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Building a GPT-like Model from Scratch with Detailed Theory and Code Implementation

Reading time14 min
Views34K

Unlock the power of Transformer Neural Networks and learn how to build your own GPT-like model from scratch. In this in-depth guide, we will delve into the theory and provide a step-by-step code implementation to help you create your own miniGPT model. The final code is only 400 lines and works on both CPUs as well as on the GPUs. If you want to jump straight to the implementation here is the GitHub repo.

Transformers are revolutionizing the world of artificial intelligence. This simple, but very powerful neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, has quickly become the go-to choice for natural language processing, generative AI, and more. With the help of transformers, we've seen the creation of cutting-edge AI products like BERT, GPT-x, DALL-E, and AlphaFold, which are changing the way we interact with language and solve complex problems like protein folding. And the exciting possibilities don't stop there - transformers are also making waves in the field of computer vision with the advent of Vision Transformers.

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Total votes 25: ↑25 and ↓0+25
Comments1

Turning a typewriter into a Linux terminal

Reading time3 min
Views9.3K

Hi everyone, a few months ago I got a Brother AX-25, and since then, I've been working on turning it into a computer. It uses an Arduino to scan the custom mechanical keyboard and control the typewriter, and a Raspberry Pi is connected to the Arduino over serial so I can log into it in headless mode.

See how it works
Total votes 10: ↑10 and ↓0+10
Comments5

Building an Arduino based RFID Emulator

Reading time7 min
Views13K

This project is aimed at creating an experimental device for emulating RFID labels of three widely available components. I simplified the explanation of the process so that it could be easily replicated. I also developed some helpful ideas along the way, including writing a special program for converting a serial number into the transmitted data, which will definitely prove useful.
Total votes 21: ↑20 and ↓1+19
Comments0

Multiple violations of policies in RMS open letter

Reading time7 min
Views3.8K

Author: Chris Punches (@cmpunches, Silo group). License: "Please feel free to share unmodified".

The following text is an unmodified copy of now removed issue #2250 on rms-open-letter.github.io repository. The text claims multiple violations of different policies, codes of conduct and other documents in creation, content and support of the "Open letter to remove Richard M. Stallman from all leadership positions". The issue has not been addressed.

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Total votes 24: ↑20 and ↓4+16
Comments3

10(+) years in the Labs

Reading time4 min
Views1.2K

At the beginning of the year 2021, Qrator Labs is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. On January 19 our company marks the official passing of a formal 10 years longevity mark, entering its second decade of existence. 

Everything started a little bit earlier - when at the age of 10 Alex saw the Robotron K 1820 - in 2008, when Alexander Lyamin - the founder and CEO of Qrator Labs, approached the Moscow State University superiors, where he worked as a NOC engineer at the time, with an idea of a DDoS-attack mitigation research project. The MSU's network was one of the largest in the country and, as we know now, it was the best place to hatch a future technology.

That time MSU administration agreed, and Mr Lyamin took his own hardware to the university, simultaneously gathering a team. In two years, by summer 2010, the project turned out to be that successful. It courted the DDoS attack of a bandwidth exceeding the MSU's upstream bandwidth capability. And on June 22 MSU superiors gave Mr Lyamin a choice - to shut down or find money to incorporate.

Alexander Lyamin chose to incorporate with his own means, which effectively meant that the needed infrastructure must be built from scratch. The initial design should be distributed instead of concentrated within one network, which resources were not enough for this specific task. And by September 1, 2010, those first server sites were ready and running.

Flashback with us
Total votes 28: ↑28 and ↓0+28
Comments1

Robotic Floor Washer

Reading time16 min
Views1.8K

When we think about robots, the first thing that comes to mind are robotic vacuum cleaners. The reason is simple: they are the most "solid" demonstration of success of "consumer" robotics. So making one sounds like a good idea... at first.

But isn't it a bit counter productive - to build something that popular, something we can buy in a store at a commodity (small) price? Should we build something similar, but NOT a vacuum cleaner? Something like... a floor washer, perhaps? Yes, a robotic floor washer.

In this tutorial I am going to build a fully working prototype of a robotic floor washer. By "fully working" I mean that it is going to wash floor, instead of moving dirt around like most robotic "moppers" do. While by "prototype" I mean it is going to be the first step towards production-ready unit, but not a production-ready unit yet. Let me explain.

