zomia.news

15dec2023

Microsolf Phi-2 Language Model - it's an old and new way of doing language models. Instead of using a lot of random data, we can use a small subset of high quality data and use that to train the model. Just like in the "good old days" of classical machine learning.

As a result, we have a small and effective model that can be used on mobile devices.

The idea is that in the near future, this will be the main method for the creation of LMs:

  • It's easy to control the results
  • The result much more effective
  • Much more robust

11dec2023

Time diaries indicate that married fathers spent an average 6.5 hours a week caring for their children in 2000, a 153 percent increase since 1965. Married mothers spent 12.9 hours, a 21 percent increase. Single mothers spent 11.8 hours, a 57 percent increase

Do Parents Spend Enough Time With Their Children

There are two sides of modern fertility crisis:

  • economic. It's mostly connected with percentage of income that parents need to spend on their child.
  • cultural. Is that there is a gap between parents’ self-evaluations and the currently high cultural expectations for “intensive parenting.”

It looks to me that the second problem is wider, deeper and more robust


Henneguya zschokkei is notable for its lack of mitochondria, mitochondrial DNA, aerobic respiration and its reliance on an exclusively anaerobic metabolism.

H. zschokkei is a highly unusual multicellular animal that does not rely on the aerobic respiration of oxygen. The creature instead relies on an exclusively anaerobic metabolism. It lacks a mitochondrial genome and therefore mitochondria, making it one of the only known members of the eukaryotic animal kingdom to shun oxygen as the foundation of its metabolism.

29nov2023

Writing Documentation for Your House

Brilliant idea. Modern houses contain a lot that needs to be documented. Several steps to develop the idea:

  • create the uniform format for it
  • create the platform to link the documentation with a real building
  • make the docs more interactive: connect it to smart house devices, more graphical representations, interactions with utility services

E-mail providers - which one to choose?

My attempt to find an email provider that was reliable, fancy and not too geeky failed. But I haven't seen most from the list during my search. The only service that looks promising to me – Migadu

21nov2023

Nostr protocol

The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all.

Awesome list for Nostr

It looks like another attempt to create decentralised social site. More geeky one than Threads and even Mastodon, but simpler and more flexible. Must try to create transport for Zomia to Nostr as alternative to RSS.


It looks like global warmer accelerating

This autumn, it adopted the goals of the 2050 Paris Agreement on climate change: Image

In September it was +1.75 to the pre-industrial level.

15nov2023

Open-Meteo

The best way to see at how biased you are. With the service the statements such as: "It's never rained as much as today" becomes "The last time it rained as much as today was 3 years ago".