convolvatron

I'm anti IP in theory and practice. If this results in undermining vengeful protection of the Annas and the Aarons of the world, I'm all for it. But it's not, is it. If the corpus and the models were all free, that would be lovely, and qualitatively quite different.

but its not, the old IP model is still intact, except these guys get an exception. and they get to scream bloody murder about distillation. they get to use their massive funding to try to draw a moat around that knowledge and expression with the goal of rent seeking from this point onwards. I'm not supposed to be able to access the original works anymore, but instead the proprietary, newly biased, blender output that contains a little bit of it.

also not at fan of what its doing to the creative process, but you're right here. that's on us for being so easily seduced and not being able to limit ai usage to solving rote problems instead of creative ones.

maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.

Im mildly confused as well, there is an even more immediate shortcut that I've certainly implemented before. in arp its not unusual to to just create a ip->mac binding from the source information in the ethernet header. where this potentially breaks down if we start looking at issues of trust. but its already the case in ND that we trust the endpoint to have executed the state machine to search for duplicates. so what's preventing us from doing the same thing here? maybe just layering concerns?

oh. I'm talking about authoring OS and boot loaders from an absolute blank slate. like starting from the world where you toggled them in from switches, and later by burning proms

until very recently you couldn't even do OS development without a boot loader, so asserting that that would be the last thing you would write is just nonsensical

in the bad olden times you definitely started to write your operating system for your new computer from the first instruction executed upwards. it wasn't at all common to have a comprehensive virtualization/simulation environment.

I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack.

for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.

in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.

having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.

general issues aside, for me one of the issues with emacs is that for historical reasons there is a cut between elisp and C that's really high up and pretty ragged. ideally a large composable lisp project like emacs would have a very accessible continuum between the surface and the underpinnings.

so I don't think one can achieve that by maintaining 100% compatibility. a much smaller base system build with better semantics that was notionally compatible would be something I would be really excited to contribute to.

yes, it can be easier to have a central serializer for events, but that certainly makes things problematic for fault tolerance and basically excludes large-scale solutions. using an agreed-upon post-hoc ordering based on timestamps is certainly another way, but really only if you're working in a paradigm that lets you impose it (like mvcc) or doesn't care (like crdt).

personally I find when you view events in a distributed system as a partial order, its more liberating than confusing. its not unusual to assume that there is some kind of canonical event ordering that we have to preserve, when its often just not semantically important. so its a useless constraint that can impose complexity and limit the solution space. the partial ordering exposes the real causal constraints.

fwiw I think it would reduce a lot of friction for the end user and probably increase utilization quite a bit. my new take on this problem is to arrange that shared resources are dynamically associated with your environment, rather than being assembled into one giant shared environment. so that if you run a program on your laptop that uses large scale compute resources, those remote threads see the same OS view that a local thread would. still not a business but I think potentially valuable. its strange how many solutions fall into that space.

to me the goal of having 'ps' show everything in the cluster is kind of cute at best.

but yes, right now you install all kinds of services and support nodes, and distributed filesystems, and orchestration tools and software management tools and job schedulers. every cluster is a bespoke mess that takes a large staff to maintain and is always broken.

this is kind of the projection of web software onto hpc clusters.

in the 90s it wasn't nearly as hard to run a supercomputer because it was an integrated software platform. they were still a lot dodgier than the needed to be. but you could run a 64k node system with one support person, and there weren't really very many support tickets because things just mostly worked.

but I certainly can't imagine trying to do a company that solves this problem. or I should say I keep trying to and just seeing failure. part of the issue is that the people that you are selling to are personally and monetarily invested in the status quo. I don't think they _want_ to relieved of the burden of messing around with Kubernetes all the time, and having distributed filesystems that need to be nursed all the time, or having provisioning tools that have a 80% success rate and take hours to spin up a node.

I did a research SSI in the early 2000s. After getting it largely to work, we kind of put it aside. Why would we aspire to using 'ps' and 'ls' and 'mount' and such to manage our large scale systems? surely there was a better model.

20 years later people are still sshing into nodes to fuss around, and treating cluster nodes like pets. it still could be done pretty easily, I guess its not really in anyone's interest to invest the 2 years it would take. there is a lot more money to be made nibbling around the edges of the problem.

I don't think the neuro-symbolic model is going to dumb anything down at all. Cyc didn't end up producing anything useful, but the only reason an llm is able to do math at all is that it can keep throwing stuff at lean all day. personally I think that that synthesis will turn out to be more powerful than just llm with constraints, but I don't really work work in the field either.

I think the point is even stronger. alignment is really not very well defined, nor are the mechanisms used to provide it. from what I understand it's more of a statistically imposed bias than an impenetrable gate.

personally I would like to flip this around, all of this is a consequence of some really extreme notions about investment. its a tail-wagging-the-dog. the investment community is apparently in love with the idea of an AI-scale vehicle in and of itself. given the amount of power they have, this is funneling a massive amount of resources into something that while really very interesting, probably would never be able to realize proportionate gains without taking down the system that built it. what's the societal control on that.

my only argument here is that there isn't really any reason to avoid going through an emissions review if required. or to require that scrubbers be installed if necessary. the decision to just make an exception to the process for datacenters is more of a political statement about deregulation than anything else.

idk where you've been but the standard for AI datacenters buildouts right now is power-plant size turbine operations up to 1GW in size. not 2KVA Honda generators. notably they are single cycle and not combined cycle used in actual plants which requires burning up to 3x the methane for the same power output. none of this is a big secret.

no, we already abolished all rule making and review about CO2, this is removing the EPA requirement to install scrubbers for removal of NO and NO2 given sufficiently large outputs, which cause acid rain and are linked to respiratory problems. of course it all depends on the dose, which is why there there is a review process, which I guess was just too inconvenient

wow. that's really quite backwards. the more money you raise and the more money you want, the bigger the story you have to tell. apparently after 1T you've got to raise the stakes to extinction level event.

