remains understudied. This is a concern as providing flawed or misleading generated fee…

If I download a free version of your product to look at some proprietary-format doc, and you start flooding me with advertising email, and when I hit "unsubscribe" you ask me for my email address, it’s the report-spam button for you. Every time.
In this case, it’s Lucidchart’s turn in the spambox.

In regard to Terraform, Redis, etc. I offer you:
Open Source in the streets, proprietary in the sheets.

Some proprietary software lobbyists are trying to spin the xz story as an "anti open source" story, and I see demands like "you shall only use opensource software if you have a contract with someone guaranteeing support and security". I'd be curious: Can I see the contract those people have with Microsoft or whatever company you never heard of that wrote the firmware in their wifi card that guarantees the same for the closed source software they're using?

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10769 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Assessing Opportunities of SYCL for Biological Sequence Alignment on GPU-based Systems
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology are two fields that have been exploiting GPUs for more than two decades, being CUDA the most used programming language for them. However, as CUDA is an NVIDIA proprietary language, it implies a strong portability restriction to a wide range of heterogeneous architectures, like AMD or Intel GPUs. To face this issue, the Khronos Group has recently proposed the SYCL standard, which is an open, royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer, that enables the…

Walt Mossberg Says the DOJ's Claim of an #Apple #Monopoly Is 'Laughable'
https://www.businessinsider.com/doj-apple-monopoly-claim-laughable-walt-mossberg-threads-2024-3 <<
"Mossberg, who covered tech for nearly 30 years ... the iPhone has 70% of that market in the US ... a right for competitors to use iMessage tech, which is proprietary to Apple. But since when must companies do such a thing? ...".
Incredible! 30yrs and he is blissfully unaware of Apple long-running battle with competition law.
Kids, beware the Apple Kool-aid.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16821 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_…

How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites
In this report, we introduce InternVL 1.5, an open-source multimodal large language model (MLLM) to bridge the capability gap between open-source and proprietary commercial models in multimodal understanding. We introduce three simple improvements: (1) Strong Vision Encoder: we explored a continuous learning strategy for the large-scale vision foundation model -- InternViT-6B, boosting its visual understanding capabilities, and making it can be transferred and reused in different LLMs. (2) Dyna…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16156 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qu…

Guardians of the Quantum GAN
Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (qGANs) are at the forefront of image-generating quantum machine learning models. To accommodate the growing demand for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices to train and infer quantum machine learning models, the number of third-party vendors offering quantum hardware as a service is expected to rise. This expansion introduces the risk of untrusted vendors potentially stealing proprietary information from the quantum machine learning models. To…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12651 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSI_…

Toxic Bias: Perspective API Misreads German as More Toxic
Proprietary public APIs play a crucial and growing role as research tools among social scientists. Among such APIs, Google's machine learning-based Perspective API is extensively utilized for assessing the toxicity of social media messages, providing both an important resource for researchers and automatic content moderation. However, this paper exposes an important bias in Perspective API concerning German language text. Through an in-depth examination of several datasets, we uncover intrinsic…

I lurk on an NZ-based school IT manager email list. It's fascinating to watch these poor folks wrestle every day with the proprietary rubbish they've had foisted upon them - it's all they know, actually - complaining about vendor policy & pricing changes, bad support, EOL'd systems, byzantine licensing headaches, proprietary non-standards compatibility issues, and the lack of capabilities & money to afford stuff they need. They're trying their best, but the school…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11850 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Open Continuum Robotics -- One Actuation Module to Create them All
Experiments on physical continuum robot are the gold standard for evaluations. Currently, as no commercial continuum robot platform is available, a large variety of early-stage prototypes exists. These prototypes are developed by individual research groups and are often used for a single publication. Thus, a significant amount of time is devoted to creating proprietary hardware and software hindering the development of a common platform, and shifting away scarce time and efforts from the main r…

DroneUp unveils an autonomous drone "ecosystem" for last-mile deliveries, with Walmart, 7-Eleven, and Chick-fil-A the first retailers to pilot the system (Joann Muller/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/26/walmart-7-11-chick-fil-a…

Scoop: Walmart, 7-11, Chick-fil-A pilot new drone delivery tech
DroneUp unveiled a proprietary autonomous drone delivery "ecosystem" for retailers.

