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convolvatron

3,798 karmajoined il y a 11 ans
really pretty old at this point

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convolvatron
·il y a 14 heures·discuss
that seems backwards to me. one of the primary constraints in language development is the OS api. programs that don't interact with the world are increasingly less interesting, and you really have to work hard and be clever to change the file and its semantics, the socket, or the thread. these things have sharp edges and tend to be leaky.
convolvatron
·hier·discuss
just wait. the current gold rush has left any consideration of efficiency or price-performance at the side of the road. the entire enterprise is structured as a 'whoever can spend the most money wins the game for all time'. if we can get past that and invest more in theory and systems at a natural pace it'll just keep getting more affordable over time.
convolvatron
·hier·discuss
that's still comes up far short of the total bill. the US never talks about the destruction to civilian infrastructure, the number of innocents killed, the loss of any ability to claim to be on the 'right side'.

these are seeds that will ensure that the US is treated like Russia, or WWII Germany, or Iran. A rabid aggressor that will need to be isolated and eventually contained.
convolvatron
·avant-hier·discuss
what would consider to be the essential characteristics of a third way?
convolvatron
·avant-hier·discuss
I know a lot about kernel programming. and the last thing as I would ever suggest as being core to kernel programming is that is a specialized discipline that uses different rules and shouldn't be accessible to neophytes. its just code. sometimes the restrictions are unfamiliar, but there is nothing magic going on here.
convolvatron
·il y a 3 jours·discuss
sorry, I meant for a systems programmer the parts where there is a kind of dual correspondence developed between statements in a language and transistors on a board I think would probably open some mental doors for a systems programmer.

but I haven't gone through the video lectures or even all of SICP. but those that I did have had a lasting impact. particularly the erasure of the declarative/procedural dichotomy..thats been a very useful tool
convolvatron
·il y a 3 jours·discuss
addendum: actually I think the case for SICP in systems programming is stronger than that. There are several places in the material where the gap between 'high level programming' and 'construction of machines using gates' is thoroughly walked through and evaporated. maybe some of of the other similar treatments for logic programming and continuous analysis won't strike as deep, but that part should really be required reading.
convolvatron
·il y a 3 jours·discuss
these talks distill out the core questions of topics like mutability and state management and abstraction. almost uniquely so. so I consider them deeply relevant to systems programming in as much that its primarily concerned with..state management and abstraction.

unless you mean 'systems programming' as just 'the crap one does to try to glue together all the grotty pre-existing systems' and 'developing a good sense of taste about 3rd party libraries', in which case no, its not really very relevant.

although even here there is insight, I watched a video of Sussman describing why they were putting down SICP and demanding that MIT develop new introductory courses. he was so graceful and considered, putting his polished jewels away. the time when we could reasonably be expected to see across and through all the layers of abstraction was over.
convolvatron
·il y a 4 jours·discuss
consider the alternatives. it could have been written in PL-1 and rapidly become dated. or it could have been written in a slightly higher level custom language and that would also have to be taught and would be less clear about what was going on under the hood. or a kind of pseudo-code that would also admit ambiguity. or it could have been rewritten in pascal, and then java, and then javascript and then rust.

given the timespan and the focus on complete analysis of running times and not just asymptotics, in the end maybe it wasn't so terrible a choice.
convolvatron
·il y a 4 jours·discuss
we completely fail to run a marathon by turning the notion of distance covered into completely fictional metric, and anathematize the idea of setting targets beyond that two weeks since that requires collaboration and forethought. by attempting to run a marathon in a completely stateless way we end up walking in a brownian fashion but get thoroughly exhausted by the process even though we aren't getting anywhere really.
convolvatron
·il y a 7 jours·discuss
that seems very unlikely. margins are already quite thin, and the airlines are making most of their money with the higher fare tiers. if you remove some of those customers, then its entirely possible that the base fare will increase in response.
convolvatron
·il y a 7 jours·discuss
in CS we define a complexity class as a set of problems that have the same growth characteristic. that is for a problem size N, how long does it take in the worst case to find the solution for that problem.

one such class is the Polynomial class, or P, where the time to solution is some fixed exponent of N (like N^2, or 3).

the next big step is NP, which require a polynomial number of nondeterministic steps, whose solution can only be verified in polynomial time. usually solutions to NP problems are exponential in cost with respect to N (like 2^N), but thats not part of their definition.

problems in NP are generally identified by mapping them into a well known problem known to be in NP, where the mapping has to occur in polynomial time.

its an open question as to whether NP as a class can actually be solved in P time, but most people doubt that that is really the case.
convolvatron
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
eventual consistency as generally used doesn't guarantee that events are presented in the same order. I use 'monotonic consistency' for that, but idk how common that is.
convolvatron
·il y a 12 jours·discuss
or, we could just wait a hot second, get GPU and associated hardware over the 30% utilization mark, develop a fault tolerance strategy that recovers more useful work, and spend a bit more time researching how models actually converge. 50% savings on training time would mean even more energy savings because of the add-on effects of cooling.

this spending of billions just to get a 4 month lead, without even trying to invest in getting this stuff to run properly is wasteful to the point of insanity. I don't think it's at all productive to chide people for not wanting to dump their resources into a black hole.

it seems pretty clear that the investors and the AI companies _like_ to throw around big GW numbers. it gives them a moat, and it fuels the bubble.
convolvatron
·il y a 15 jours·discuss
no, they want a questionnaire, a coding sample, and an example of technical writing. there's a reasonable interpretation of that that doesn't involve writing a distributed unix.
convolvatron
·il y a 15 jours·discuss
I've gone through the same process, not so much that I don't think I would be worth considering, but serious code and documentation examples aren't something I can really give out given that they're proprietary. this last winter I started a whole guest-kernel based syscall intermediation and distribution framework in rust just for the application. with all kinds of design documents. I was about 30% finished by the time I landed a job somewhere else :)

but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep
convolvatron
·il y a 16 jours·discuss
as someone who actually worked at the NSA pointed out earlier in this thread, they have plenty of resources, but also plenty of politics and some execution problems. so I wouldn't put money on them making a great model, but to say that they are completely incapable of doing anything is probably quite wrong.

the issue here that is a forgone conclusion, regardless of where the model comes from and which chips it runs on, is that now they can reasonably comb through all the stuff that they've been collecting. that's a pretty huge operational change.
convolvatron
·il y a 16 jours·discuss
NSA has had their own supercomputing program for decades. they design and produce their own large scale machines. chips, fabrics, arithmetic units, all of it. they also employ quite a number of hardcore mathematicians, computer scientists, and systems wranglers. if they decided it was of strategic importance there is absolutely no reason they couldn't train their own models.
convolvatron
·il y a 16 jours·discuss
idk how old you are, but there there was a style in the 70s where goto was the only control flow operator used in a lot of codebases, and it was absolutely horrible.
convolvatron
·il y a 17 jours·discuss
or don't put the burden on the website at all, but let the parent choose whitelists of child-appropriate sites based on whatever criteria they want.