webdevver

as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)

maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.

a similar (?) scandal happened in China, for which 2 people faced execution, alongside some very lengthy prison sentences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

its funny how writing games in C is now seen as some kind of 'hardcore mode', despite the fact that a huge number of excellent titles up to and including the 2000s were written that way.

the core of games tend to be a 'world sim' of sorts, with a special case for when a select entity within the world sim gets its inputs from the user.

where C becomes a chore is the UI, probably has to do with how theres many more degrees of freedom (both in terms of possibilities and what humans consider appealing) in the visual plane than there is in the game input 'plane', which might be as little as 6 independent inputs plus time.

it definitely sucks to be honest, and theres a lot of cope out there.

fact of the matter is, being able to churn out bash oneliners was objectively worth $100k/year, and now it just isnt anymore. knowing the C++ STL inside-out was also worth $200k/year, now it has very questionable utility.

a lot of livelihoods are getting shaken up as programmers get retroactively turned into the equivalent of librarians, whose job is to mechanically index and fetch cognitive assets to and from a digital archive-brain.

imo the engineers who stay in their nuts-and-bolts lane - those are the ones who are at a real risk of 'brainrot', who sometimes at the ripe age of 50+ continue to misunderstand what motivates management, the executives, seemingly unable to model anyones minds other than their own (or that of a very predictable entity, like a computer.)

infact, you could argue that politics is in some sense the biggest, most complex dynamic system of them all, and thus poses the greatest 'engineering' challenge. and it invariably involves promotion of oneself, or an idea, or a certain direction, with real trade-offs that have positive impact on some people, and negative on others.

demis is more than qualified. he was politically savvy enough to stay in control of deepmind when it was acquired by google, thats up there with the altman fiasco a year or two ago.

i did a similar excercise - something i found very funny, was that my half-baked emulator was getting stuck in various places in the tetris ROM. i copy-pasted the program counter hex address into the google search bar, and immediately got a reddit thread of someone doing exactly the same thing i was, whose emulator was getting stuck in exactly the same place in exactly the same tetris ROM!

not only that, i think this scenario played out a few more times before i finally got tetris to play. i suppose game boy emulators are sort of the defacto 'hello world' of this type of work.

reading books these days is more akin to visiting the theatre. its a special cultural occasion that you might do once a year to remind yourself that this stuff is still out there, but for actual practical purposes reading books is probably the slowest method of ingesting information today.

knowing elon, he will make this actually work, thus fully vindicating both the financial engineering and his arrogance!

thats fair enough but reading assembly is such a pain in the ass... it was exciting for the first 10 minutes of my life, but now, if i ever got to that point, i will 100% copy-paste the listing to chatgpt with "hey, can you see anything sketchy?"

i was sincerely hoping i could get

    auto main(argc, argv) -> int
         int argc;
         char **argv;

to work, but alas it seems c++ threw pre-ansi argument type declarations out.

right click -> "explain this for me" has been a life-changer. nothing infuriated me more than having to ask someone to elaborate only to get some high-and-mighty "you wouldn't get it" type response.

now the AI calmly and professionally goes into all technical details, allowing me to independently realize that yes, indeed; I wouldn't get it, and my mammalian ego is at peace.

>beatings continue

>stock goes up

>beatings stop

>stock goes up

well, the split is both ways. lets not forget that depite a lot of talk and wish-casting, the EU is still largely impotent. I know for sure that I am envious of my colleagues in the US. but europe? hmm...

regarding the Russian kleptocrat situation, you can't knock London for having a Profitable Business Arrangement. The biggest enemy of any Russian oligarch are other Russian oligarchs. it makes sense then, to keep your dragon hoard where none of them can touch it (possibly not even you!)

ofcourse it becomes even funnier when all of them get the same idea, converging on the same optimal strategy...

indeed any and all mafiosos are welcome to safeguard their assets in London banks (for a price, and not neccesarily monetary.) whatever happened to the venezuelan gold? if that then serves to subsidize the rest of the UK ordinary citizenry, hey, you could say the UK in the business of karmic repayment.