I struggled a little bit reading this. but I think your point is valid. if we are actually advancing the field then we should just be unconditionally happy. ignoring the attribution issue, there is a real concern that the process of math has been somewhat undermined. so we have a giant lean proof that shows that there is a solution to an important problem. but we didn't find the solution, and we didn't get it expressed in such a way that it helps develop the common language of mathematics, and thus isn't a very useful building block for later work (like the actual solution).

the math people seem to really keep an eye on what's important, so I'm sure this isn't going to lead to fields medalists hanging around in dive bars all afternoon stretching out cheap pitchers of beer. but this is kind of a slop problem.

I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total number of records made it pretty feasible that it was the whole thing.

the fact that traditional database infrastructure handles many people's needs doesn't really obviate dataflow style architectures. personally I think (3) composition is a real potential win. I would also note that streaming is a really great base on which to build a distributed database that looks more like Postgres on top.

I guess I'm mostly confused about the idea that streaming systems should be trying to supplant sql databases, or that a failure to do so implies that they don't have utility. it looks like the GP has done some really interesting work on automatic parallelism. that isn't pointless just because most people building operational systems still reflexively reach for PG.

there is a couple good arguments that alternative front ends open up competition. the first is that since people only see the front end, then augmenting that with additional backends is lower friction. the other is that since network effects are so important (people only go to the busy clubs), that providing a bridge to the existing users and content is kind of mandatory for someone trying to promote an alternative.

it certainly seems to be. if it were just a matter of noise, or discharging contaminated water, or waste gasses we're supposed to have rules for these things. any facility that does these things is supposed to adhere to them.

so the issue isn't about data centers at all, but the fact that we've decided to stop enforcing even minimal environmental standards.

water consumption is another one, we just haven't done a very good of realizing that its a limited resource and trying to manage it.

the other is raising electrical rates. it should just be a real problem to raise rates to pay for Capex for other non-residential customers.

those are all real issues. 'people are going to get screwed' is a culture war thing, particularly if their opinion seems to be against environmental regulation as a matter of course. if a data center isn't noisy and polluting, and doesn't impact water or electrical consumption, then there is no sane reason to be against it. there are data centers that use close loop cooling. there are those that don't effect your rates. there are ones that are not really close to residences.

two doors down from my shop is an antique bently restorer. he's sold a few, but he still has 5 frames that he's working on. after all the custom panel and interior work and chasing after the few remaining parts available in all kinds of odd international corners he's still quite underwater.

ok, so we managed to get a decision that the president wan't immune from having to pay out in a civil suit related to the molestation of a woman from before he even became a politician. but part of the problem here is the blurring of the personal and the official. should the president be liable for overtly violating the constitution 'while performing official acts'. Is interfering in the state's right to hold their own elections an official act? is instructing the military to order someone in cold blood an official act? does pursuing a series of novel legal interpretations imply that he was violating the law or not? is accepting money in exchange for a presidential pardon an official act?

whether or not you believe this is a pass from the Supreme Court, it opens up a whole new unexplored space of lack of culpability.

its substantially worse than that. anytime anyone uses the word 'scale' without even saying what kind of scaling they mean is guilty of eroding the discourse. at this point I don't think we should even be talking about scaling without meaning 'the Amdahl residual'

we can probably generalize and say that anything that's a culture war issue has become disconnected with useful actionable reality.

are you off by a K? from the article - 'As of early August, ERCOT was considering more than 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the Texas electric grid, about 90% of which came from data center projects.'

idk why Meta has to be the one to decide. I'm not suggesting that everyone carefully curate their own feed rules, but we could certainly choose to adopt packages from people and institutions that we trust, and be able to revisit those decision later.

Meta is actually a horrible crime against humanity. They have immense power be being the gatekeeper of all information. They did it by intermediating themselves in the relationships we keep with our families, our friends, and the institutions that are close to use like schools and churches, and our communities in general.

I agree with you that any alternative has to be equally as convenient. Idk that open access is in and of itself a solution, but at least would provide a bridge to having alternate solutions. If the alternative is just to cede control of my information input to Meta forever, I can't fault any effort to try.

it seems like this whole discussion, both the proposed law and EFFs full throated support for social media giants is getting lost in the weeds.

we used to have a small number of media outlets for structural reasons. and we were concerned enough about their ability to filter what everyone saw that we tried to pass some laws that's weren't very useful or effective

now that the structural barriers are gone, do we see a greater diversity of editorial decision making, a greater number of channels in which to learn about the world. we could easily have a world where every single person could parameterize their own agents or choose from sets of parameters to present customized views on the sea of information available.

instead we see a massive concentration of control. instead of trying to legislate the behavior of a company whose entire profit is based on manipulating the narrative we all see, shouldn't we be promoting alternatives? if we are going to legislate meta instead of picking one little aspect maybe demand instead that some of of the core functions like data and identity be open access?