Really hard for me to care about a private company (aka a legal entity beholden to no nation) landing on the moon as part of an effort to develop new proprietary technologies for the enrichment of a few business owners and their investors.
Particularly when we need more investment in basic services for regular people.
The "progress of humanity" remains stalled here on Earth.
#intuitivemachines

The more I look at the BlueSky documentation and try to make sense of their proprietary jargon, the more my head hurts.
It just doesn't make any sense to me how this is different from ActivityPub and how BlueSky doesn't control what federates.
I keep seeing people say it's decentralized, but if they can control who federates with bsky.app then is it really decentralized since that's where the vast majority would be anyways?
What the hell am I missing? Yeah, …

LightFAt: Mitigating Control-flow Explosion via Lightweight PMU-based Control-flow Attestation
Jeferson Gonzalez-Gomez, Hassan Nassar, Lars Bauer, Jorg Henkel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02608

LightFAt: Mitigating Control-flow Explosion via Lightweight PMU-based Control-flow Attestation
With the continuous evolution of computational devices, more and more applications are being executed remotely. The applications operate on a wide spectrum of devices, ranging from IoT nodes with low computational capabilities to large cloud providers with high capabilities. Remote execution often deals with sensitive data or executes proprietary software. Hence, the challenge of ensuring that the code execution will not be compromised rises. Remote Attestation deals with this challenge. It ens…

Better late then never, Apple makes great products but it's ecosystem is too proprietary and closed. #Apple

Apple lawsuit: US accuses tech giant of monopolising smartphone market
In a landmark lawsuit, the justice department alleges the company uses its power to limit competition.

The Reddit user asks if Discord is secure after learning the software Garuda Linux opted not to have a server due to concerns about the tool being proprietary, bloated, and insecure. The user seeks input on Discord's potential insecurities. https://reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1ara68e/

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01081 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

LAB: Large-Scale Alignment for ChatBots
This work introduces LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots), a novel methodology designed to overcome the scalability challenges in the instruction-tuning phase of large language model (LLM) training. Leveraging a taxonomy-guided synthetic data generation process and a multi-phase tuning framework, LAB significantly reduces reliance on expensive human annotations and proprietary models like GPT-4. We demonstrate that LAB-trained models can achieve competitive performance across several benchm…

Google groups in the Digest mode doesn't include the message ids of the individual messages. So, the only way to reply is to use the proprietary web interface.

Pretty impressed by nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming. Seems to be the only reasonable way how to play games like #fortnite on #linux without dealing with Epic anti-cheat nonsense. Additionally no need to install tons of proprietary stuff onto my computer. Well except Chrome.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16359 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Reference Coverage Analysis of OpenAlex compared to Web of Science and Scopus
OpenAlex is a promising open source of scholarly metadata, and competitor to the established proprietary sources, the Web of Science and Scopus. As OpenAlex provides its data freely and openly, it permits researchers to perform bibliometric studies that can be reproduced in the community without licensing barriers. However, as OpenAlex is a rapidly evolving source and the data contained within is expanding and also quickly changing, the question naturally arises as to the trustworthiness of its…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01292 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Autonomous Intelligent Systems: From Illusion of Control to Inescapable Delusion
Autonomous systems, including generative AI, have been adopted faster than previous digital innovations. Their impact on society might as well be more profound, with a radical restructuring of the economy of knowledge and dramatic consequences for social and institutional balances. Different attitudes to control these systems have emerged rooted in the classical pillars of legal systems, proprietary rights, and social responsibility. We show how an illusion of control might be guiding governmen…

Trying to get people to learn how to use the File Transfer Protocol for transferring files instead of all these baloney proprietary apps. https://pocketnow.com/if-you-think-airdrop-is-cool-wait-until-you-try-netdrop/

Funnily enough I’ve written a lot of both proprietary and free & open source software and, uhm, of course the quality was always fantastic and it had never any bugs. 😇

Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring
https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-d132a6fa-e25baa017efbcb2f
Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring Last time, we looked into using a logic analyzer to decode SPI signals of LCD displays,

Studying LLM Performance on Closed- and Open-source Data
Toufique Ahmed, Christian Bird, Premkumar Devanbu, Saikat Chakraborty
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15100

Studying LLM Performance on Closed- and Open-source Data
Large Language models (LLMs) are finding wide use in software engineering practice. These models are extremely data-hungry, and are largely trained on open-source (OSS) code distributed with permissive licenses. In terms of actual use however, a great deal of software development still occurs in the for-profit/proprietary sphere, where the code under development is not, and never has been, in the public domain; thus, many developers, do their work, and use LLMs, in settings where the models may…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15721 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_…

Radical-Cylon: A Heterogeneous Data Pipeline for Scientific Computing
Managing and preparing complex data for deep learning, a prevalent approach in large-scale data science can be challenging. Data transfer for model training also presents difficulties, impacting scientific fields like genomics, climate modeling, and astronomy. A large-scale solution like Google Pathways with a distributed execution environment for deep learning models exists but is proprietary. Integrating existing open-source, scalable runtime tools and data frameworks on high-performance comp…

Funnily enough I’ve written a lot of both proprietary and free & open source software and, uhm, of course the quality was always fantastic and it had never any bugs. 😇

Heh, listening to Mark Pesce on RNZ about people being surprised that car companies are tracking their driving info and selling it to advertisers & insurers... and they probably clicked "I ACCEPT" on the Ts&Cs when they first started the car... The farce of 'informed consent' on proprietary software is beyond absurd. Why do we (people who depend on computers) accept this? Are we that credulous and naïve? Yes, apparently so. The few who aren't are paralysed by l…

Simple Image Signal Processing using Global Context Guidance
Omar Elezabi, Marcos V. Conde, Radu Timofte
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11569 https://

Simple Image Signal Processing using Global Context Guidance
In modern smartphone cameras, the Image Signal Processor (ISP) is the core element that converts the RAW readings from the sensor into perceptually pleasant RGB images for the end users. The ISP is typically proprietary and handcrafted and consists of several blocks such as white balance, color correction, and tone mapping. Deep learning-based ISPs aim to transform RAW images into DSLR-like RGB images using deep neural networks. However, most learned ISPs are trained using patches (small region…

Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models
Seungone Kim, Juyoung Suk, Shayne Longpre, Bill Yuchen Lin, Jamin Shin, Sean Welleck, Graham Neubig, Moontae Lee, Kyungjae Lee, Minjoon Seo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01535

Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models
Proprietary LMs such as GPT-4 are often employed to assess the quality of responses from various LMs. However, concerns including transparency, controllability, and affordability strongly motivate the development of open-source LMs specialized in evaluations. On the other hand, existing open evaluator LMs exhibit critical shortcomings: 1) they issue scores that significantly diverge from those assigned by humans, and 2) they lack the flexibility to perform both direct assessment and pairwise ra…

Really sick of "because it's a commercial thing it's automatically bad".
No, things are bad because they're bad, not because of the way someone chose to distribute them.
E.g. There's tons of free software that sucks and there's tons of free software that's great; and the same is true for proprietary software.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13116 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models
This survey presents an in-depth exploration of knowledge distillation (KD) techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), spotlighting the pivotal role of KD in transferring sophisticated capabilities from proprietary giants such as GPT-4 to accessible, open-source models like LLaMA and Mistral. Amidst the evolving AI landscape, this work elucidates the critical disparities between proprietary and open-source LLMs, demonstrating how KD serves as an essential conduit for imbuing t…

Prioritized Multi-Tenant Traffic Engineering for Dynamic QoS Provisioning in Autonomous SDN-OpenFlow Edge Networks
Mohammad Sajid Shahriar, Faisal Ahmed, Genshe Chen, Khanh D. Pham, Suresh Subramaniam, Motoharu Matsuura, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Shih-Chun Lin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15975

