marsten

6 ms·

31.
by marsten 1y ago
Intel should have spun out their fab in 2009-2010 when the signs were clear: Mobile was taking off, AMD spun out their fab, Intel had missed the boat on mobile CPUs, and Apple had acquired PA Semi and was investing heavily in custom silicon
32.
by marsten 1y ago
Biological weapons are probably the more worrisome case for AI. The equipment is less exotic than for nuclear weapon development, and more obtainable by everyday people.
33.
by marsten 1y ago
I attribute the curriculum shift to something slightly different, which is the changing perception of CS as a career. When I was in college in the late 1980s, CS was not perceived as the moneymaking career it is today. Accordingly the kids
34.
by marsten 1y ago
The problem isn't that time blindness is a fake issue. The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize accountability fo
35.
by marsten 1y ago
> Over the years, the magic was never lost on me. However, I can never see LLMs as more than a "token prediction machine". The "mere token prediction machine" criticism, like Pearl's "deep learning amounts t
36.
by marsten 1y ago
You raise a good point that this isn't a low marginal cost business like software, telecom, or (most of) the web. Efficiency will be a big advantage for companies that can achieve it, in part because it will let them scale to new AI us
37.
by marsten 1y ago
Interesting that they converged on a memory/network architecture similar to a rack of GPUs. - 152 cores per chip, equivalent to ~128 CUDA cores per SM - per-chip SRAM (20 MB) equivalent to SM high-speed shared memory - per-board DRAM (
38.
by marsten 1y ago
A surprising number of 401(k) plans default to a money market fund for invested assets. Imagine retiring after a decades-long career and realizing what could have been.
39.
by marsten 1y ago
I've always found it amusing that mathematically it should be the rule of 70, but it's commonly rounded to 72 because the latter has more convenient divisors. 70 is divisible by 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 35, 70 72 is divisible by 1, 2,
40.
by marsten 1y ago
The standard answer is that the US government broke up Ma Bell in the early 1980s to encourage competition. Hence the quid pro quo that had existed for decades – you let us have a monopoly, we'll do research in the public interest – va
41.
by marsten 1y ago
Unfortunately C++ ended up with a set of defaults (i.e., the most ergonomic ways of doing things) that are almost always the least safe. During most of C++'s development, performance was king and so safety became opt-in. Many of these
42.
by marsten 1y ago
Length is 100% marketing. There is no commercial market for 15-20 page essays, which would be the ideal length for a lot of business books. (The famous Harvard Business Review cases are typically this long.) The reason many business books f
43.
by marsten 1y ago
This would be a planet by anyone's definition, if it's near the predicted 9 times the mass of the Earth. By comparison the entire Kuiper belt – including Pluto – is estimated to have a total mass of about 10% of Earth's mass.
44.
by marsten 1y ago
No wonder Varian is still here after all these years. A prepaid 99 year lease for $41k!
45.
by marsten 1y ago
Terman gets a bad rap because his father, Lewis Terman, was a proponent of eugenics. There used to be a Terman middle school in Palo Alto named after Frederick, but the bad association with the Terman name compelled them to rename it. Which
46.
by marsten 1y ago
I remember that! 237 was a country road through a lot of grassland. The only thing of note in that part of the bay was a few streets of houses in Alviso. Great America was surrounded by empty space when it was built.
47.
by marsten 1y ago
I think what may save Google from an Innovator's Dilemma extinction is that none of the AI would-be Google killers (OpenAI etc.) have figured out how to achieve any degree of lock-in. We're in a phase right now where everybody get
48.
by marsten 1y ago
> When I worked there Google routinely funded all kinds of things without even the foggiest idea of whether it was profitable or not. You're talking about small-money bets. The technical infrastructure group at Google makes a lot of
49.
by marsten 1y ago
Google was changed by two things, neither of which were much fun. But very understandable. One was the transition to a mature product line. In the early days it was about how do we do cool new things that will delight users: Gmail, Google M
50.
by marsten 1y ago
What do you think made Lenat work so secretively? I suspect his ideas could have advanced a lot quicker if he'd been plugged into the community, sharing and getting feedback. In research it's almost never a good move to pursue a d
51.
by marsten 1y ago
Given the secrecy surrounding Cyc we don't know how close or not they got to something AGI-like. Whatever conclusion you draw will be from very little data. From a practical standpoint Cycorp seems to have pivoted at least 10 years ago
52.
by marsten 1y ago
My own thought process is that it's like Usenet or arXiv: The collective value of Github is so high that even if Microsoft loses interest, someone else will buy it from them or clone the content elsewhere. That said, I do wish there wa
53.
by marsten 2y ago
This underscores the difficulty companies have trying to navigate through this. Even if Trump doesn't change his mind tomorrow, as he's liable to, he's only around for another four years and for most companies that's not
54.
by marsten 2y ago
It's a poem about self-deception, and Frost has cleverly extended that theme to encompass the reader. He clearly wrote it the way he did to invite an easy, comfortable interpretation, one that is blatantly contradicted by the very evid
55.
by marsten 2y ago
For an LLM conscious thought is the tokens in its context window, and subconscious thought is the training embedded in its parameters. A person thinks in a similar manner, with subconscious gut instincts modulated (more or less) by a thin v
56.
by marsten 2y ago
My shocking 23andMe story: I reached out to a guy on 23andMe that was a DNA relative (2nd cousin) and said hi. Curious how we were related, I gave him some family names going several generations back, and asked if any of them rang a bell in
57.
by marsten 2y ago
I got my start climbing at City Rock in the mid 90s when I was in grad school at Berkeley. It was a great place and really defined the model that other climbing gyms copied and built upon. Peter would also show up at Indian Rock sometimes,
58.
by marsten 2y ago
> But it shifts the need to memorize undefined behavior with the need to memorize the borrow checker rules. You have a choice: Fight the borrow checker on the front end until your code compiles, or chase down bugs on the back end from un
59.
by marsten 2y ago
No court in the land will agree with your interpretation. The first amendment protects speech, but it doesn't grant you the right to publish that speech wherever you want. If it did then Facebook couldn't ban people from its platf
60.
by marsten 2y ago
For the harder Euler problems you usually need a combination of mathematical insight and good coding technique. Each problem typically provides sample values for smaller instances of the problem, which you can confirm with a straightforward

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