TechnicolorByte

How’s that 2016 promise of LA to NYC autonomous driving goal going for Musk? Or his Cybercab venture going? And the decision to not use LIDAR in his vehicles? Or the Cybertruck’s dismal engineering and sales?

Can you expand on what types of uncomfortableness you faced and what you mean by effort (to the point of bewildering people)? Curious what worked for you. Not sure if you just mean you forced yourself to go on a million dates and were super selective.

Can anyone recommend a technical overview describing the design decisions PyTorch made that led it to win out?

Embarrassing comment. This current administration and its supporters most definitely does not agree on several of your points, in particular on sustainable sources of energy and regulations on pollution.

Plenty of them here before the election. Wish they’d speak up more now and explain how any of these policies are objectively good for the US economy and US citizens.

Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick of this crap.

These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.

Happy New Years, y’all!

Curious to hear if anyone has any specific goals/resolutions/things they’re especially looking forward to in 2025.

Comparing X, which is one company (with a far reduced headcount and much smaller revenues compared to pre-Elon) in a tech hub city to an entire oil industry in an oil-rich state seems beyond hyperbolic.

If you enjoy being bored to death, perhaps.

Somehow I think the group of people who choose to live in SF have particular interests and desired amenities that make high rent worth it. E.g., walkable and lively neighborhoods, access to parks, events, etc.

Seems silly. Nvidia focused on the market several years ago while other players fumbled the bag with multiple startup buyouts and no coherent execution plan (Intel) or were too focused on the wrong product with x86 CPUs (AMD). Never mind all the failed AI hardware startups who believed an ASIC optimized for ResNet and early DL models would somehow be in play as the market evolved to Transformers.

Nvidia played the long game, focused on enough generalization to be useful for future models and opening their software brought such that other players could write frameworks/compilers for them. Nvidia also supports x86 CPUs in their servers (they don’t lock it to their Grace CPU AFAIK) and allow Ethernet fabrics (not locking it to their infiniband).

Now AMD’s GPU division is doing what they do best: slowly copying Nvidia’s execution and catching up on software, which means they’ll always play second fiddle.

How is any of that antitrust?

As I understand, many people in Apple’s ML org come from Google. So there’s a bias to use Google software and hardware. Moreover, there’s probably a deal that Apple extracted to do training on Google hardware.

The important thing for Apple is the endpoint inference which will be done on Apple Silicon.

Have to say, I was thoroughly impressed by what Apple showed today with all this Personal AI stuff. And it proves that the real power of consumer AI will be in the hands of the platform owners where you have most of your digital life in already (Apple or Google for messaging, mail, photos, apps; Microsoft for work and/or life).

The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations or asking about someone’s flight is so useful (can’t tell you how many times my brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup!).

I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem.

Nevermind all the thought put into private cloud, integration with ChatGPT, the image generation playground, and Genmoji. I can genuinely see all this being useful for “the rest of us,” to quote Craig. As someone who’s taken a pessimistic view of Apple software innovation the last several years, I’m amazed.

One caveat: the image generation of real people was super uncanny and made me uncomfortable. I would not be happy to receive one of those cold and impersonal, low-effort images as a birthday wish.

SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. Their initial designs were based on NASA designs. Stop perpetuating the “genius engineer” myth around Elon Musk.

Had the same thought. Seems like we’re entering the era of generative AI and mixed reality in a very real way very soon.

As much as I love the technology, I’m really not looking forward to this becoming ubiquitous. Time and time again we’ve allowed technological progress to outpace our ability to weight the societal pros ands cons.

Smartphones and the rise of image-heavy social media has rapidly changed social norms. Watch a video of people out in public 20 years ago: no screen to distract them at bus stops, concert events, or while eating dinner with friends. And if that seems trite, consider how well correlated the rise in suicide rates is with the popularity of these technologies.

Not sure if this makes me a luddite or if the feeling is common in this crowd.

Any specifics you can describe or somewhere to read about this?

Incredible how much has changed in one weekend… or not?

Confused what this really means. So Microsoft still has access to OpenAI’s pre-AGI tech that Sam and Greg can leverage for their more product-focused visions.

More than that, it looks like Microsoft has become a major AI player (internal research) overnight up with the likes of Meta, Google, and OpenAI. Incredible.

Even if you don’t believe many employees would consider leaving for Altman, I find it probable that many would consider leaving for financial reasons. What will their PPUs be worth if OpenAI is seen as a funding risk?

I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend.

If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this?

Will be super interesting when all the details come out regarding the board’s decision making. I’m especially curious how the (former) CEO of Twitch gets nominated as interim CEO.

Finally, if Altman goes his own way, it’s clear the fervent support he’s getting will lead to massive funding. Combined with the reporting that he’s trying to create his own AI chips with Middle East funding, Altman has big ambitions for being fully self reliant to own the stack completely.

No idea what the future holds for any of the players here. Reality truly is stranger than fiction.

Very useful comment, thanks. I’ll need to read up a Wikipedia article to get the details but the emphasis on price controls is noteworthy.

