The Nightly Build.
Tuesday, July 21, 202669 min read
the-paper

LoRA shrinks a fine-tuned GPT-3 checkpoint from 350GB to 35MB

By freezing the pretrained weights and training a low-rank update to the attention projections, it matches full fine-tuning where the two were compared, and costs nothing extra at inference once the update is merged back in.

13 min read4 sources
the-build

Rank fusion beats BM25 and the dense index it fuses, on 12 of 13 BEIR datasets

Reciprocal rank fusion sums 1/(60+rank) across two rankings and needs no score normalization, but it lifts nDCG@10 only where BM25 and the dense index disagree.

11 min read9 sources
Current Affairs · Unbiased

The strongest four-day-week evidence comes from firms that volunteered for it

Boston College and Cambridge researchers measured steady revenue and healthier staff in the firms that cut to four days; whether a legislated 32-hour week would do the same where work cannot be redesigned is the question Manhattan Institute and University College Cork economists press.

11 min read19 sources
the-nightlight

Gentle sleep training cuts infant sleep problems and lifts maternal mood

The one randomized trial to measure salivary cortisol and the Strange Situation attachment test found no rise in cortisol and no loss of secure attachment after graduated extinction.

10 min read9 sources
the-position

The New Data-Center Load Could Exceed America's Entire Nuclear Fleet

By 2028 data centers could draw up to 132 gigawatts of continuous power, more than the entire U.S. nuclear fleet supplies today, forcing a choice about which firm clean source can be built fast enough to feed them.

10 min read14 sources
the-wire

Hugging Face reconstructs its breach on a self-hosted open model

By Hugging Face's account, commercial tools refused the attacker's payloads mid-breach, so it rebuilt the 17,000-event intrusion on an open model it hosted itself, a case for keeping one in the incident-response toolchain.

5 min read10 sources
the-word

Horace Walpole built 'serendipity' to require sagacity, not luck

He built it in a 1754 letter out of a fairy tale about three traveling princes, and fixed the rule himself: a discovery you set out to make does not count.

5 min read7 sources
the-world

US strikes Iran for a tenth straight night

The reported ten-day truce traces to a single unnamed Iranian official; on the record, Tehran confirms only that mediators floated "new ideas."

4 min read15 sources