deploy: 2a5ee6dd11

index.xml

@@ -1,4 +1,9 @@
-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Eric X. Liu's Personal Page</title><link>/</link><description>Recent content on Eric X. Liu's Personal Page</description><generator>Hugo</generator><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:36:52 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>Beyond Words: How RVQ Teaches LLMs to See and Hear</title><link>/posts/how-rvq-teaches-llms-to-see-and-hear/</link><pubDate>Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>/posts/how-rvq-teaches-llms-to-see-and-hear/</guid><description>&lt;p>Large Language Models (LLMs) are masters of text, but the world is not made of text alone. It’s a symphony of sights, sounds, and experiences. The ultimate goal for AI is to understand this rich, multi-modal world as we do. But how do you teach a model that thinks in words to understand a picture of a sunset or the melody of a song?&lt;/p>
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Eric X. Liu's Personal Page</title><link>/</link><description>Recent content on Eric X. Liu's Personal Page</description><generator>Hugo</generator><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Thu, 14 Aug 2025 06:50:22 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>Fixing GPU Operator Pods Stuck in Init: Secure Boot, DKMS, and MOK on Proxmox + Debian</title><link>/posts/secure-boot-dkms-and-mok-on-proxmox-debian/</link><pubDate>Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>/posts/secure-boot-dkms-and-mok-on-proxmox-debian/</guid><description>&lt;p>I hit an issue where all GPU Operator pods on one node were stuck in Init after migrating from Legacy BIOS to UEFI. The common error was NVIDIA components waiting for “toolkit-ready,” while the toolkit init container looped with:&lt;/p>
+&lt;ul>
+&lt;li>nvidia-smi failed to communicate with the NVIDIA driver&lt;/li>
+&lt;li>modprobe nvidia → “Key was rejected by service”&lt;/li>
+&lt;/ul>
+&lt;p>That message is the tell: Secure Boot is enabled and the kernel refuses to load modules not signed by a trusted key.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Beyond Words: How RVQ Teaches LLMs to See and Hear</title><link>/posts/how-rvq-teaches-llms-to-see-and-hear/</link><pubDate>Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>/posts/how-rvq-teaches-llms-to-see-and-hear/</guid><description>&lt;p>Large Language Models (LLMs) are masters of text, but the world is not made of text alone. It’s a symphony of sights, sounds, and experiences. The ultimate goal for AI is to understand this rich, multi-modal world as we do. But how do you teach a model that thinks in words to understand a picture of a sunset or the melody of a song?&lt;/p>
 &lt;p>The answer lies in creating a universal language—a bridge between the continuous, messy world of pixels and audio waves and the discrete, structured world of language tokens. One of the most elegant and powerful tools for building this bridge is &lt;strong>Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ)&lt;/strong>.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Supabase Deep Dive: It's Not Magic, It's Just Postgres</title><link>/posts/supabase-deep-dive/</link><pubDate>Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>/posts/supabase-deep-dive/</guid><description>&lt;p>In the world of Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), platforms are often treated as magic boxes. You push data in, you get data out, and you hope the magic inside scales. While this simplicity is powerful, it can obscure the underlying mechanics, leaving developers wondering what&amp;rsquo;s really going on.&lt;/p>
 &lt;p>Supabase enters this space with a radically different philosophy: &lt;strong>transparency&lt;/strong>. It provides the convenience of a BaaS, but it’s built on the world&amp;rsquo;s most trusted relational database: PostgreSQL. The &amp;ldquo;magic&amp;rdquo; isn&amp;rsquo;t a proprietary black box; it&amp;rsquo;s a carefully assembled suite of open-source tools that enhance Postgres, not hide it.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>A Deep Dive into PPO for Language Models</title><link>/posts/a-deep-dive-into-ppo-for-language-models/</link><pubDate>Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>/posts/a-deep-dive-into-ppo-for-language-models/</guid><description>&lt;p>Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated astonishing capabilities, but out-of-the-box, they are simply powerful text predictors. They don&amp;rsquo;t inherently understand what makes a response helpful, harmless, or aligned with human values. The technique that has proven most effective at bridging this gap is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and at its heart lies a powerful algorithm: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO).&lt;/p>
 &lt;p>You may have seen diagrams like the one below, which outlines the RLHF training process. It can look intimidating, with a web of interconnected models, losses, and data flows.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Models Challenges &amp; Solutions in Practice</title><link>/posts/mixture-of-experts-moe-models-challenges-solutions-in-practice/</link><pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>/posts/mixture-of-experts-moe-models-challenges-solutions-in-practice/</guid><description>&lt;p>Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) are neural network architectures that allow different parts of the model (called &amp;ldquo;experts&amp;rdquo;) to specialize in different types of inputs. A &amp;ldquo;gating network&amp;rdquo; or &amp;ldquo;router&amp;rdquo; learns to dispatch each input (or &amp;ldquo;token&amp;rdquo;) to a subset of these experts. While powerful for scaling models, MoEs introduce several practical challenges.&lt;/p>