When you enjoyed reading an article on a blog, you might be interested in other, similar articles. As a blog author, you want to surface that relevant content to your readers to keep them engaged. For a long time, I’ve wanted to add a “Similar articles” section to my posts, but I never quite found a simple and effective way to do it. Hugo (the static stite generator I’m using) has a related content concept, but it wasn’t really what I was after.

A few days ago, Google DeepMind released a new embedding model based on the Gemma open weight model: EmbeddingGemma. With 308 million parameters, such a model is tiny enough to be able to run on edge devices like your phone, tablet, or your computer.

Embedding models are the cornerstone of Retrieval Augmented Generation systems (RAG), and what generally powers semantic search solutions. Being able to run an embedding model locally means you don’t need to rely on a server (no need to send your data over the internet): this is great for privacy. And of course, cost is reduced as well, because you don’t need to pay for a remote / hosted embedding model.

First article of the year, so let me start by wishing you all, my dear readers, a very happy new year! And what is the subject of this new piece of content? For a while, I’ve been interested in analyzing trends and topics in social media streams. I recently joined Bluesky (you can follow me at @glaforge.dev), and contrarily to X, it’s possible to access its Firehose (the stream of all the messages sent by its users) pretty easily, and even for free. So let’s see what we can learn from the firehose!

By Guillaume Laforge & Valentin Deleplace

The Programming Idioms community website created by Valentin lets developers share typical implementations in various programming languages for usual tasks like printing the famous “Hello World!” message, counting the characters in a string, sorting collections, or formatting dates, to name a few. And many more: there are currently 350 idioms, covering 32 programming languages. It’s a nice way to discover how various languages implement such common tasks!

Prelude

As I’m focusing a lot on Generative AI, I’m curious about how things work under the hood, to better understand what I’m using in my gen-ai powered projects. A topic I’d like to focus on more is: vector embeddings, to explain more clearly what they are, how they are calculated, and what you can do with them.

A colleague of mine, André, was showing me a cool experiment he’s been working on, to help people prepare an interview, with the help of an AI, to shape the structure of the resulting final article to write.

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