[Dev Catch Up #44] - Qwen 2.5, OpenAI's Deliberative Alignment, Stimulus with Rails and React, Dockerize React application, Finemath dataset, and much more.
Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles.
Happy Holidays and Welcome to the 44th edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!
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Apollo video LLM, Gemini 2.0, lla file explorer, Database migration
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Must Read
Rapid innovation in the field of AI is evident with the introduction of new LLMs and improvements of existing LLMs. Last week, Alibaba Cloud, the creator of Qwen family of LLMs unveiled Qwen 2.5 in a series of sizes to meet the diverse needs of development and usage. It has significant improvements in pre and post training stages than its previous iterations. Learn more about this family of models from the technical report here.
Speaking of innovation in AI, OpenAI teases on its release of o3 family of models and in the process, they shed light on a new training paradigm named Deliberative Alignment. It directly teaches reasoning LLMs the text of human-written and interpretable safety specifications, and trains them to reason explicitly about these specifications before answering. More information on this paradigm is available from OpenAI’s official article.
HPX is a parallelization runtime and framework written in C++ and together with Node.js, it can be used for parallel computing to execute certain algorithms. Here is a guided tutorial that highlights the building of a Node.js add-on that uses HPX for the same.
In our last issue, we discussed how Gemini 2.0 made everyone spellbound in the tech community. Continuing that, the developers are particularly excited with the new multimodal capabilities of the model that came along with the new Multimodal Live API. This Google article tells you more about the API and multimodal live streamings with live demos.
After this, shouting out a top open-source project is a delight and here it is:
OSS Highlight of the Week
This week, we focus on an open-source tool called MarkItDown, which is developed by Microsoft. With over 26.4k stars, this one is one of the hot ones out in GitHub. It is a utility that converts various types of files to Markdown for indexing, text analysis, etc. Check it out from its official GitHub page and leave a star if you like it.
Now, we will head over to some of the news and articles that will be at a place of interest for developers and the tech community out there.
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Good to know
The developments in the field of AI is not only happening with LLMs but with the creation of new datasets as well. HuggingFaceTB presents FineMath, a mathematical dataset consisting of 34B to 54B tokens of educational mathematical content filtered from CommonCrawl. Check out the dataset and learn more about it from here.
TanStack Router has already made headlines in the JavaScript community because of its modern and scalable routing for React applications. Now, the TanStack team has released TanStack Start in Beta. It is a thin service layer on the top of the router which ensures not losing of anything from the router. Know more about it from here.
Docker is the de facto king of containerization and with React being one of the most popular library in JavaScript for developing applications, it is essential to know the benefits of containerizing a React application with Docker. This article sheds light on the matter with a guided tutorial on Dockerizing a React application.
A well-written prompt can obtain accurate and relevant outputs from LLMs. Hence, a prompt template can facilitate rapid iteration and experimentation of LLMs and executing them against various underlying LLMs helps in taking advantage of LLM supported tasks. To centralize the process of constructing prompt templates, the team at Uber created a Prompt Engineering Toolkit.
Stimulus is a JavaScript framework that enhances static or server-rendered HTML by connecting JavaScript objects to page elements through simple annotations. Here is a tutorial that guides you how to React.js with a Rails + Stimulus app in a specific use case.
Lastly, we will take a look at some of the trending scoops that hold a special mention for the community.
Notable FYIs
The low-code vs no-code battle is quite legendary in itself with different views surrounding the topic. Here is an article that discusses the learnings achieved from building a no-code data stack and the eventual changing of course towards low-code AI copilots.
Increased reliance on web and AI-driven applications and made security a major cause of concern and on hopes of mitigation, organizations turn towards OWASP, a non-profit foundation dedicated to improve software security. This article provides guidance on detecting and addressing of vulnerabilities before production with CodeRabbit.
In SRE, a readiness check must take place before deploying services in production to ensure the reliability of them under real user traffic. This article shows how the production readiness check works at Mercari.
Optimizing the speed of sites that are built on React.js involves the optimzation of JavaScript long tasks. This can be done with optimizing the response rate to interactions or the INP (Interaction to Next Paint) metric. This article provides five effective tips in achieving that.
The Node.js ecosystem have been shifting from the CommonJS modules to the ES modules for sharing and utilizing JavaScript code. Here is an article that aims to highlight the core differences between CommonJS and ES modules, discuss the benefits of adopting ES modules, and offer practical guidance for a smooth transition.
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