Symmetry

7 ms·

1.
by Symmetry 12d ago
Hasn't OpenAI had a number of people responsible for security quit in the last year over not getting support from leadership?
2.
by Symmetry 12d ago
At the end of pretraining, where the AI has been trainied to predict the next token over a humongous corpus of human text, that's basically all the wanting that exists in the AI. But then the AI undergoes posttraining and is rewarded
3.
by Symmetry 14d ago
It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever. Again, this article isn't about whether we should produce plastic but how we should dispose of it once its collecte
4.
by Symmetry 14d ago
There's a very nice park near where I live that used to be a landfill. Space isn't really a concern. https://maps.app.goo.gl/vCeyDb9tbm29zr549 It's much more the case that we ship plastic to be recycled to o
5.
by Symmetry 14d ago
The article mentions the energy benefits from recycling aluminium but fails to mention the also large (but not as large) savings from recycling glass. Please recycle your aluminium and glass even if it's probably wiser to throw out pl
6.
by Symmetry 14d ago
But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them. Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world. Since we can&#x2
7.
by Symmetry 28d ago
The patent making Lenovo's Trackpoints better than imitators (US5570111A) expired back in 2020 but everybody keeps making touchpad-only laptops. :/
8.
by Symmetry 1mo ago
More to the point x86 instruction streams aren't self-synchronizing. There are cases where you can read one valid stream of x86 instructions starting at byte X, but another completely different one starting at byte X+1. Apart from th
9.
by Symmetry 1mo ago
Essentially every cell phone out there has a VLIW DSP like Qualcomm's Hexagon cores (though AFAIK Qualcomm is the only one who lets you run your on programs on their DSP).
10.
by Symmetry 1mo ago
Between the Mason-Dixon line and the opposite latitude in Brazil it was more Malaria, Yellow Fever, and other mosquito born diseases rather than smallpox that did most of the killing. Malaria alone is responsible for about 5% of all human
11.
by Symmetry 3mo ago
There actually wasn't any appreciable fallout after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Fallout is mostly generated when a bomb explodes close to the ground so that its neutrons are able to reach and transmute that ground into rad
12.
by Symmetry 3mo ago
It's unfortunate that we only have one vocabulary for radiation to cover both a 100 uS dose of fallout and a 10 S one. If a quantity of rock drops on someone we have different words like "pebble" and "boulder" that
13.
by Symmetry 3mo ago
At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way in humans.
14.
by Symmetry 3mo ago
Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a
15.
by Symmetry 3mo ago
The spectrum is the big thing. If they wanted a revenue stream they could just buy bonds.
16.
by Symmetry 3mo ago
I wish they wouldn't call these "open source" models. The output weights are open but that's more analogous to a binary. The source would be the training data and techniques that went into producing the binary/wei
17.
by Symmetry 3mo ago
Except for a brief spike during Covid unemployment has been below 5% for a long time which has led to more wage growth for cooks and waiters than for programmers.
18.
by Symmetry 4mo ago
In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water used in bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication has a lot m
19.
by Symmetry 4mo ago
Not if you first absorb heat with your solar panels. Conservation of energy and all that.
20.
by Symmetry 4mo ago
Yeah. I don't have any doubts that this is something that can be done. But doing it cheaply enough to be worth while is the difficult bit. Elon does have reputation for delivering impressive things, but not for finishing them on t
21.
by Symmetry 4mo ago
Nobody (sane) is talking about putting nuclear reactors on Satellites in close Earth orbit so we don't have to worry about them generating heat. They've got solar panels that move some of the solar energy they absorb to a central
22.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
Selenian Boondocks did a whole series on Venus and what could be usefully extracted from the atmosphere a decade back. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/
23.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
.03ns is a frequency of 33 GHz. The chip doesn't actually clock that fast. What I think you're seeing is the front end detecting the idiom and directing the renamer to zero that register and just remove that instruction from the
24.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
There's been a lot of churn over the years but additions being done in the same timeframe as XORs has been pretty constant. The Pentium 4 double pumped its ALU but both XORs and ADDs could happen in a half cycle latency. The POWER 6
25.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
For a 32 bit number you're looking at going from using 256 to ~1800 transistors in the operation itself. A modern core will have roughly 1,000,000,000 transistors. Some of those are for vector operations that aren't involved in
26.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
Right. Keeping down the number of slots the scheduler and bypass network need to worry about is an important design pressure.
27.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
There's a structure called a carry-bypass adder[1] that lets you add two numbers in O(√n) time for only O(n) gates. That or a similar structure is what modern CPUs use and they allow you two add two numbers in a single clock cycle whi
28.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
That's all true, but on any modern x86 processor both the single pair of gates for the xor and the 10 or so for a carry-bypass 64 bit wide subtraction both happen with a single clock cycle of latency so from a programmer's perspec
29.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
There's only a few grams of hydrogen in the reactor's plasma, it's reaction with oxygen wouldn't be much more exciting than just losing containment. There are engineering challenges that have to be addressed but no wors
30.
by Symmetry 5mo ago
"Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection...except for the problem of too many levels of indirection."

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