> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess?
my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list
It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand
I worked in blockchain 5 years trying to build good tech, and speculators ruin everything and don't care about good tech, but the real punch line is that
good tech is like 2% of a real answer
Here's a rant about a bunch of other layers of 'so you want to move money'
I worked in blockchain ("builder") for 5 years. I started 'eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech' but finished 'holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech'
I designed and named the Transaction Execution Approval Language for the Algorand blockchain in 2020. I'm partial to the original, but as it grew it got rebranded to be the "Algorand Virtual Machine". Glad someone still remembers it as TEAL!
I built a 'slice of function pointers' bytecode interpreter in Go in 2019 for the Algorand VM (Blockchain smart contract stuff) and before that the same pattern in C for a toy JVM around 2005.
It's a good pattern!
The Algorand VM was focused on low overhead running thousands of tiny programs per second. Version 1 had no loops and a 1000 instruction limit.
The JVM was focused on low memory, towards possible embedded microcontroller use.
So, 'array of function pointers' is nothing new, but it is a good pattern.
I think the 'law of large numbers' says that it's very unlikely for you to follow 4k and have _none_ of them posting. You could artificially construct a counter-example by finding 4k open but silent accounts, but that's silly.
The other workaround is: follow everyone. Write some code to get what you want out of the jetstream event feed. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/jetstream
95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.
atproto PDSes are like blog servers with RSS (but better) and bsky.app is the prevailing RSS reader. It's an open protocol because anyone can host a source and anyone can run a different reader.
Rust async/await is less nice than Go coroutines. There are things you can't do and weird rules around Rust async code. Every Go chan allows multiple readers and multiple writers, but Rust stdlib and tokio default to single-reader queues.
Bitcoin is still wasting gigawatts every year, but later blockchains are literally a million times more efficient. If the current generations of AI turn out to be useful, maybe someone will figure it out an efficiency optimization.
It's not. It's not about efficiency. Compute-per-watt will certainly be better in other systems. This is about pushing a small system as fast as possible because it's easier to program for a small system. A few problems are 'embarrassingly parallel', but lots have substantial overhead as parallelism increases so running each core as fast as possible is a win for some problems.
going way back: Science Fair in High School landed me summer internships that rolled over into my first job out of college. ("Science and Engineering Fair" project was building robots with microcontrollers) I think it was the proof that I could do that kind of work in a self directed way that made them notice me.