FuckButtons

I take the authors point about empires being necessarily cosmopolitan, but it’s not as though it’s a new phenomenon that people have a myopic view about what empire is or how they should operate. (Eg, Russification) Its always been true that empires use various means of social engineering to reduce differences in populations to engender a more uniform polity over various time scales (because it’s beneficial to the entity to do so, eg: Spanish and Italian are both just bad latin) It’s also often true that ethnic cleansing does take place. (If empire was just about getting the already existing social structures to work for you, america would look very different). It’s not true that empires are purely extractive on the periphery, otherwise they would only ever be loose confederations with a tax system and a hegemonic central power. Which is sometimes true, but is not what most empires do. Even saying that empire is just about reifying one polity over another doesn’t hold together all that well on closer inspection. It doesn’t explain why, for example, the Roman Empire shifted from being culturally italic and centered in Rome to being centered in Constantinople and culturally Greek. How could the periphery take over the center if it’s a purely extractive enterprise by one group over its periphery?

I guess the point I’m making, is that empires are very complicated, and trying to reduce them to being solely a thing imposed by one group onto a periphery in order to extract resources is almost as reductive as to say they only exist through colonization and genocide.

While it’s reasonable to say that people get their view of the world through media, I think it’s fine that media can contain simplifications of reality. Otherwise I would have to play Europa Universalis, which is boring.

My 2 cents: you don’t have to look at the pelican if you don’t want to.

not only that, but what all of this misses is the fact that the specification that they used was a product of writing the software, not the other way round. It would be much, much more difficult to first write a correct specification than to first write a correct program, because programs are formal systems that can be executed to observe their correctness. You can’t do that with a specification.

The only barely sane rationale that I’ve heard for wanting datacenters in space is that they would give space-x low latency signal processing capacity it would need to turn Starlink into a real time Passive SAR constellation.

Given that their initial product was called ChatGPT I’m not sure that anyone should expect them to be able to name anything remotely sensibly.

While you’re not wrong, this is also simply mechanical, the context window is the root problem here, if the llm doesn’t happen to have read implementation n of a thing that it needs that session, well now you have n+1 implementations.

One would hope, though I suspect they may want to make things a bit flashier than “we made the audio transcription on the keyboard not terrible” in the changelog given the amount of work that’s gone in.

Yeah, apple will be optimizing a model to work on ANE and then turn it into a native app. My only hope is that it has a reasonable api so that I can use that as a generic input source across iOS / macOS that’s equivalent to the ubiquity of the keyboard.

Also not true, they want you to pay for a higher subscription bracket and then use only marginally more than you would have, which I think they’re doing quite effectively for most people based on my interactions.

Nope, that’s not true, because they want you to pay for the higher subscription bracket.

There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.

qwen 27b at q8 is slower and worse than ds4 at q2 in my experience.

The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.

If you look at us military procurement over the past 20 years you will find that many, many projects have been sunk because of this exact reason.

I will never understand this mindset. What exactly do you think primary scientific research is if not collecting data on questions to which you do not know the answer? How are you supposed to get data to said questions without observing the actual events? I suppose you’re sanguine with the idea of letting future generations of children be born with potentially preventable genetic disorders based on your squeamishness?

I’ve found ds4 on my mbp to be very useful, bought before ram prices became insane. It’s not writing entire applications on it’s own, it has resolved annoying networking issues on my tailnet that I had neither the time nor inclination to figure out on my own and I often find myself reaching for it for simple but annoyingly research intensive tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to. Is it opus? No, but is it useful? absolutely and I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m getting value out of a subscription or the api cost of using it.

Sure, but it’s equally likely that we hit a point where scaling becomes economically unviable because we can’t come up with enough algorithmic improvements to break free of the tyranny of log linear scaling. (I’m not sure how many 2x in token cost people would be willing to pay)

this is explicitly why qwen opted to use recurrent layers as the middle layers of their hybrid model.

The fact that I can take it with me? That I don’t need internet to still have access to deepseek? The fact that electricity is expensive and an mbp uses ~10% of the power that an equivalent vram set up would using gpu’s. Also, in order to get the same vram I would need to spend a similar amount, but wouldn’t also have a machine that was useful for other workloads that need a huge amount of ram.

One presumes that in order to compete they must also be innovating, if the only innovation they had was how much money they could set on fire then OpenAi / Google would have walked all over Anthropic by now.

… by some fool who didn’t know what they were doing, since evidently the same behavior could be done with less.

It’s not like this is a new tactic, china has been very successful at wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies in many sectors of the economy.

They already have those, for several years if I’m not mistaken.

I’m not sure how you construe “country implements desperate measures during time of existential crisis” with technology only working for a small cabal? If anything this shows that this particular technology is more egalitarian than its predecessors, since it’s cheap and being used effectively by a smaller country defending itself against the territorial ambitions of its imperialist neighbor.

but we’re going to get a 90% cost reduction in the next 18 months… right? Right guys? Sam Altman wouldn’t lie right?

Laying the blame for the transparent financial manipulation we are observing at the feet of regular people (who are putting their savings into their pension funds, a system that we incentivize because of its pro social outcomes) and saying they should just opt out because they should know better, is at best callous, most people should not have to think about that issue at all.

Sure, but you lost the non technical audience by the end of the first sentence.

Some of the exams in Berkeley were brutal, but they never felt like trick questions, they did on occasion require a level of mastery of the material which was extreme, but it never felt like someone was just trying to make the questions obtuse for the sake of it.

No one consented to training llms, as the op clearly implies, if they had been asked they would have declined to do so. As would all of the many copyright holders who are in the process of suing the model companies.

They all know it’s coming, if it pops before they ipo then they don’t get their billion dollar payday, they have every incentive to move quickly.