fho

I have some fond memories of getting into computers around 2000. Building PCs, installing Windows, re-installing Windows ever so often.

At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.

(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)

I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.

Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.

I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.

...

Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.

... what a hot mess :-)

I'm using it to build an AI RPG site

I am trying something similar: basically a LLM managed MUD for people with too little time for roleplaying.

If you want to chat, hit me up at mail-from-ohsohumble@f12n.de

Actually yes. It's been a while, but now that you mention that, that probably was the reason for somebody (me) bringing the reels to the cinemas for a single showing in the first place.

"buy twice" is one of those live advices I heard and adhere to since.

It's basically the optimistic interpretation of "buy cheap, buy twice":

When I consider getting into something I buy cheap first, the idea being that that is enough to get a feel ...

... then you buy the second time and don't cheap out. But this purchase is more informed and you really get to appreciate it more because you know the step up from the cheap thing.

And sometimes... maybe even most of the time... the cheap thing is just enough.

One of my student jobs was to transport film spools to theaters. They would arrive at my door in a box, I would walk them to the cinema on a small trolley and spend 2-3 hours in the projection rooms. The reels were spliced on site by a technician, projected, cut again and I transported them back home where they would be picked up again.

The job was less to transport the spools, but to supervise that there was no copying happening.

This was late 200x-ish, before digital protection became widespread iirc.

Wouldn't be the first time that having nothing better to do (being in school) and dedication lead to amazing results.

"Back in the day" people were afraid that pupils would create CS (beta 6.5) maps of their schools. Gaussian Splatting would have been very convenient for that :-)

My last serious GPU programming was with OpenCL. And if my memory does not fail me the API was quite specific about copying and/or sharing memory on a shared memory system.

I am pretty sure that my old 10th gen CPU/GPU combo has the ability to use the "unified"/zero-copy access mode for the GPU.

Yeah... We had those bulky TI Voyage 200 graphical calculators in school [1]. They could do everything the teachers could throw at us up to the point of having all but a few formulas build in.

I would say that definitely shaped me in a way where I rarely bother with the underlying details and tend to focus on how high level abstractions interact. [2]

[1] German "Mathe-LK", we could chose specializing in two things, for me it was math and computer science, the later being quite novel back in 2003. [2] I _do_ tend to specialize in things, but e.g. for LLMs or GLMMs, while I do have the capability to understand the technical details, I just don't bother.

I am always a bit baffled why Apple gets credited with this. Unified memory has been a thing for decades. I can still load the biggest models on my 10th gen Intel Core CPU and the integrated GPU can run inference.

The difference being that modern integrated GPU are just that much faster and can run inference at tolerable speeds.

(Plus NPUs being a thing now, but that also started much earlier. Thr 10th gen Intel Core architecture already had instructions to deal with "AI" workloads... just very preliminary)

Can't confirm. We had students at university (18-20-ish) that had not used a mouse prior to our courses. That was at least 3-4 years ago now and not a single case.

My "only" experience here is designing ASICs for Neuromorphic Chips. We used sub-threshold exclusively for linearity and energy reduction. No standard cells for us

I think their "4-bit multiplier with a single transistor" bit is hinting at them using transistors in the sun-threshold regime.

Just wanted to say thanks one note time!

We have been running Ardour 9 for a while now during band rehearsals. Currently 12 channels that we record and monitor in realtime with some effects on top.

Then let me quickly say: thank you! I used that algorithm three times in different projects during my academic "career" :-)

You might be interested in RWKV: https://www.rwkv.com/

Not exactly "minimal viable", but a "what if RNNs where good for LLMs" case study.

-> insanely fast on CPUs

Started a comment to write basically what you said. I've been commuting like that for five years. At the end I didn't bother trying anything productive anymore.

Losing 2-3h per day commuting is not something I am gone miss anytime soon.

Just nitpicking, but there is at least one ball next to his contraption in his video :-)

Doesn't make the whole thing less remarkable.

Don't Github have emoji reactions? I would assume that those tie "PR" and "needs emojis" closely together.

On the ground, we know that creating CLAUDE.md or cursorrules basically does nothing.

I don't agree with this. LLMs will go out of their way to follow any instruction they find in their context.

(E.g. i have "I love napkin math" in my kagi Agent Context, and every LLM will try to shoehorn some kind of napkin math into every answer.)

Cursor and Co do not follow these instructions because they:

(a) never make it into the context in the first place, or (b) fall out of the context window.

I still remember when Google (and Facebook?) used XMPP for their chat functions. You could log into any XMPP client and chat with people using Google infrastructure.

Good times, I feel old now.

"two or three stones" sound huge. We are 20k vs 14k, iirc that does not justify a three stone handicap.

Our games feel relatively close, it's just evident that he is always ahead.

Plus at least one motor plus sun tracking controller. All of that has to operate 24/7, all year.

Depending on your local climate, that has to be sun and rain proof. (Most Nema 7 "3D printer" motors are not waterproof... Ask me now I know )

Nothing a quick hack job can't solve for you, but if you want to sell it (and make sure your customers will be satisfied for decades) it quickly adds up in price.

I've been playing Go with my spouses brother for a while. He had a lot of free time to studyGo back then, I didn't. I couldn't get a single win out of him, still I enjoyed every single game.

We rarely play anymore, I should invite him over sometime :-)

Am I the only one who apparently can't count the dots in 24: Eye Exam?

I know about the optical illusion, but no idea how to count them.

Second this, if you have the time to assemble everything that is.

On the plus side your Voron won't become obsolete as you can just upgrade it to the next version.

I just upgraded my Voron 2.1 to have direct drive. Having build everything myself in the first place, the decision was easy.

Meanwhile we have a Bambu X1 at work and some of the time I just have no idea why it does not work.

I wonder if the author could now go one step further and wrote some code to interface the take drive with an ESP32, thereby removing the floppy drive from the equation and going straight to USB.

Thanks for the invite :-)

Had been decades since I've been to Paris. But with a life and kid, I guess coming back isn't too high on the priority list ;-)

YouTube's automatic title translation (English to German in my case) is surprisingly bad.

I often stumble over translations that are technically correct, but plain wrong in the context of the video.

(Just tried to find some examples, but could not find any. Maybe Google does not force autotranslated titles on me anymore?)

Been there for 10+ years as well. Recently decided that it has gotten too money grabby and started our own privat festival :-/