owlbite

12 ms·

31.
by owlbite 1y ago
Trying to reduce high end processor performance to "operation X takes Y cycles" likely confuses the uninitiated more than it helps once you get beyond "cache miss bad". For the uninitiated, most high-performance CPUs of
32.
by owlbite 1y ago
Whenever we make our code faster the users just run bigger models :P.
33.
by owlbite 1y ago
Having "Mathematics for Computer Science" as a course title rubs me the wrong way, I always believed Computer Science was a specialized subfield of Mathematics.
34.
by owlbite 1y ago
My policy: If it's a real TODO, it includes the ticket number/link tracking the actual fix. Otherwise it should either be a regular comment or not exist.
35.
by owlbite 1y ago
I suspect it comes from raising flags/signals (literally as one might run a flag up a flag pole?) to indicates CPU conditions, and then that terminology getting propagated from hw to sw.
36.
by owlbite 1y ago
So we write a lot of code in this agnostic fashion using typedef's and clang's vector attribute support, along with __builtin_shufflevector for all the permutations (something along similar lines to Apple's simd.h). It works
37.
by owlbite 1y ago
They already are?
38.
by owlbite 1y ago
I mean, we could just throw them in jail and then sell their labor back to giant corporate entities for a fraction of minimum wage.
39.
by owlbite 1y ago
There is a significant asymmetry in the requirements: cheap attack drones only have to succeed once, cheap defense drones have to succeed every time (or intercept sufficiently far out that some more reliable backup can be deployed when they
40.
by owlbite 1y ago
Most math is more about definition, proof and structuring/relationships than about numbers. It is a bit of a joke among math students that numbers above 5 are effectively infinity, they crop up that rarely.
41.
by owlbite 1y ago
Because that's worked so well for PCs?
42.
by owlbite 1y ago
The biggest contrast for me between Oxbridge and another red brick was the Oxbridge tutors aren't shy of saying "You've not done the homework, go away and stop wasting my time", whereas the red brick approach was to pick
43.
by owlbite 2y ago
Having been involved in UK research labs before moving to industry, none of this surprises me. The government is more interested in short term headlines than long-term actually doing something. They'd rather make capital investments (w
44.
by owlbite 2y ago
Our first family computer was an A3000. I'm still amazed at the boot time on it compared to the PCs we had later (even today). Switch it on, beep and then almost instantly you're in a responsive GUI. (The wonders of storing the OS
45.
by owlbite 2y ago
I've also seen it explained that it's part of their toolset in extracting maximum "value" from a customer. Richer customers self-select to pay higher prices without the app as they can't be bothered faffing around t
46.
by owlbite 2y ago
I think my normal approach to coding is "Scrappy" followed by "Surgeon" i.e. get the thing that works done in simple code style and then apply a series of transformation to obtain something that is significantly more com
47.
by owlbite 2y ago
The scary thing for me is when they've got an 18 year old drone operator making shoot/no-shoot decision on the basis of some AI metadata analysis tool (phone A was near phone B, we shot phone B last week...). You end up with &quot
48.
by owlbite 2y ago
That's not forgetting the ability for them to just straight up 100% legally purchase a lot of this information from data brokers.
49.
by owlbite 2y ago
The concern is they won't be 17 forever. 5/10/20/30 years down the line some small portion of these kids are going to hold important jobs, and some of them will have worthwhile blackmail material in their tiktok history.
50.
by owlbite 2y ago
Source? Many companies seem to be stopping offering insurance in the state just fine! The most recent moves seem to be relaxing the pricing rules to allow major disaster pricing and recharging reinsurance rates in exchange for insurers offe
51.
by owlbite 2y ago
I did a PhD and about a decade in postdoc/early-career researcher posts before moving into tech. That was in Computational Mathematics, it was clear that the most successful people in the field were the ones who had found areas where t
52.
by owlbite 2y ago
Do we know if this was a bug in the beta releases of 15.2, or did it manifest only in the final version?
53.
by owlbite 2y ago
CPUs and GPUs are fundamentally aiming at different vertices of the performance polygon. CPUs aim to minimize latency (how many cycles have to pass before you can use a result), and do so by way of high clock frequencies, caches and fancy m
54.
by owlbite 2y ago
That quickly becomes unfeasible for things that are not single input (and still requires being able to identify a correct result).
55.
by owlbite 2y ago
Unless the underlying code has been designed specifically for it (at the cost of some lost performance), it is a somewhat unreasonable expectation for high performance numerical code to always return the same result across version changes.
56.
by owlbite 2y ago
Sometimes its more about numerical stability than absolute accuracy (numerical stability being defined as not have the property that small changes in input cause large changes in the output).
57.
by owlbite 2y ago
I feel the arbitrary split between code and weights makes little sense when discussing if these models are "open source" in the copyleft meaning of the term. If the average user can't meaningfully use your product without agr
58.
by owlbite 2y ago
KV-cache based LLM inference is normally significantly memory bound on the matrix-vector multiply. This is (part of) why the quantization-based approaches are so popular.
59.
by owlbite 2y ago
The title on the image is also a link to the actual map. Took me a while to figure it out too.
60.
by owlbite 2y ago
I'd go further and say automated average speed cameras are the most effective I've seen. Point speed cameras just get marked on a map and cause sudden braking and acceleration to dodge them - this can be effective at particular

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