Prioritized Multi-Tenant Traffic Engineering for Dynamic QoS Provisioning in Autonomous SDN-OpenFlow Edge Networks
This letter indicates the critical need for prioritized multi-tenant quality-of-service (QoS) management by emerging mobile edge systems, particularly for high-throughput beyond fifth-generation networks. Existing traffic engineering tools utilize complex functions baked into closed, proprietary infrastructures, largely limiting design flexibility, scalability, and adaptiveness. Hence, this study introduces a software-defined networking (SDN)-based dynamic QoS provisioning scheme that prioritiz…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02998 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

InPars-Light: Cost-Effective Unsupervised Training of Efficient Rankers
We carried out a reproducibility study of InPars, which is a method for unsupervised training of neural rankers (Bonifacio et al., 2022). As a by-product, we developed InPars-light, which is a simple-yet-effective modification of InPars. Unlike InPars, InPars-light uses 7x-100x smaller ranking models and only a freely available language model BLOOM, which -- as we found out -- produced more accurate rankers compared to a proprietary GPT-3 model. On all five English retrieval collections (used i…

Radical-Cylon: A Heterogeneous Data Pipeline for Scientific Computing
Arup Kumar Sarker, Aymen Alsaadi, Niranda Perera, Mills Staylor, Gregor von Laszewski, Matteo Turilli, Ozgur Ozan Kilic, Mikhail Titov, Andre Merzky, Shantenu Jha, Geoffrey Fox
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15721

Radical-Cylon: A Heterogeneous Data Pipeline for Scientific Computing
Managing and preparing complex data for deep learning, a prevalent approach in large-scale data science can be challenging. Data transfer for model training also presents difficulties, impacting scientific fields like genomics, climate modeling, and astronomy. A large-scale solution like Google Pathways with a distributed execution environment for deep learning models exists but is proprietary. Integrating existing open-source, scalable runtime tools and data frameworks on high-performance comp…

Really sick of "because it's a commercial thing it's automatically bad".
No, things are bad because they're bad, not because of the way someone chose to distribute them.
E.g. There's tons of free software that sucks and there's tons of free software that's great; and the same is true for proprietary software.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15878 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Decoding the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Enterprise Evaluation: An Analysis of EDR Performance in Real-World Environments
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems have emerged as a critical component of enterprise security solutions, effectively combating endpoint threats like APT attacks with extended lifecycles. In light of the growing significance of endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems, many cybersecurity providers have developed their own proprietary EDR solutions. It's crucial for users to assess the capabilities of these detection engines to make informed decisions about which products to choo…

Simple Image Signal Processing using Global Context Guidance
Omar Elezabi, Marcos V. Conde, Radu Timofte
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11569 https://

Simple Image Signal Processing using Global Context Guidance
In modern smartphone cameras, the Image Signal Processor (ISP) is the core element that converts the RAW readings from the sensor into perceptually pleasant RGB images for the end users. The ISP is typically proprietary and handcrafted and consists of several blocks such as white balance, color correction, and tone mapping. Deep learning-based ISPs aim to transform RAW images into DSLR-like RGB images using deep neural networks. However, most learned ISPs are trained using patches (small region…

OPEN TEACH: A Versatile Teleoperation System for Robotic Manipulation
Aadhithya Iyer, Zhuoran Peng, Yinlong Dai, Irmak Guzey, Siddhant Haldar, Soumith Chintala, Lerrel Pinto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07870

OPEN TEACH: A Versatile Teleoperation System for Robotic Manipulation
Open-sourced, user-friendly tools form the bedrock of scientific advancement across disciplines. The widespread adoption of data-driven learning has led to remarkable progress in multi-fingered dexterity, bimanual manipulation, and applications ranging from logistics to home robotics. However, existing data collection platforms are often proprietary, costly, or tailored to specific robotic morphologies. We present OPEN TEACH, a new teleoperation system leveraging VR headsets to immerse users in…

Fine Tuning LLM for Enterprise: Practical Guidelines and Recommendations
Mathav Raj J, Kushala VM, Harikrishna Warrier, Yogesh Gupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10779

