robotresearcher

Some people react to the disease by dying.

Some horse barns put little fishes in the drinking water troughs. The fish eat the larvae. The horses ignore the fish.

Copyrights protect the literal text of your program and binaries. Not the design and functionality. Getting Sherlocked is having your functionality duplicated, independent of the code itself.

No one thinks Apple violated Sherlock copyright. They just made it (nearly) functionally redundant.

Touch screens are tricky for some people with motor control issues.

> This article was drafted with AI from my outline

Maybe just post your human outline and the data, where the data processing and viz is AI assisted if you like.

The synthetic prose is not a value-add over your outline. It takes time to read, and reduces the bit-rate over your intentions.

A ‘Registered Limited Company’, as in ‘Widgets Ltd.’. Per the ‘Limited Liability Companies Act’ of 1855.

What on earth are emotions, feelings and motives that are not functional? We created all those words to compactly describe the observed behavior of people and other animals, including ourselves. And now we’re applying them to machines. These are functional descriptions, always have been.

If you normalize those numbers for the cost of operating in Mississippi vs New York City, the gap is way smaller.

The chief costs for schools are salaries and premises, both of which are highly location dependent.

The argument, quoted by the GP, is about improperly restrained seats. They are only talking about those.

Humans are restrained by seatbelts, which are checked by cabin crew.

You need that to do drag and drop with one mouse-down and one mouse-up.

Given that, the designer can decide if that’s an exception and everything else requires click-to-focus before being interactive, or to use focus-follows-mouse. People really seem to have individual preferences on this, so there’s no one right answer.

Those sentences are perfectly precise. Yes they are sensitive to the commas, just as they are to the whitespace and spelling.

Storage access isn’t, though. You have to read every byte of a (non-sorted) file to find words in it. And whether it’s disk or RAM, the bandwidth is usually a key constraint.

That’ll be just as true for an ASIC NN as it is for good ole grep.

Sometimes. Other times you get the Feynman Lectures.

So you don't want the top scientists, engineers and thinkers training the next generation? And you don't want popular sexy things subsidizing inventing new things that haven't had time to be popular yet?

How do you think we arrived at the current model?

Ah. That’s an unusual thing to mean by ‘coin flip’!

The coin flip method you describe breaks the same-query same-server locality (unless adding or removing servers) that is one motivation for the consistent hashing method.

You could solve that by storing the new-query flip result, but the goal was reducing storage…

Not foolish. The constraint of no-need-for-globally-consistent-state is so important and rules out so many approaches that it was well worth stating in the article.

Indeed the statistical model described in the article does not model the distribution over server hash allocations you'd get if you allow them to be inconsistent across load balancer hosts, so the model actually models (and thus implies) a single global source of truth that they probably don't have in practice.

Customers often want to pay less, and shareholders often want lower capital costs. A tasteful optimization is a win-win. The opportunity cost should be traded off against new features of course, but tasteful optimization is a good thing for customers.

Ok, let’s talk apples to apples. I’ll talk about RAM instead of disk, and I have a workload example for you.

As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then then a high end personal workstation (not big iron or server rack gear).

The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars. Just the RAM.

The maxed out Mac Studio today, with 256GB of RAM is $10,800, including an upgrade to max RAM of $4K. This machine smokes the Sparc 5 so hard it’s not even funny (as does my phone, of course). The RAM on this frontier workstation is 1/10 the price of my student workstation’s RAM, and more than a thousand times larger.

It is simply not true, however you cast it, that storage (static or dynamic) has never been more expensive.

We can talk about bloated installs without saying stuff that is not at all true. It’s good to know our history. You can call it pedantry, I just prefer true things.

RAM is ~10,000 times cheaper for today’s workstation purchasers per byte, or ~ten times cheaper for max-out-that-bastard, which normalizes for technical progress.

No, the parameters are updated online as new run-time data comes in. Infinite different param values over time, but a constant number of params. It's a stretch really, since by this usage a one-parameter model that updates itself is also infinite over time...

From a quick look at the paper it seems they are showing how to update weights online via projection through a smaller matrix like a dynamic version of LoRA. That's weights changing, and not the architecture or training approach. Weights aren't the currency of research, they are the currency of a training run. This paper itself adds an architectural extension.

No one claimed those things you’re arguing against. The claim is simply that storage has never been more expensive.

A Macintosh 128K with a FLOPPY DRIVE cost $7,500 in inflation adjusted dollars.

Can we please take a view of today that’s in a context of more than a few years? It would really help perspective sometimes.

> when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.

Most expensive it's been for a handful of years.

1TB of spinny disk cost a million dollars as recently as 1994, and half a billion dollars in 1980.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

> one of the best parts of vacations is actually planning it

For some. Others hate or fear it. For others it just feels like work.

If you’re satisfied using a third party bootloader, and one exists, there’s no point writing one ever.

You probably want to use a working bootloader to see if your ‘hello world’ OS-fragment works at all. No one is writing much OS without running it, surely.

The problem with that approach is that “how do I handle this query”, and “did I handle that query ok” are both AI-hard problems, and must be tackled near the user, where the large model is not.

It also requires a relatively complex distributed architecture.

I worry about how successful they can be with this approach, in terms of best user experience.

See also:

Power steering

Jet engines

Anesthetics

Rubber tires

Flat screen TVs

How grubby of them to take a high end feature and make it more affordable.

You do. ASML, ARM, Linux (originally), Spotify, Logitech. Novartis, Astra Zenica.