321 karma · joined March 23, 2017
I wonder though if Google isn't so worried about the viability of their coding AIs and have a longer term view than simply providing coding aids. This might also be indicated by their recent $40B investment in Anthropic, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/google-to-invest-up-to-40-bi...
...Only time will tell!
Hope the paper gets lots of references and the technique gets a lot of use to save power and time.
There's been several potential big changes for LLM inference efficiency over the last few months. There's been Attention Sequencing (I think it's called..?) Turbo Quant and this one.
Interesting times.
I was wondering what would be involved in getting it to work with GGUF files, rather than safetensor files...
Should I delete the issue since its not their article?
I have a much larger screed in another part of the tree of comments too. It's a case of braindump, TLDR.
There are multitudes of neuro research projects using animals as test subjects that could save a lot of money using a tool like this. If the research project is able to use a device like this rather than a human verified device. From my limited knowledge, these projects do their best to be very kind to the animals being tested. A device like this wouldn't need to be enclosed within the animal, so less risk of harm right away.
In Africa, clever locals built a humidy crib from car parts. It ended up not working as a product, but a great idea. In the link below, its celebrated as a commercial failure to learn from.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140430-why-bad-inventio...
There's another affordable humidy crib that won a design competition here, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/dec/25/i...
I think EEGs (Electro EncepheloGraph) can produce a far more detailed, brain related view of what an ECG (Electro CardioGraphs) can produce. An EEG can of course look into many other brain related functions and issues.
Creating a low cost version of an EEG will hopefully at least provide some thoughts to the engineers of commercial EEGs.
Commercial, medically verified devices are tied down in many ways...
- Full checks of the software and hardware design,
- backwards interoperability and compatibility for devices and their connections over their lifespan
- A full medically based software/hardware quality check,
- Providing very detailed documentation,
- doing a full test cycle around every device,
- Interacting with doctors and health experts to fully characterise the domain and typical device use. This is great to do as an engineer, but is expensive for the company :-)
- Older (often slower) more fully field verified/trusted chips for any logic are used, since they have a large measure of reliability, reducing the risk you'd get from new products.
The list above is from memory. Engineering around devices like this become part of the culture of the company. Each region (US, Europe, Oceania) have their own requirements and levels of completeness. The big market for any medical product is the US. It's FDA in the past has been the most important regulatory body to satisfy to allow access to the US market. Several other markets use the FDA as a base for their own standards too.
This process takes several years and millions to complete. Its a very necessary step. Think of the Therac 25, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 . The mistakes in this device design caused fatalities.
I used to work for Cochlear. Their devices have had some issues, but overall I think they have a very good record. The verification/quality checks outlined above are super necessary.
Anther Oz company Telectronics, built many pacemakers and unfortunately made a design mistake in the choice of material for a lead feeding the part of the device that fed the therapeutic current to the patient. After time, the lead cracked. Failure of physical integrity in a fully enclosed medical device is quite a bad failure mode. I believe The company lost 75% of its share price overnight when the issue was reported. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telectronics
When this device becomes fully wireless, its risk will drop somewhat.
This project is awesome also as a teaching tool for people wanting to join companies that make medical products. They'll be able to look over a modern design and discover what's involved.
Please jump in and make any additions or corrections to the above.
https://github.com/Cerelog-ESP-EEG/ESP-EEG/issues/1
A quick look over the other links looks like they're okay, follow them instead for the moment.
I believe that birds brains are kind of uniquely advanced too. Lightweight (in terms of mass) structured differently to mammalian brains... I've heard a definition of sight as "a bit of the brain popping out for a look". I wonder if the same brain density tricks bird brains use are used in some parts of their vision system. This is all as my memory serves. Feel free to correct any mistakes in my understanding.
There's some very interesting work happening to understand their calls too. If (my) memory serves, there able to identify particular call types quite well now.
If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less!
Fascinating to also think that birds are of course evolved dinosaurs. Raptors of the sky. It would be fascinating to link whats being looked at here with any kind of data that can be pulled from fossil evidence (though there might not be much...). I wonder which unique bird genetic traits were useful or super enhanced dinosaur traits.
...I think the strong but light bone structure was something inherited from the dinosaurs too? Fascinating creatures.
On the face of it, seems sensible that avian evolution has spent many genetic GPU cycles to generate advanced vision needed to fly and hunt from the air.... One wonders which "subroutines" have been reused from dino-days, as mentioned.
Perhaps running pumps that move around coolant passing over the cubes of GPUs? ..
That would be extra weight/cost into orbit though...
Also, don't solar panels have reduced efficiency when they're hot? And having anything hot surely increases failure rates.. with metals getting closer to melting points...?
I wonder sometimes if the role of architect in a business might be about having a group/team wide senior person who
- Knows how to architect systems very well and can share that knowledge with the larger group and more junior devs - Is a kind of high level business analyst who can speak "business, stuff that makes money" and "dev, how it's done" to each of those groups effectively
Does Google/Atlassian miss out on things by not having system architects? ... Or can they achieve what's needed by having sensible team rules (so architecture gets followed) and relatively standard reusable architectures (so it's not too hard to adapt to a given business solution).