Besides my lazy and misleading usage of the term “socialized,” I guess the question still stands: how do we change our system to more closely reflect these other systems? Highly discouraging to think about.

So what are practical solutions for the US? The rest of the developed world has already shown that socialized medicine is the only way. Details like private/public mix or not don’t really matter as long as there’s a guarantee of free-at-service healthcare for everyone.

The main question is how do you actually go about making the change in the US with so many entrenched vested interests in keeping the status quo? How do you get people to agree to effectively fire millions of admin and health insurance actuaries? Seems like an impossible problem, especially given the political state of the country.

There it is: the least charitable comment I’ve ever come across on HN.

Any insight into what those design mistakes are?

We’re most of those groups (political, singles meetup) hosted on the Meetup app? Curious because I also need to try more of that.

Fairly relatable other than the fact that I wouldn’t consider myself an extrovert. I’m mostly WFH. Late 20s, single, don’t really have strong connections locally. Moved to SF a few years (COVID times…) which is a terrible time to move to a new place where you don’t know anybody. Have struggled to be outgoing since and have found it very hard to make connections. Granted I should be trying harder.

What’s worse is that the few friend connections I have from earlier in life back home are all getting busier with their own lives/partners so it’s not like I get to see them often anyway. That’s been a hard hitting realization.

Going to the office for a short while before COVID hit was really beneficial in retrospect since you meet a lot of people that way. Especially when you’re younger.

As you said it seems like most people hang out at bars and such but I have no idea how to cold approach random people and talk them up. At this point I’m probably going to try apps like Meetup, Bumble BFF, FB Groups to make some friends.

If anyone’s got suggestions I’m down to hear them.

This is in contrast to SIMD, or "single instruction multiple data," where the programmer explicitly uses vector types and operations in their program. The SIMD approach is suited for when you have a single program that has to process a lot of data, whereas SIMT is suited for when you have many programs and each one operates on its own data

This statement is comparing the SIMT model to SIMD. Can anyone explain the last part about SIMT being better for many programs operating on its own data? Are they just saying you can have individual “threads” executing independently (via predication/masks and such)?

I’ve always wondered why there aren’t better ways to prevent ad blockers (not that I’d want that) and embedding ads directly in a video stream seems like it’d be easy and completely unskippable. Especially useful for livestream content like Twitch.

Any web experts know?

The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites earned an average household income of $545,549, or more than 53 times as much as the bottom 20 percent, who earned an average of $10,259, according to 2022 census data

“It’s amazingly unequal,” said Andrew Beveridge, the president of Social Explorer. “It’s a larger gap than in many developing countries,” and the widest gulf in the United States since 2006, when the data was first reported. The Bronx and Brooklyn were also among the top 10 counties in the country in terms of income inequality.

53x gap between the top and bottom quintiles shocked me. Was curious who the people making $10k/year are since that’d be much less than full time hours at minimum wage. The author responded in the comments:

The folks in the bottom income tier include residents on forms of public assistance, gig economy workers with variable hours, and older single adults, among others. The average reflects a range of people making close to nothing to those making around $23,000, according to Social Explorer. There is reason to think that raising the minimum wage could reduce this gap. As the story mentions, five of the 10 largest cities -- all of which fared better than New York, in terms of median household income -- have substantially increased their minimum wage since 2019. New York City has not.

Such a shame what’s become of Reddit. Such an excellent resource for knowledge on niche topics and especially good for buying recommendations.

But worse then these ad changes and the API changes forcing off 3rd party apps has been the increasingly overzealous mods exacting control over their fiefdoms, even among top subreddits. Doesn’t feel like you can have a real conversation in many parts anymore unless you toe the line with each sub’s personal agenda. A common example is very left-leaning (disclosure: I consider myself fairly left leaning) city subs barring discussion of certain crimes (see r/Oakland and r/washingtondc).

If Reddit cared about quality discussion they’d take back control from these mods but in the end the only thing that matters is brand-safe content that helps drive revenue. Enshittifcation strikes again.

Anyone know of a good Reddit alternative that has decent traction?

I admit that was a glib comment and unnecessary.

I’m really speaking about Nvidia’s ability to perform well in both hardware and software, at chip-scale and datacenter-scale. Also speaking of their product/business direction that revolutionizes multiple industries (leaders in graphics with ray tracing and AI frame/resolution sacking; leaders in AI infra and datacenter systems, etc.) all resulting in big impacts to their respective industries.

You’re right that many of those software-only companies do very real engineering with distributed systems and such. I should’ve been more precise and was really complaining about the SV hype of the 2010s focusing on regulating-breaking companies like Airbnb, Uber, wework, etc. and on companies like Meta and Google who focus on pushing ads for their revenue.

Feels like this comment is stuck in 2019 or something. Have you seen DLSS3.5 announced yesterday with ray reconstruction? Have you seen path tracing in CP2077?

Seems like you’re really dismissing the massive speed ups these past few years. Agreed that ray tracing in games is only at the beginning. A lot of that is gated by the consoles/AMD but that’s generally how it goes. Would love to see Nvidia in one of the powerful consoles to accelerate adoption of these technologies.