JetBrains Releases Mellum2

JetBrains (the home of IntelliJ and PyCharm) has released its Mellum2 Mixture-of-Experts coding model, of 12B parameters. 

The model is available under the Apache 2.0 license. 

The model has been published on Hugging Face and can be run locally.

A mixture-of-experts model works via a "gating network" which delegates work to smaller neural networks, the "experts", optimising overall performance. This model also leads to "sparse activation" - which means of all the possible parameters utilised by the model, only a subset are used per input.

Training an MoE model requires training the gating network and training the various "experts".

OpenCode and GLM Models

OpenCode is an open source AI coding agent. It connects to free models and also allows connection to commercial models. GLM models are supported.

C++ 26 is a Work in Progress

The current status of ISO C++ standards can be found here.

MESI and MOESI

MESI and MOESI are cache coherency protocols to ensure consistent data across CPU caches. The terms are abbreviations for the various states of the cache.

Windows 11 Taskbar Icons Resize Dynamically

If you open too many applications, watch those icons shrink in your taskbar.

What is DNSSEC?

DNSSEC uses a cryptographic signature of DNS records to protect domains against forged DNS answers.

DNSSEC stands for Domain Name System Security Extensions, and comprises a suite of protocols to protect against DNS Spoofing, cache poisoning and man-in-the-middle attacks.

A scenario in layman's terms would be an attack that sends a user to a fake copy of your site. E-commerce and SaaS platforms in particular must take care to ensure they use DNSSEC for added protection.

DNSSEC can be skipped for very early stage projects where DNS server settings may change frequently.

Multi-signer DNSSEC is an additional way to implement DNNSEC. An RFC covers this (note that it is not an Internet Standard however), with contributors from Salesforce and Verisign.

Working with Word Templates

Word templates offer a good starting point for documents you may be required to mass-produce e.g. a document explaining IT strategy or architecture for multiple organizations.  However they may not work well out-of-the-box.

Things to look out for:

1. Word templates may do funny stuff with margins.  This is to create interesting and effective custom alignments - particularly for cover sheets. However, you may want to use more standard margins for the broader document if you need a more traditional, essay-style flow for your document.  For this go to  Layout and explore the various Margins, ranging from Narrow, Moderate, Wide up to Custom Margins.

2.Colour schemes. May be garish. Decide if you want to tone down the schemes for ease of printing. Or perhaps go the other way and tone up for maximum impact.

In short, expect to do a great deal of customisation, even if you have a standard template ready-to-run.