I'd be genuinely interested to know. My aspiration was to become an architect, but I now wonder if this is the right way to go.
Does anyone keep a DB somewhere of open source project names?
I think it would be better to give the code fork a different name.... And maybe move it off Github!!
I guess in theory, the original question is whether this project allows a board to be sent of for construction at a company that makes and populates boards. Yes, you could do this if you wanted to. As numpad0 has said though, it's early days for these boards and if you wanted to do something commercially reliable, you will most likely run into issues with things not being completely tested on these boards yet.
These boards provide the ability to make your own boards to host the chipsets yourself, rather than relying on a third party providing the board. So what? What if you want USB-C? What if you want to make a square or a circular board? This project is a good step along the way to allowing you to make these kinds of things.
On the hobbyist and corporate side, they also provide a way to provide a modern design that can use USB-C, which is becoming very common and is better than older USB options.
As mentioned in the README.md "Available Development Boards" section, the Atmega16u2 chip was hard to come by for Hanqaqa in 2023. The Arduino guys (arduino.com ?) probably did a "lifetime buy" of these comms chips and they probably also have several shelves of fully built Arduino boards as well. Lifetime buys and keeping good stock levels mitigate the risk of difficulty building new boards... Just get one of the older working ones off the shelf and send it. However, for an organisation (even an open source board that becomes fairly popular) wanting to build their own board, not having a given comms chip is a problem. Replacing it with a commonly available one makes it much easier for people/companies wanting to build these boards in any kind of numbers.
Having the board design readily available is really useful for the reasons above. It does seem like overkill if you just want to fiddle with a board, but if you make something that becomes popular that needs any kind of hardware adjustment, having the design becomes almost essential.
Wonderful that there's a Free version of these designs out there. The bugs and kinks will get sorted out over time.
But I'd love it if it could run in SQLite3. The stored functions and procedures here are neat, but I wonder if they could be turned into views and combinations of built in functions...
I think triggers can do nearly everything that a stored procedure does, perhaps with a little bit more fiddling. I sometimes make "parameter tables" where I insert all the necessary data and a trigger does what effectively a stored proc does.
Maybe there'd need to be a few imported functions? I wonder if an AI could be persuaded...
Laurie does an amazing job of reimagining Google's strange job optimisation technique (for jobs running on hard disk storage) that uses 2 CPUs to do the same job. The technique simply takes the result of the machine that finishes it first, discarding the slower job's results... It seems expensive in resources, but it works and allows high priority tasks to run optimally.
Laurie re-imagines this process but for RAM!! In doing this she needs to deal with Cores, RAM channels and other relatively undocumented CPU memory management features.
She was even able to work out various undocumented CPU/RAM settings by using her tool to find where timing differences exposed various CPU settings.
She's turned "Tailslayer" into a lib now, available on Github, https://github.com/LaurieWired/tailslayer
You can see her having so much fun, doing cool victory dances as she works out ways of getting around each of the issues that she finds.
The experimentation, explanation and graphing of results is fantastic. Amazing stuff. Perhaps someone will use this somewhere?
As mentioned in the YT comments, the work done here is probably a Master's degrees worth of work, experimentation and documentation.
Go Laurie!
It would be great if Linux was able to do simple chroot jails and run tests inside of them before releasing software. In this case, it looks like the whole build process would need to be done in the jail. Tools like lxroot might do enough of what chroot on BSD does.
It seems like software tests need to have a class of test that checks whether any of the components of an application have been compromised in some way. This in itself may be somewhat complex...
We are in a world where we can't assume secure operation of components anymore. This is kinda sad, but here we are....
Has anyone tried doing this on ReactOS? I know this is a touch DIY, but it would be interesting to know if Win sofware could be built on ReactOS...
I hope they've got good heat sinks... and I hope they've plugged into renewable energy feeds...
If you're running on Linux, adjust the qemu call to use alsa rather than coreaudio.
I generated a pull request for this on Github. If the author is happy enough with my verbose shell scripting style :-) it might get included.
It is standing on the shoulders of giants (all of the compilers of the past, built into it's training data... and the recent learnings about getting these agents to break up tasks) to get itself going. Still fairly impressive.
On a side-quest, I wonder where Anthropic is getting there power from. The whole energy debacle in the US at the moment probably means it made some CO2 in the process. Would be hard to avoid?
Interesting that he's got as far as he has with this issue. I don't think you can run a company effectively if you don't deal in truth.
Some of his videos have seemed quite bizarre as well, quite sarcastic about concerns people have about AI in general.
I'd be interested to find out how biodegradable the non-paper parts are...
Has any thought been given to what happens if a kid swallows one of these batteries? I'm wondering if they're better or worse than swallowing a typical tiny cell battery.
These kinds of displays probably are cheaper? ..though OLEDs certainly have economies of scale on their side...
Please comment if any of the above fits with some known devices?
...On the artistic side, this font looks great and could be super useful for building soft prototypes of devices... Which kind of loops back to the reason this font was released is because these devices are still perhaps quite well used?