Rami's Readings #87 - MobileLLM

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #87 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering AI, technology, business, culture, fashion, travel, and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.

🤖 AI Reads

Facebook Research: MobileLLM

Notes: Read the paper. Meta shows that architecture matters for SLM. Many papers have already demonstrated this, nice to see additional evidence. #Edge-AI

Apple ML Research: On Device Llama 3.1 with Core ML

Notes: Keeping an eye on how far Apple gets with on device AI (#Edge-AI) and Core ML. This blog post is great and demonstrates MLX’s progress.

AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation

Notes: Cool idea from a multitude of researchers. Mila is present! 🇨🇦

Notes: Try to keep an eye on Google’s papers. This one is interesting for the research, and not the immediate application.

💼 Business Reads

The Epicenter of China’s Gold Craze Is a Former Fishing Village

Notes: Gold remains an inflation hedge in many countries around the world. It’s not the best hedge, but is commonly accessible and understood. This makes gold a useful investment holding in any portfolio.

LVMH’s Empty Chinese Megastore Signals Deepening Luxury Crash

Notes: Is gold replacing luxury goods? (See above)

Intel’s Future Laptops Will Have Memory Sticks Again

Notes: I don’t even know where to start with Intel anymore… Today I added more RAM to my Intel PC, only to find out that I can no longer overclock it with Intel XMP because of instability / lack of support for 4 DDR5 sticks. To be fair, I can more about size than speed so it wasn’t a huge deal, but nothing in this ecosystem makes any sense anymore. At least integrated memory would have simplified trying to guess which RAM at what overclock setting is compatible with what CPU and Motherboard combo.

Fantastical Now Available for Windows

Notes: A pleasant surprise to see Fantastical add Windows support. Any fans? I am not pleased with either Apple, Outlook or Google Calendars. I run my life by calendar - infamous among my friends for sending calendar invites for everything. We should all care about our productivity tools.

Notion is Making a Customizable Email App

Notes: Exciting!

Open Source Alternatives to Just About Everything

Notes: Great post on Reddit showing the strength of the open source software community. For just about every commercial software, there is an open source alternative.

🔀 Other Reads

Porsche x La Marzocco

Notes: My friends knew to send this to me right away. This espresso machine combines two of my favorite hobbies: coffee and cars.

New Indian Single Malt Whiskies Hold Their Own Against Scotch

Notes: I tried Rampur at a party recently. It was pretty good! It doesn’t replace Japanese whiskey for me, but I will be paying more attention now. Perhaps you should too if you drink whiskey.

Signing off from Redmond.