Training an Illustrious-XL LoRA on RunPod for around $1 by doing env setup on a $0.08/hr CPU Pod and renting the 4090 only for actual training. Network Volumes attach to both pods at the same time, so there's no idle GPU billing. Four sd-scripts gotchas hit on the way included.
WAI-Illustrious SDXL v17 tested on M1 Max 64GB ComfyUI against v16 with the same seed. Hires fix now auto-corrects hands and feet, the four rating tags (general/sensitive/nsfw/explicit) still drive NSFW output, and v16-trained LoRAs mostly carry over — with one case where they don't.
TRACER, a recent arXiv paper, takes the input/output logs of an LLM classification endpoint and reuses them as training data, then swaps in a lightweight surrogate only on regions that pass a parity gate to cut inference cost. The surrogate absorbs 83–100% of traffic on a 77-class intent dataset and 100% on a 150-class one, while correctly refusing to deploy on an NLI task — that refusal behavior is the interesting part.
Japan's Digital Agency released parts of Gennai, the generative AI platform it runs for central-government staff, on GitHub under MIT / CC BY 4.0. The web app and cloud-specific AI templates for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are bundled together so local governments and private companies can redeploy the same stack.
Xiaomi launched two MiMo-V2.5 models at once. MiMo-V2.5-Pro hits SWE-bench Pro 57.2, Claw-Eval 63.8, and τ3-Bench 72.9 — frontier-tier — while MiMo-V2.5 brings native omnimodality plus a 1M context. Both are API-only for now; open weights are promised but unscheduled.
The NotebookLM clone open-notebook assumes Docker and cloud APIs by default. I installed SurrealDB natively, ran four processes in tmux, and wired everything through Ollama's qwen3.6:35b and bge-m3. I fed it the Qwen3.6 benchmark article I wrote this morning, and it answered with the correct numbers.
A dev.to post about building a Moon Patrol-style 80s game in a few days with AI for an internal AWS Summit contest. The Phaser 3 + TypeScript + Vite stack, combined with splitting into three role-specific AI skills instead of one giant prompt, turned out to be a practical workflow.
A hub for the 5-article series that organizes math symbols in AI and LLM articles for reading, not solving. Covers equations, vectors and matrices, probability and statistics, derivatives, and gradient descent with backprop, plus a reading-order guide for different backgrounds.
Gradient descent, SGD and Adam, backpropagation, vanishing/exploding gradients with residual connections, and learning rate schedules — organized around what each piece is doing at a high level. The goal is reading training logs and model card numbers, not computing anything.
A minimum set of calculus for reading AI and LLM articles — d/dx, e, the chain rule, partial derivatives, and gradients. Focus on what the symbols are doing, not on solving the formulas.
A minimum set of probability and statistics for reading AI and LLM articles — conditional probability, cross-entropy, perplexity, and temperature are the main ones; rigorous Bayes and MLE derivations stay out of scope.
A minimum set of vectors and matrices for reading AI and LLM articles — the dot product and matrix product are the main two; determinants, inverses, and eigenvalues stay out of scope.
