# forck.live — 5–11 April 2021

> AI lab announcements, news reports and podcasts.

forck.live follows what companies announce about their own products. Press may
corroborate an official story; it never leads and never appears as an item of its
own. A missing date stays missing. A title is the publisher's words — where a
company does not publish in English, an English rendering is listed separately
as `Title in English` and named as this site's translation, never as theirs.

This file is one issue of the weekly archive: every confirmed
first-party announcement of ISO week 2021-W14, 5–11 April 2021, newest
first. The window never moves, so this URL always names the same seven days —
but a post published inside them and detected later is added when it arrives,
so a closed week can still gain entries.

Every entry is one first-party announcement, and carries the same eight fields
in this order before any others:

    Company · Announced · Category · Coverage · Announcement · Group · Source · Record

`Source` is the company's own page the announcement was traced to and `Record`
is this site's page for it. Both are safe to cite.

`Coverage` is a number of outlets, or `not counted` — which means this record
reached no count of its own, never that nobody wrote about it.

`Category` is this tracker's own analysis, and is authoritative wherever it is
stated. `not stated` means either that nothing has analysed the post yet or
that the analysis placed it outside this taxonomy; neither is a verdict about
the announcement.

`Announcement` is whether the post is news of something the company did, rather
than a how-to, a customer story, a changelog listing or a staffing note.

`Group` is which of this record's groups the entry falls in, carried on the
entry itself so it holds where the groups are headings and where they are not.
One of: `models`, `covered`, `announcements`, `routine`.

Anything after `Record` is held detail that only some announcements carry.

- This week's page: https://forck.live/week/2021-W14
- The current issue, and the catalogue of the other weeks: https://forck.live/briefing.md
- Catalogue: https://forck.live/llms.txt

## Announcements

### Replit — Introducing system audio

- Company: Replit (replit.com)
- Announced: 2021-04-08T19:00:00+00:00
- Category: capability-change
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://replit.com/blog/system-audio
- Record: https://forck.live/items/18067-introducing-system-audio
- Subject: Replit Agent

Replit added system audio integration as an opt-in feature for repls. Users enable it by creating a secret called VNC_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_AUDIO with a value of 1 and restarting the repl. The feature uses a custom RFB proxy written in Rust to transcode PulseAudio into an Opus stream in a WebM container, with an MP3-in-MPEG fallback for browsers that do not support Opus/WebM.

### Hugging Face — Distributed Training: Train BART/T5 for Summarization using 🤗 Transformers and Amazon SageMaker

- Company: Hugging Face (huggingface.co)
- Announced: 2021-04-08
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/sagemaker-distributed-training-seq2seq
- Record: https://forck.live/items/2261-distributed-training-train-bart-t5-for-summarization-using-transformers-and
- Subject: Platform

To use Hugging Face Transformers and Amazon SageMaker to fine-tune a distributed BART/T5 model for summarization, using the SageMaker Data Parallelism library and the samsum dataset.

### Replit — Securing your graphic repls

- Company: Replit (replit.com)
- Announced: 2021-04-07T17:00:00+00:00
- Category: capability-change
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://replit.com/blog/vnc-passwords
- Record: https://forck.live/items/18235-securing-your-graphic-repls
- Subject: Replit Agent

Replit announced that all VNC connections to graphic repls are now automatically protected by the same token used for repl connections, with no user action required. Users who want to access repls with a stock noVNC client can set a VNC_PASSWORD secret; only the first 8 characters of the password are considered due to Remote Framebuffer authentication limitations.

### Replit — Introducing Kaboom

- Company: Replit (replit.com)
- Announced: 2021-04-06
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://replit.com/blog/kaboom
- Record: https://forck.live/items/18053-introducing-kaboom
- Subject: Replit Agent

Replit introduced Kaboom, a JavaScript game-making library and integrated editor, designed to be accessible and fun for beginners and intermediate programmers. The library uses a composable component system for describing game objects and behaviors, and the Replit editor includes tools like a sprite manager, debugger, and planned sound and music editors.