Go 1.22 and more
Hybrid Meetup #41 took place 2024-02-27 at Basislager Leipzig. We reviewed some updates in Go 1.22, especially the sharing bug fix in for loops and the enhanced routing pattern.
Go tools for genai models
There is no shortage of tooling and applications for LLM and generative AI in general, and increasingly, these tools abstract the model access away to you can use remote or local models with the same code (and easily switch between different providers).
We also briefly looked at lingoose, a lightweight LLM framework, which offers some wrappers around common tasks for generative AI models, like chat or document adapters for retrieval-augmented generation.
Rough notes: What RAG?
The Cutoff
For the record, 2023 may be the cutoff year. The amount of synthetically generated material will dwarf everything that existed up to that point.
Misc
- we wondered about some performance implications regarding ARM servers (which are becoming available on various cloud providers (e.g. EUR 0.0070/h CAX11 instance at Hetzner) - anecdata has it that you can run a complete Go web app stack and get 100-200 requests/s out of a 32-bit 2011 ARM Cortex A7 (inside a Cubietruck), consuming about 2W total - cf. The Progress of the Energy-Efficiency of Single-board Computers
- there are also tools to reclaim your cloud! Specifically, the zimablade runs a low power 4-core CPU and can be equipped with 16GB RAM, plus two SATA drives (back-of-the-envelope costs breakdown would be $128 (SBC), $15 for one 128GB SATA SSD, a total of $158 or EUR 145 or 20714h of the cheapest (and weaker) cloud instance; excluding positions like maintenance, bandwidth and energy, the amorization period of on-prem hardware is somewhere between six months and three years).
Joke
COBOL is still used, and still may be in the future. Maybe someone can write a Go-to-COBOL tool, we already would have a name: gobol (this name has also been suggested by gemma 2B (91bff873f359), when prompted how would you name a software project that translates Go (golang) to COBOL? offer multiple alternatives)
Image Credit
Stable Diffusion v1.5 pruned, emaonly; prompt: a data center, many computers, located inside a jungle, where cables and branches interweave, style: polaroid (estimated generation cost: EUR 0.05).
