Recent content on Simone Bellavia's Web Page
DeepSeek Sparse Attention , some considerations about it after reading the paper. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp is defined as an experimental sparse-attention model . Its architecture is the same as DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus, except for the introduction of DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA). The core idea is to reduce the number of key-value pairs each query token looks at, instead of attending to all tokens.…
Qwen3-Max has been released from Qwen team. It’s their largest and most advanced large language model to date. It competes against GPT-5 and Grok 4. The base model has over 1 trillion parameters and was pretrained on 36 trillion tokens . Its architecture seems to follow the same of other models from Qwen3 series: it provides a highly optimized MoE design, which activates only a subset of…
Go has added Valgrind support. While reading the commit, I saw this: Instead of adding the Valgrind headers to the tree, and using cgo to call the various Valgrind client request macros, we just add an assembly function which emits the necessary instructions to trigger client requests. This is super interesting. Let’s have a quick look at the code: // Copyright 2025 The Go Authors. All…
New model in town! GPT-5-Codex is a version of GPT-5 specifically realized for agentic coding in Codex. Here’s what you need to know: It dynamically adapts its thinking based on the complexity of the task. Adheres to AGENTS.md instructions. It has been trained specifically for conducting code reviews and finding critical flaws. GPT-5 and GPT-5-Codex achieve comparable accuracy on SWE-bench…
One year ago, the Safe C++ proposal was made. The goal was to add a safe subset/context into C++ that would give strong guarantees (memory safety, type safety, thread safety) similar to what Rust provides, without breaking existing C++ code. It was an extension or superset of C++. The opt-in mechanism was to explicitly mark parts of the code that belong to the safe context. The authors even state:…
Qwen team released two new models : Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking. Both are already present on HuggingFace . Qwen also published a post on their blog . Compared to the MoE structure of Qwen3, Qwen3-Next introduces several key improvements: a hybrid attention mechanism, a highly sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure, training-stability-friendly optimizations, and a…
Apple presented the iPhone Air, the thinnest iPhone ever . This is the only new release from Apple that got my interest during their presentation event. Its design is interesting: the entire logic board and A19 Pro chip are compacted into the camera bump (which includes both front and rear cameras). This iPhone is all battery and screen. IMHO, it seems like a strategic move for the coming years,…
Yesterday, a lot of npm packages have been compromised with malicious code. Following, a list of affected packages: ansi-styles@6.2.2 debug@4.4.2 (appears to have been yanked as of 8 Sep 18:09 CEST) chalk@5.6.1 supports-color@10.2.1 strip-ansi@7.1.1 ansi-regex@6.2.1 wrap-ansi@9.0.1 color-convert@3.1.1 color-name@2.0.1 is-arrayish@0.3.3 slice-ansi@7.1.1 color@5.0.1 color-string@2.1.1…
Yesterday, Fil-C popped up to the top of Hacker News . This time the submission got a fair amount of traction, sparking a lot of interest in the community, including a comment from Andrew Kelley. In fact, I’ve been interested in Fil-C for about a year already: my first submission on Hacker News was eight months ago. So I can say I’ve been actively following the project’s progress, also thanks to…
There is a very interesting law that I think is worth sharing: I will apply it more often.
I’m Sicilian, and I support building the Strait of Messina Bridge. Premise: I don’t vote for Matteo Salvini, the current Minister of Infrastructure and Transport and promoter of the project. Even though, to be fair, many before him have tried to start construction on the Bridge, since it’s been discussed ever since the post-World War II era. In modern times, both Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi…
I have been working with Helm for some time now and I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with it. It seems to have become the de-facto package manager for K8s, and there are good reasons for that. But like any tool, it comes with its own set of frustrations that can make you question your life choices. Some honest thoughts follow. What I like I find Helm to be fairly simple to get…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a class of neural networks designed to process sequential data, such as time series, text, audio, or any other type of sequential data. RNNs were developed to overcome the limitations of feedforward networks that don’t maintain a memory of past information. From Feedforward to RNNs Let’s take a general look at Feedforward Networks, to then better…
Retinal detachment is an eye disease and is one of the most serious ocular emergencies. It occurs after a layer of the retina - essential tissue for vision - is lifted from the pigmented epithelial tissue, dragging the blood vessels that supply nutrients and the eye with it. If the retina is no longer nourished through contact with the pigment epithelium layer, cell death and a progressive and…
A Clinical Decision Support System is defined as an “active knowledge system, which uses two or more patient data elements to generate case-specific advice” (DSS, 2001). This implies that a CDSS is simply a Decision Support System focused on the use of knowledge management in order to obtain clinical advice for patient care based on multiple variables inherent to it. The main purpose…
I’m Simone Bellavia. I’m passionate about software engineering, deep learning and distributed systems. On this weblog, I share my thoughts on various topics that inspire me: from technical insights in AI and machine learning to reflections on building software. Connect You can find me on Twitter . Thanks for stopping by!