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pptr

104 karma · joined August 13, 2021

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pptr··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
You can only make money if you produce value. If you stop producing value because your old industries decline/collapse and you miss out on new industries, your wealth will trend towards that of a third world country.
pptr··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
Right, but that negative externality is on emissions. For emissions it doesn't really matter who is producing the oil.
pptr··on ARC-AGI-3
Let's say an agent needs to do 10 brain surgeries on a human to remove a tumor and a human doctor can do it in a single surgery. I would prefer the human.

"steps" are important to optimize if they have negative externalities.

pptr··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
(Based on AI research) fossile fuel production takes a few years to recoup investment. Only refineries seem quite long term (15-20 years). I'm sure the companies have projections about future demand to decide which projects are worth pursuing. If they miscalculate, the oil companies loose money (oh no! /s). Anyway, you won't loose money on this.

There is of course also an argument about national security, not being at the whim of some Iranian dictator. So some form of government investment would be justified, but not necessary IMO.

pptr··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
Voters in the US have the ability to actually change the course of their country. Voters can say they want Obama or Trump in charge and the government has to obey that choice.

In Europe you only have the same parties/"uniparty" in power all the time. Many people never had a representative they voted for.

I understand the nuance about the US voting system. But when I look at the outcomes, the US seems way more democratic than Europe.

Re gas demand: Renewables are cheaper than fossile fuels. They will obviously win out in a free market. No subsidies needed.

pptr··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
This really seems like a nothing burger.

The $1B were a refund. Net exchange ~$0.

Building out fossile fuel production shifts oil revenue from various dictatorships around the world to the US in this case. That's a good thing. I wish we in Europe produced more gas ourselves instead of being highly dependent on other countries.

This does not mean higher gas demand, which is what matters for CO2 reduction.

pptr··on BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal
They only had to comply with EU laws when they were already a big player in China. EU manufacturers need their new vehicles to be compliant on day one. That is, if they want to launch in the EU market first. Audi recently launched a China-only car (AUDI E5 Sportback).
pptr··on Meta scrambling 'war rooms' of engineers to figure out DeepSeek's AI
What is different about Deepseek's use of MoE vs all the other MoE models that makes training more efficient?

FP8 training and GRPO make sense to me, but that only gets you a 4x improvement total, right?

pptr··on Authors seek Meta's torrent client logs and seeding data in AI piracy probe
If you don't, your geopolitical adversary might be the first to build AGI.

So in this scenario I could see it become necessary from a military perspective.

pptr··on Ask HN: Is there an Anti-EU sentiment from big tech?
Right, and that regulation has a cost. I hope it's worth it.
pptr··on Ask HN: Is there an Anti-EU sentiment from big tech?
The mere existence of regulation is part of the problem. Without precise understanding of the law, you don't know if your use cases are fine/excempted. The safe default assumption is that your site is not compliant with regulations until you can prove otherwise, involving a lawyer.
pptr··on Ask HN: Is there an Anti-EU sentiment from big tech?
Once you have a technological breakthrough that requires lots of exploration to figure out which products will succeed, regulation is a competitive disadvantage.

For established industries regulation just increases prices. ... Until a new technology comes up that allows new competitors to enter the market. Like Tesla, SpaceX.

pptr··on C++ is an absolute blast
If you declare using an invalidated iterator as UB, the compiler can optimize as if the container was effectively immutable during the loop.
pptr··on Firefox removes "do not track" feature support
Ignoring it means you need to get explicit consent, which is what the websites are already doing.
pptr··on Can Europe build its first trillion-dollar startup?
But then you don't have a company that can afford to build a 100b training cluster for example. If that becomes the new sota you are again left behind.
pptr··on Why pay for a search engine
When I do a Google search for the example query "postgresql query analysis" on mobile chrome (no ad block), I get 0 ads. Same thing if I select the "Example" filter as shown in the demo image.
pptr··on Good Retry, Bad Retry
Ideally you can only retry error codes where it is guaranteed that no backend logic has executed yet. This prevents retry amplification. It also has the benefit that you can retry all types of RPCs, including non-idempotent ones. One example is if the server reports that it is overloaded and can't serve requests right now (loadshedding).

Without retry amplification you can do retries ASAP, which has much better latency. No exponential backoff required.

Retrying deadline exceeded errors seems dangerous. You are amplifying the most expensive requests, so even if you only retry 20% of all RPCs, you could still 10x server load. Ideally you can start loadshedding before the server grinds to a halt (which we can retry without risk of amplification). Having longer RPC deadlines helps the server process the backlog without timeouts. That said, deadline handling is a complex topic and YMMV depending on the service in question.

pptr··on AlphaChip transformed computer chip design
It's 6% shorter wire length. Hardly an infinite compute glitch.
pptr··on New California law requires one-click subscription cancellations
App store subscriptions are pretty easy to cancel.
pptr··on Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning
The loop itself is claimed to be the problem. It doesn't matter whether you use an AR or non-AR model. They both have a certain error probability that gets amplified in each iteration.
pptr··on Ever used Google Chrome in incognito mode? You could be entitled to up to $5k
The incognito icon seems like a great analogy to me.

A person that hides the face with glasses and hat can still be tracked via CCTV, etc., but the data can't easily be associated to the public persona.

pptr··on CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office
One argument I heard is that junior team members benefit from others being in the office.

So there might be a long term benefit to the team, even if individual productivity of high performers goes down slightly.

pptr··on Go 1.23 Released
I think the key difference is that in a loop body you can return from the outer function. In a function passed to m.Range you can't.
pptr··on US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button
App stores solved this problem long ago without any help from the government.
pptr··on Tesla's Sales in Europe Fall to a 15-Month Low
Just because the EU wants to ban gas cars in the future doesn't mean there is demand for EVs today. It's called an unpopular decision.
pptr··on "Privacy may be an anomaly", says Google's Vint Cerf (2013)
The data is stored in people's brains for a lifetime. The data is worthless afterwards, so this is indefinite storage for all intents and purposes. Law enforcement can retrieve the information by asking for it.
pptr··on Tech startup connects to two satellites in orbit from Earth via Bluetooth
That's pretty impressive, but it also has me worried.

Does this mean you could eavesdrop all Bluetooth connections from a single satellite?

pptr··on Monorepos: Please Don't (2019)
How do you share config files, protobuf schema, etc. between frontend and backend if you have different repos for each?

I have only worked in large codebases with monorepo, so I'm curious.

pptr··on Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla's fleet into AWS for AI – would it work?
I assume there will be revenue sharing between Tesla and the car owner. Tesla can't force people to give them electricity for free.
pptr··on Meta MTIA v2 – Meta Training and Inference Accelerator
What is worth solving in your opinion? Should they not make their service more efficient?

I assume this helps reduce their server and electricity costs. At a certain scale these things pay off.

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