Echo Digest: Linus Torvalds' timeless advice

Iron News

Russia

GK "Element" launched a new production line in Voronezh for the assembly of microcircuits in metal-polymer cases with a capacity of up to 10 million units per year, using a preferential loan from the FRP.

The Russian government plans to extend and expand tax incentives for the microelectronics industry for three years, including equipment and materials manufacturers.

Russian scientists have created a 50-qubit ion quantum computer.

Russian IT companies are creating joint ventures with Indian partners to produce tablets based on the Alt OS, as well as laptops and servers on Elbrus processors in India.

Russian company Aquarius plans to increase the production of computer equipment to 2.5 million units per year by the end of 2025, focusing on government customers and large companies with state participation.

Mikron developed the first domestic UHF chip for RFID tags with a reading range of up to 14 meters.

The Zelenograd Nanotechnology Center continues to develop the first domestic lithograph with the planned completion of work on a version with topological norms of 130 nm by 2026.

Is modern chip design possible without the use of purchased IP blocks - the view of the director of the Baikal Electronics design center.

MCST, the developer of Elbrus processors, has become a partner of Open Mobile Platform, the creator of the Aurora OS, with the aim of developing fully domestic solutions for a secure mobile infrastructure, combining the capabilities of Elbrus processors and the Aurora OS software environment.

The most uncomfortable questions for Elbrus developers:

World

Meta* introduced advanced AR glasses Orion* with an innovative MicroLED display, wide field of view, and AI control, aimed at future mass production.

Intel demonstrated working samples of Clearwater Forest server processors, manufactured using the 18-angstrom process (Intel 18A), confirming the company's readiness for a quick transition to this advanced technology in mass production.

Intel has completely lost its market share of discrete graphics processors, while NVIDIA and AMD have increased their shipments.

Qualcomm recently approached Intel with a proposal for a possible acquisition of the company.

Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games, sparking speculation about the development of new hardware based on this architecture.

Nvidia is preparing to release the RTX 5090 graphics card with 32 GB of GDDR7 memory and increased power consumption of 600 W.

Qualcomm, a smartphone chip manufacturer, announced the layoff of 226 employees in San Diego as part of business optimization.

The ten most promising semiconductor startups of 2024.

A humanoid robot Nadia, remotely controlled by a human for boxing training using a motion capture system in virtual reality, has been demonstrated.

AnySkin is a tactile sensor for robots that is easy to install and replace.

AI News

Russia

Russian startup Metamentor, developing corporate solutions based on generative AI, has raised 40 million rubles in investments from four business angels, valuing the company at 100 million rubles.

Fully autonomous trucks have been launched along the entire M-11 "Neva" highway, which is part of the "Autonomous Logistics Corridors" project and an important step in the development of autonomous freight transport in Russia.

World

Sam Altman released a note on the future of AI.

OpenAI's CTO Mira Murati is leaving the company to conduct her own research.

Google has released updated Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash models with improved quality, reduced prices, and increased usage limits.

AI startup Anthropic is considering a new funding round with a target valuation of 30-40 billion dollars. This would roughly double the company's valuation compared to the last funding round held earlier this year.

Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung are discussing the construction of mega-factories for chip production in the UAE with potential investments of over 100 billion dollars.

James Cameron, the legendary director and innovator in visual effects, has joined the board of directors of Stability AI, a company specializing in generative artificial intelligence.

China has launched the world's first AI hospital, where 14 AI doctors can serve 10,000 patients in a few days.

A Reddit user shares effective user instructions for Claude Sonnet 3.5 to improve its programming capabilities. In the comments, he was advised to check out the guide from Anthropic.

15 years ago, Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg predicted the emergence of AGI in 2025. Since then, he has adhered to roughly the same timeline (2025-2028).

Models from Hugging Face and beyond

The Vikhr Team has released three new Russian language models: Vikhr-Nemo-12B-Instruct-R-21-09-24, Vikhr-Llama3.1-8B-Instruct-R-21-09-24, and Vikhr-Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct.

Meta has released Llama 3.2* – a set of open-source multimodal and language models capable of working with text and images.

How2Draw is a LoRA model for Stable Diffusion that allows generating images in the style of step-by-step drawing instructions.

The GitHub repository offers an extensive knowledge base and examples on GenAI agents, covering a wide range from simple chatbots to complex multi-agent systems using advanced AI technologies.

Linux

Linus Torvalds advises open-source developers to focus on meaningful projects rather than hype.

Raspberry Pi

An enthusiast used the Raspberry Pi Pico to create an inexpensive and reliable modchip that allows running unofficial software on the original Xbox, released 22 years ago.

Python Libraries

How to transmit a message in Morse code over Wi-Fi from Raspberry Pi to NodeMCU (ESP8266)

The developer created a Python script using AI for local file organization on Linux devices without the need for an internet connection.

Developers have released version 0.6.0 of the Reflex framework, which allows creating web applications entirely in Python without the need for JavaScript.

The programmer created his own web framework, Spiderweb, to better understand how web frameworks work.

An open-source Python library for extracting data in markdown format from various sources using computer vision models.

Opik is a new open framework for evaluating large language models (LLM), providing ready-made metrics, step-by-step tracking, and an API for testing.

The QuickApiClient library for Python has been developed, making it easy to create fully typed and declarative API clients.

Connor is a local NLP-based tool that organizes files by text content, creating folders and grouping similar files.

ComiQ is an OCR library that combines traditional OCR engines with the Gemini Flash-1.5 model for accurate recognition and translation of text in comic images.

What to watch

Forgotten lesson US Memories: why America missed the chance to regain leadership in memory chip production

In the late 1980s, when Japanese companies dominated the DRAM memory market, a group of American technology giants attempted to create their own chip production. The ambitious US Memories project was supposed to return the US to leadership in a critically important industry, but it failed. This little-known story contains important lessons for modern attempts to revive the American semiconductor industry.