Arc Notes Weekly #38: Rockets
This week, we learn scaling to millions of users using Google Sheets, a new language model which is more efficient and as performant, and cracking ransomware with GPUs.
This week, we learn scaling to millions of users using Google Sheets, a new language model which is more efficient and as performant, and cracking ransomware with GPUs.
Enjoy this week's round-up!
— Mahdi Yusuf (@myusuf3)
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Articles
Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter language model
How Levels.fyi scaled to millions of users with Google Sheets as a backend
How we almost cracked a ransomware using CUDA
For the past two years we've been tinkering with a proof-of-concept decryptor for the Phobos family ransomware. It works, but is impractical to use for reasons we'll explain here. Consequently, we've been unable to use it to help a real-world victim so far. We've decided to publish our findings and tools, in hope that someone will find it useful, interesting or will continue our research.
Projects
GitHub - FMInference/FlexGen: Running large language models like OPT-175B/GPT-3 on a single GPU. Focusing on high-throughput generation.
Large language models on single GPUs.
GitHub - sveinbjornt/Sloth: Mac app that shows all open files, directories, sockets, pipes and devices in use by all running processes. Nice GUI for lsof.
Poste.io ~ complete mail server
Complete mail server deployment
❤️ The Favourites - this section won't make an appearance every week, will usually be something that was a particularly high point in tech that impacts us all. If you see something worthy of the favourite, tweet at @arcnotes
Reverse Engineering A Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel
I have been staying at a hotel for a while. It’s one of those modern ones with smart TVs and other connected goodies. I got curious and opened Wireshark, as any tinkerer would do.
I was very surprised to see a huge amount of UDP traffic on port 2046. I looked it up but the results were far from useful. This wasn’t a standard port, so I would have to figure it out manually.