First of all, it is not going to be THAT solid. You can grab a robotic vacuum cleaner that you got from the store by any part, including wheels and bumper and lift it. It will not fall apart. Ours probably will. The reason is, to make a device "mechanically solid" is a separate task, and if we focus on it, then "robotic" tasks will become more difficult to achieve. So we are going to do what engineers usually do: first they build C3PO without the outside body, wires everywhere and so on. And only then they put a gold-covered outfit on it.

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Total votes 12: ↑12 and ↓0+12
Comments11

Russian AI Cup 2020 — a new strategy game for developers

Reading time5 min
Views2.4K


This year, many processes transformed, with traditions and habits being modified. The rhythm of life has changed, and there's more uncertainty and strain. But IT person's soul wants diversity, and many developers have asked us if annual Russian AI Cup will be held this year. Is there going to be an announcement? What is the main theme of the upcoming championship? Should I take a vacation?

Though some changes are expected, it will be held in keeping with the best traditions. In the run-up, we will announce one of today's largest online AI programming championships — Russian AI Cup. We invite you to make history!
Total votes 15: ↑15 and ↓0+15
Comments0

Linux Switchdev the Mellanox way

Reading time7 min
Views2.7K
This is a transcription of a talk that was presented at CSNOG 2020 — video is at the end of the page



Greetings! My name is Alexander Zubkov. I work at Qrator Labs, where we protect our customers against DDoS attacks and provide BGP analytics.

We started using Mellanox switches around 2 or 3 years ago. At the time we got acquainted with Switchdev in Linux and today I want to share with you our experience.
Total votes 18: ↑18 and ↓0+18
Comments0

Toxic Comments Detection in Russian

Reading time17 min
Views7.5K

Currently, social network sites tend to be one of the major communication platforms in both offline and online space. Freedom of expression of various points of view, including toxic, aggressive, and abusive comments, might have a long-term negative impact on people’s opinions and social cohesion. As a consequence, the ability to automatically identify and moderate toxic content on the Internet to eliminate the negative consequences is one of the necessary tasks for modern society. This paper aims at the automatic detection of toxic comments in the Russian language. As a source of data, we utilized anonymously published Kaggle dataset and additionally validated its annotation quality. To build a classification model, we performed fine-tuning of two versions of Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and ruBERT. Finetuned ruBERT achieved F1 = 92.20%, demonstrating the best classification score. We made trained models and code samples publicly available to the research community.
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Total votes 18: ↑17 and ↓1+16
Comments0

Common misconceptions about space-grade integrated circuits

Reading time27 min
Views21K

Space exploration was always fascinating, and recent developments have reignited the interest to the heights never seen since the last man stood on the Moon. People argue about Mars exploration and features of spaceships as their grandparents would’ve done if the internet existed fifty years ago. I’m an electronics engineer working in the aerospace industry, so I know a thing or two about the technical background of this stuff — and I see that these things aren’t common knowledge, and people often have significantly skewed ideas about the reasons behind many things and decisions. Namely, I’d love to speak of some misconceptions about radiation hardened integrated circuits and the means of protection from radiation-induced damage.

So, let's start our journey
Total votes 15: ↑15 and ↓0+15
Comments35

IIoT platform databases – How Mail.ru Cloud Solutions deals with petabytes of data coming from a multitude of devices

Reading time11 min
Views1.7K


Hello, my name is Andrey Sergeyev and I work as a Head of IoT Solution Development at Mail.ru Cloud Solutions. We all know there is no such thing as a universal database. Especially when the task is to build an IoT platform that would be capable of processing millions of events from various sensors in near real-time.

Our product Mail.ru IoT Platform started as a Tarantool-based prototype. I’m going to tell you about our journey, the problems we faced and the solutions we found. I will also show you a current architecture for the modern Industrial Internet of Things platform. In this article we will look into:

  • our requirements for the database, universal solutions, and the CAP theorem
  • whether the database + application server in one approach is a silver bullet
  • the evolution of the platform and the databases used in it
  • the number of Tarantools we use and how we came to this
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Total votes 19: ↑19 and ↓0+19
Comments0

Turns out internet businesses are sustainable during pandemics. Why? Home Office DNA

Reading time5 min
Views1.5K
“In 1665, Cambridge University closed because of the plague. Issac Newton decided to work from home. He discovered calculus & the laws of motion.”

