Bytes placed first in a text file to signal its encoding. Fine-tuning data should be saved as UTF-8 with a BOM, keeping each file below 512 MB; ASCII, UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1 files risk failing validation.
Also called byte-order mark.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains BOM in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- FIFO
First in, first out: messages are processed in strict order. Service Bus achieves this with message sessions, which Storage queues can't offer.
- ENCODING
A COPY INTO option for CSV sources that states whether the files use UTF8, the default, or UTF16 character encoding.
- Fine-tuning
Continuing to train a pretrained base model on task examples, through supervised fine-tuning, DPO or RFT, so its weights shift towards a style, format or task. It neither acts as a safety control nor adds new knowledge well.
- UTF-8
The text encoding required for Intune remediation scripts. If the file has a byte order mark and signature checks are enforced, the script fails.
- ASCII
An encoding for human-readable files like JSON or CSV that turns their bytes into printable characters. Unicode supports far more characters.
- Risk
As ISO 31000 puts it, how uncertainty affects objectives; that effect can be good or bad.