i think there's a danger here of underestimating how varied mankinds 'mindware' is at large.

for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".

you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)

and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.

im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).

im sure the clang compile times are very respectable, but for llms? paltry 200gb/sec compared to the rtx 6000 pros 1.8tb.

sure you can load big(-ish) models on it, but if youre getting <10 tokens per second, that severely limits how useful it is.

the reason he (probably) wants that feature so badly is cos it crashes his amdgpu driver when he tries inferencing lol

although, as an amd user, he should know that both vulkan and rocm backends have equal propensity to crap the bed...

permanent underclass...

starting from a 'known good' config file (olddefconfig, allnoconfig) and then carefully iteratively switching options around is the only methodology ive had any success with.

I've had some good experiences with using Gemini to help me explore Kernel config options (e.g. "whats the minimum set of config options i need to have enabled to faciliate feature X?")

LLMs in general are very knowledgeable about the Linux kernel (unsurprisingly!) which is why I made my original comment. You can ask them about relevant places in the kernel source tree to look at for a given mechanism, and they'll point you to the file and function without having to 'look'.

Making bespoke linux distros should be quite a good fit for LLM agents, especially given the recent results with the LLM-authored web browser.

I have increasingly negative things to say about this.

There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V. and I wonder if there really ever was any desire for it, at this point.

This whole "Open ISA" crap appears to be a thin veneer to funnel quite large sums of investment into an otherwise completely proprietary and locked-down environment that could never harm the incumbents in any meaningful way - while still maintaining just enough of a pretense of open source, that the (regrettably myself included) shallow nerds and geeks could get smitten by it.

Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.

I want my SoC to have a special register that has the git SHA ID of the exact snapshot of the repository that was used to cook the masks. that, now that - is Open Source. that is Open Computing. And nothing less!

I dont care about the piece of paper with instruction encodings - the least interesting part of any computer!

Wasn't that the whole point? We're more than a quarter of a century in and we're still begging SoC vendors for datasheets. Really incredibly embarassing and disappointing.

riscv is going to start having brand issues with these hardware offerings (if it doesn't already.)

sure, prototypes are good. but maybe it shouldn't be sold as a general product, because it implies that the sellers deem it a good product (when it obviously isn't.)

maybe it should be a closed offering, e.g. we're only making 1000, and we're only sending them to select few specialists/reviewers.

id imagine someone like Simon to pick his AI products carefully enough that he doesn't waste his time on duds.

the US is the centre of the world, and AI is at the centre of US attention!

why would anyone do anything else, anywhere else?

it would be so incredibly trumpian if he announces "Greencards For Greenland!"

surely, surely someone has already brainstormed it...

applesisters...

not really an answer ofcourse, but what ive found to be quite fun is having the elixir linux source code open in Edge, and using the copilot side-window to just copy-paste it bits of code and asking it to walk me through it (select block of code, right click, "ask copilot".)

sort of like a modern-day "a commentary on the unix operating system". LLMs appear to be (probably unsurprisingly) very knowledgeable about Linux internals.

if everyone had symmetric gigabit, this would be a no-brainer. imagine having auto-scaling CPUs, auto-scaling RAM, etc - it would incentivise some cool OS architecture (yes yes, privacy issues aside etc.)

most of the time i'm doomscrolling, but every now and then you wanna play with linux, or llvm, or some VM cluster.

i bought a beefy rig for these 1% events in my life, and the rest of the time its doing basically nothing. seems a real waste.

to be fair, that cobol program has been working for probably 30 years (maybe even longer than that) - thats unusually reliable and long-lived for a software project.

the only real contender in this regard is the win32 api, and actually that did get used in enterprise for a long time too before the major shift to cloud and linux in the mid 2010s.

ultimately the proof is in the real-world use, even if its ugly to look at... id say, even as someone who is a big fan of linux, if i were given a 30 year old obscure software stack that did nothing but work, i would be very hesitant to touch it too!