HN user

slongfield

520 karma
Posts1
Comments74
View on HN

Full disclosure: I work at Etched.

Weights are not burnt into silicon per-model. They're in SRAM/HBM. There's some more info on the website (etched.com) and we'll be sharing more details about model benchmarks this summer.

Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just spares.

My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.

The big problem with MUMPS is that as the "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System", it does not work well for development in other states. There's been some experimentation with using it in Wisconson, but a W is not an M.

I asked it to create the kind of storybook my toddler would have asked for ("create a storybook about a music truck and an ice cream truck and a mailman and a carwash", inspired by his request for a story last night), and the results were certainly... interesting.

Obviously Gemini doesn't know that "music truck" is another name for "ice cream truck", but more concerningly, the illustrations it made for the trucks were this kind of eldritch amalgamation of Cars-movie style cars and people driving cars. The story was just OK, I don't think it would have kept my toddler's attention for the whole ten pages. Plus, the mailman is barely involved.

I've recently started using Github code reviews for a lot of C++, and one thing that I wish it would do is show the header (.h) files before the implementation (.cc) files.

Small PRs help, but I often end up just opening a handful of windows to have everything open at once.

Gemini 2.5 1 year ago

For better or worse, Google gets more bad press when their models get things wrong compared to smaller AI labs.

Solitaire 1 year ago

People love to dunk on hacky looking gamedev code. Some of it is pretty ugly, e.g, VVVVVV's famous gigantic switch statement, but if it works and makes a fun game, that's the actually important part.

Non-centralization is enough for me (I love archive.org, but always worry about them flying too close to the sun one day and getting shut down), but this does also have a different UX, and has a more direct focus on videogame history, which should help them surface things in more interesting ways than a general purpose archive.

The most annoying bots are the ones that mindlessly slam sites over and over, without doing any filtering. Having these kinds of tarpits out in the wild forcing people to be better behaved with their crawling bots is a feature, not a bug.

They presented at HotChips 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_R0S6piLA0&t=2114s

There, one of the things they mentioned was that they were hoping that RISC-V in general, and their cores in particular, becomes a platform for academic research. That way, cutting-edge things are shared in the open and the industry benefits globally.

The optimistic view of this is that it's hoping for a better future for all. The cynical view is that open source is much harder to sanction/export control. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The N64 has a GPU, which is not the same as modern GPUs, and you need that GPU to render graphics.

Skimming the Github repo, looks like this uses rt64 under the hood for the raytracing support ( https://github.com/rt64/rt64 ), and that uses the ubershader technique to emulate the GPU. This excellent article talks about the what, why, and insanity that are ubershaders: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/