Fine Tuning LLM for Enterprise: Practical Guidelines and Recommendations
There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intri…

Radical-Cylon: A Heterogeneous Data Pipeline for Scientific Computing
Arup Kumar Sarker, Aymen Alsaadi, Niranda Perera, Mills Staylor, Gregor von Laszewski, Matteo Turilli, Ozgur Ozan Kilic, Mikhail Titov, Andre Merzky, Shantenu Jha, Geoffrey Fox
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15721

Radical-Cylon: A Heterogeneous Data Pipeline for Scientific Computing
Managing and preparing complex data for deep learning, a prevalent approach in large-scale data science can be challenging. Data transfer for model training also presents difficulties, impacting scientific fields like genomics, climate modeling, and astronomy. A large-scale solution like Google Pathways with a distributed execution environment for deep learning models exists but is proprietary. Integrating existing open-source, scalable runtime tools and data frameworks on high-performance comp…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01081 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

LAB: Large-Scale Alignment for ChatBots
This work introduces LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots), a novel methodology designed to overcome the scalability challenges in the instruction-tuning phase of large language model (LLM) training. Leveraging a taxonomy-guided synthetic data generation process and a multi-phase tuning framework, LAB significantly reduces reliance on expensive human annotations and proprietary models like GPT-4. We demonstrate that LAB-trained models can achieve competitive performance across several benchm…

Six Levels of Privacy: A Framework for Financial Synthetic Data
Tucker Balch, Vamsi K. Potluru, Deepak Paramanand, Manuela Veloso
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14724

Six Levels of Privacy: A Framework for Financial Synthetic Data
Synthetic Data is increasingly important in financial applications. In addition to the benefits it provides, such as improved financial modeling and better testing procedures, it poses privacy risks as well. Such data may arise from client information, business information, or other proprietary sources that must be protected. Even though the process by which Synthetic Data is generated serves to obscure the original data to some degree, the extent to which privacy is preserved is hard to assess…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09539 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

Logits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information
The commercialization of large language models (LLMs) has led to the common practice of high-level API-only access to proprietary models. In this work, we show that even with a conservative assumption about the model architecture, it is possible to learn a surprisingly large amount of non-public information about an API-protected LLM from a relatively small number of API queries (e.g., costing under $1,000 for OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo). Our findings are centered on one key observation: most moder…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14972 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_…

Scaling Down to Scale Up: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Replacing OpenAI's LLM with Open Source SLMs in Production
Many companies use large language models (LLMs) offered as a service, like OpenAI's GPT-4, to create AI-enabled product experiences. Along with the benefits of ease-of-use and shortened time-to-solution, this reliance on proprietary services has downsides in model control, performance reliability, uptime predictability, and cost. At the same time, a flurry of open-source small language models (SLMs) has been made available for commercial use. However, their readiness to replace existing capabil…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09539 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

Logits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information
The commercialization of large language models (LLMs) has led to the common practice of high-level API-only access to proprietary models. In this work, we show that even with a conservative assumption about the model architecture, it is possible to learn a surprisingly large amount of non-public information about an API-protected LLM from a relatively small number of API queries (e.g., costing under $1,000 for OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo). Our findings are centered on one key observation: most moder…

OpenMedLM: Prompt engineering can out-perform fine-tuning in medical question-answering with open-source large language models
Jenish Maharjan, Anurag Garikipati, Navan Preet Singh, Leo Cyrus, Mayank Sharma, Madalina Ciobanu, Gina Barnes, Rahul Thapa, Qingqing Mao, Ritankar Das
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19371

OpenMedLM: Prompt engineering can out-perform fine-tuning in medical question-answering with open-source large language models
LLMs have become increasingly capable at accomplishing a range of specialized-tasks and can be utilized to expand equitable access to medical knowledge. Most medical LLMs have involved extensive fine-tuning, leveraging specialized medical data and significant, thus costly, amounts of computational power. Many of the top performing LLMs are proprietary and their access is limited to very few research groups. However, open-source (OS) models represent a key area of growth for medical LLMs due to …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14604 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