We live in a truly remarkable moment. With the year 2020 and the COVID-19 outbreak employees all over the world are staying home for quarantine, trying their best to sustain the normal flow of life, which means continue working. And this is something new compared to all the previous infectious pandemics humanity has survived through — this time we have the Internet.

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Total votes 21: ↑20 and ↓1+19
Comments0

Self-Development: How I Couldn't Wear Two Hats and Found Third One

Reading time18 min
Views2.5K


Hi all! I lead antispam team and several machine learning teams at Mail.ru Group. The subject of this article is self-development for team leads/managers. But in reality many techniques and recipes do not depend on the role at all. This really concerns me because machine learning is developing extremely fast, and it takes a lot of time to stay up to date. So the question about what should be done for development and how is quite topical.

Of course, the content of this article is not the ultimate truth but just a description of the results of my continuing quest. It tells about approaches based on books and workshops, trials and errors, which have worked for me. It'll be good to have a discussion with you in comments.
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Total votes 26: ↑26 and ↓0+26
Comments0

Inside ITMO University: The robotics lab

Reading time4 min
Views1.7K
The Department of Computer Science and Control Systems at ITMO University houses a robotics lab. In this article we’ll take a look at the projects its staff is working on, and show you the machinery on site: industrial manipulator robots, robotic hands and dynamic positioning system testing equipment.

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Total votes 13: ↑13 and ↓0+13
Comments0

Hypercube. How we gave developers test devices without losing any

Reading time11 min
Views4.9K
You can’t properly test and debug mobile apps without test devices, which there should be plenty of considering how the same code may behave differently on different models. So how do we keep track of these devices? How do we quickly provide developers and testers with the smartphones they need, configured the way they need, and without much red tape?

I’m Alexey Lavrenuke. Over the years, I’ve worn many hats: one of the authors behind Yandex.Tank, a speaker on load testing, and the guy who calculated energy consumption by mobile phones. Now I’m a Yandex.Rover developer on the self-driving car team.

After the phones and before Yandex.Rover, there was Hypercube.

A few years ago, the head of mobile development popped in to the load testing department and mentioned a problem they were having with test devices: phones had a tendency to inexplicably migrate from one desk to another. Picking the right device and then finding it had become a challenge. We already experienced working with mobile devices from building a digital ammeter to calculate energy consumption, so we decided to help our coworkers out and quickly rig up a handy contraption. We figured the whole thing wouldn’t take more than three months. Oh how wrong we were. Let me tell you what we were really in for.


''Dallas cube''
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Total votes 13: ↑12 and ↓1+11
Comments2

Making a demo for NES — HEOHdemo

Reading time26 min
Views5.3K
There is a lengthy history of computer arts festivals, also known as demo parties, held in Russia over the last quarter century. For decades, once in a while people from all over the country gather together to compete in their ingenuity at getting what was once deemed impossible out of the old or new computer hardware and mere bytes of code. A few leading annual events has been established in the early years. One of them, creatively named CAFe (an acronym for Computer Art FEstival), was held in Kazan from 1999 to 2003. It went under the radar since, making the way for the everlasting Chaos Constructions (1999 — now) and DiHalt (2005 — now). After so long hiatus, the last year CAFe made a loud comeback, returning in full glory — at least by the number of prods released, if not in the scale of the event itself. Presentation of the compo entries went far into the night, with the last demos being shown at 6 AM to the popping eyes of the few hardy ones. There was my demo, too, and this is the story of its making.

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Total votes 13: ↑12 and ↓1+11
Comments0

Full disclosure: 0day vulnerability (backdoor) in firmware for Xiaongmai-based DVRs, NVRs and IP cameras

Reading time6 min
Views92K

This is a full disclosure of recent backdoor integrated into DVR/NVR devices built on top of HiSilicon SoC with Xiaongmai firmware. Described vulnerability allows attacker to gain root shell access and full control of device. Full disclosure format for this report has been chosen due to lack of trust to vendor. Proof of concept code is presented below.
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Total votes 19: ↑18 and ↓1+17
Comments15

Weekend Picks: light reading for STEM majors

Reading time4 min
Views1.3K
The weekend is upon us, and so is the paralysis that comes with having nothing to do. Fear not, our editorial team picked 9 books on science and tech worth picking up on a cold winter day. You’ll learn about the history of space exploration, join a physicist on a surprisingly science-appropriate hike, and more.

Total votes 14: ↑14 and ↓0+14
Comments0
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