Describe-then-Reason: Improving Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning through Visual Comprehension Training
Open-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel in various tasks involving textual and visual inputs but still struggle with complex multimodal mathematical reasoning, lagging behind proprietary models like GPT-4V(ision) and Gemini-Pro. Although fine-tuning with intermediate steps (i.e., rationales) elicits some mathematical reasoning skills, the resulting models still fall short in visual comprehension due to inadequate visual-centric supervision, which leads to inaccurate interpret…

Hacktivism Goes Orbital: Investigating NB65's Breach of ROSCOSMOS
Rajiv Thummala, Gregory Falco
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10324 https://

Hacktivism Goes Orbital: Investigating NB65's Breach of ROSCOSMOS
In March of 2022, Network battalion 65 (NB65), a hacktivist affiliate of Anonymous, publicly asserted its successful breach of ROSCOSMOS's satellite imaging capabilities in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. NB65 disseminated a series of primary sources as substantiation, proclaiming the incapacitation of ROSCOSMOS's space-based vehicle monitoring system and doxing of related proprietary documentation. Despite the profound implications of hacktivist incursions into the space sector, the …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00838 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models
Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both NLP research and in commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the importance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, we believe it is essential for the research community…

Hacktivism Goes Orbital: Investigating NB65's Breach of ROSCOSMOS
Rajiv Thummala, Gregory Falco
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10324 https://

Hacktivism Goes Orbital: Investigating NB65's Breach of ROSCOSMOS
In March of 2022, Network battalion 65 (NB65), a hacktivist affiliate of Anonymous, publicly asserted its successful breach of ROSCOSMOS's satellite imaging capabilities in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. NB65 disseminated a series of primary sources as substantiation, proclaiming the incapacitation of ROSCOSMOS's space-based vehicle monitoring system and doxing of related proprietary documentation. Despite the profound implications of hacktivist incursions into the space sector, the …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14604 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

Describe-then-Reason: Improving Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning through Visual Comprehension Training
Open-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel in various tasks involving textual and visual inputs but still struggle with complex multimodal mathematical reasoning, lagging behind proprietary models like GPT-4V(ision) and Gemini-Pro. Although fine-tuning with intermediate steps (i.e., rationales) elicits some mathematical reasoning skills, the resulting models still fall short in visual comprehension due to inadequate visual-centric supervision, which leads to inaccurate interpret…

Enhancing Security of AI-Based Code Synthesis with GitHub Copilot via Cheap and Efficient Prompt-Engineering
Jakub Res, Ivan Homoliak, Martin Pere\v{s}\'ini, Ale\v{s} Smr\v{c}ka, Kamil Malinka, Petr Hanacek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12671

Enhancing Security of AI-Based Code Synthesis with GitHub Copilot via Cheap and Efficient Prompt-Engineering
AI assistants for coding are on the rise. However one of the reasons developers and companies avoid harnessing their full potential is the questionable security of the generated code. This paper first reviews the current state-of-the-art and identifies areas for improvement on this issue. Then, we propose a systematic approach based on prompt-altering methods to achieve better code security of (even proprietary black-box) AI-based code generators such as GitHub Copilot, while minimizing the com…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00374 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

The Philosopher's Stone: Trojaning Plugins of Large Language Models
Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained popularity because of their comparable performance to proprietary LLMs. To efficiently fulfill domain-specialized tasks, open-source LLMs can be refined, without expensive accelerators, using low-rank adapters. However, it is still unknown whether low-rank adapters can be exploited to control LLMs. To address this gap, we demonstrate that an infected adapter can induce, on specific triggers, an LLM to output content defined by an adv…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00374 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

The Philosopher's Stone: Trojaning Plugins of Large Language Models
Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained popularity because of their comparable performance to proprietary LLMs. To efficiently fulfill domain-specialized tasks, open-source LLMs can be refined, without expensive accelerators, using low-rank adapters. However, it is still unknown whether low-rank adapters can be exploited to control LLMs. To address this gap, we demonstrate that an infected adapter can induce, on specific triggers, an LLM to output content defined by an adv…