loudmax

It is ironic, but there's a sound technical reason here. They wouldn't be able to get the same memory performance using upgradeable slotted DIMMs. I do appreciate that Framework offers the motherboards for sale so you can use them with your own case and power supply.

If it's running an LLM you're thinking of, there was a post yesterday on r/LocalLLaMa from someone who put a 24 GB VRAM AMD 7900xtx into their GMK X2: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ni5tq3/amd_max...

The GMK X2 doesn't have the Framework motherboard, but it's the same AMD APU, so the characteristics should be similar.

This really ought to be a consumer-grade LLM powerhouse, but the results were underwhelming. Due to the APU design, bandwidth between the APU and the discrete GPU is limited. From the Reddit poster "In this case adding the 7900xtx is effectively like just having another 24GB added to the 128GB."

Running an AMD GPU with the AMD APU should save the headache of dealing with both Nvidia and AMD drivers on the same host. It's possible that an Nvidia GPU might give better performance here, or there might be other optimizations to be made.

Unfortunately for the US, the administration is also furtively generating brand new structural problems.

The Not Just Bikes channel really makes clear the benefits of living in an environment that isn't designed around cars, but also the challenge of designing such an environment. You can't just plop in some busses and bike lanes and expect immediate improvement, you really need to think about transportation holistically. This means considering how cars, trucks, busses, bikes, pedestrians and everything will interact.

The Netherlands is lauded as a model, but it took them decades to get where they are today. This isn't to say that we can't do it in the US or Asia or anywhere else, but that we should be clear-eyed about the magnitude of the challenge.

I graduated from McLean High School in 1990. I had some fantastic teachers. McLean is absolutely an outlier.

McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nationwide.

The aspiration is to make excellent education available for all children, regardless of what school district their parents can afford to move into. This is a problem that looks easy on the surface, but it seems to be extremely difficult in practice. Education is a social benefit, and a lot of people seem to have rejected the notion that taxes should even pay for social benefits.

Yes, but not to the same degree. The disagreement is on which side is worse.

I fully agree. Just to add some nuance, walking away means pulling back, but it doesn't have to entail completely abandoning all social media. Obviously, the advertising here on Hacker News is very mild, just Y Combinator launches. But even Facebook and Reddit and Twitter can convey useful information. You do need to curate your feeds, but more importantly, know when to step away when the muck and the outrage seep in.

Optimistically, the cynicism you describe could develop into a sophisticated ability to discern fraud.

An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.

China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy.

Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers.

Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.

> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?

Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?

Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.

Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.

Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.

Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?

That is an interesting story, thanks for sharing. However, the prospect of speaking to a serial killer does not make me more likely to want to strike up conversations with strangers.

I'm glad to see a European company succeeding here, especially since Mistral has released open weights models. But you're deluding yourself if you think Mistral is any more moral than its American counterparts.

This does sound interesting, but is generative AI the right tool for this use case? A generative AI model sounds great for making a video game or even exploring historical photos, where introducing invented artifacts is a feature not a bug. In your case, wouldn't hallucinations be a problem?

I'd never recommend someone not learn calculus, but the average non-technical high school or college student would probably benefit more from learning statistics instead.

Learning calculus is very valuable to a relatively small number of people. We should absolutely make calculus available to any student, regardless in advances in AI. But a lot more people, particularly non-technical or non-math type people, would benefit more from experience with statistics than calculus. Statistics, combined with an introduction to simple programming, should be part of the basic high-school curriculum.

From the post:

> Also, these assistants (for now) appear to exhibit no common sense about what is “much”, “little”, “exceptional”, “average”, etc. For example, after measuring a consumption of 3.5GB of memory (!!) for solving a 3-disk problem (due to a bug), the assistant declared all was well...

That describes a good portion of my coworkers.

David Reich was on the Dwarkesh podcast about a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj6skZIxPuI

It's a really good interview. Recommended if you're an amateur wanting to understand more about human prehistory.

These figures are very plausible. Most Linux distros are terribly inefficient by default.

Linux can actually meet or even exceed Window's power efficiently, at least at some tasks, but it takes a lot of work to get there. I'd start with powertop and TLP.

As usual, the Arch wiki is a good place to find more information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

A few years ago I was playing around with upscaling options in ffmpeg. For my starting point, I used my DVD of The Road Warrior that I bought in 1999, and wasn't particularly well mastered. I applied some filters to remove film grain, and raised the frame rate to 120 fps by inserting artificial interstitial frames.

Firstly, the filter that removed grain from the film also removed grain from the road, the sand, and Mel Gibson's stubble, all of which there's a lot of in the Road Warrior. Everything looked quite a bit too clean.

But the super high frame rate gave the video a hyper-realistic quality. Not realistic in the sense that I'm watching actual post-apocalyptic survivors. Realistic in the sense that I'm looking at what are clearly actors wearing costumes, and it's hard not to imagine the camera and rigging crew standing just out of frame.

An interesting exercise, but not how I want to experience that movie. Having said that, this was my experience just playing around with ffmpeg on my desktop PC. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a dedicated professional using the right tools (presumably also ffmpeg) could manage a set of adjustments and upscaling processes that really do create a better experience than the original film.

I must be a few years older than you are. It was the original Cyberpunk (set in 2013, published in 1988) that did it for me.

One of the things I remember about the game was that it came with a suggested book and film list. Reading all those books, and tracking down the recommended films was something of a quest for me and my friends. That last part sounds trivial, but if your local video rental store didn't happen to have a copy of 1982's art-house weirdo indie film Liquid Sky, it was a real challenge.

When I bought my Prius in 2010, the longevity of the traction battery was a concern. A month ago, when I finally sold it to a garage, that car had over 190,000 miles on the odometer. I sold it because the transmission needed some repair work. The battery and the engine were still going strong.

You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat.

To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.

You can, but you have to know where to look, and you have to have some idea of what you're doing. The benefit of Ollama is that the barrier to entry is really low, as long as you have the right hardware.

To me, one of the benefits of running a model locally is learning how all this stuff works, so Ollama never had any appeal. But most people just want stuff to work without putting in the effort to understand how it all fits together. Ollama meets that demand.

Very well done! This hearkens back to Asteroids, but it feels very novel.

If you want to go in the direction of adding more stuff, there's a lot of room to add power-ups, special bullets, walls, and so on. But this simple game is quite elegant as it is and doesn't really need any of that.

Nice work.

Arguably, there wasn't a free market. Jean-Louis Gassée has been on record criticizing the Microsoft Windows monopoly of the late 90's, early 2000's.

A lot of people who describe themselves as "conservative" have completely abandoned formerly conservative values: the rule of law, moral integrity, personal humility, and so on. I'd prefer we not call these people "conservative" because those old values have real merit.

The short answer is that the best value is a used RTX 3090 (the long answer being, naturally, it depends). Most of the time, the bottleneck for running LLMs on consumer grade equipment is memory and memory bandwidth. A 3090 has 24GB of VRAM, while a 5080 only has 16GB of VRAM. For models that can fit inside 16GB of VRAM, the 5080 will certainly be faster than the 3090, but the 3090 can run models that simply won't fit on a 5080. You can offload part of the model onto the CPU and system RAM, but running a model on a desktop CPU is an enormous drag, even when only partially offloaded.

Obviously an RTX 5090 with 32GB of VRAM is even better, but they cost around $2000, if you can find one.

What's interesting about this Strix Halo system is that it has 128GB of RAM that is accessible (or mostly accessible) to the CPU/GPU/APU. This means that you can run much larger models on this system than you possibly could on a 3090, or even a 5090. The performance tests tend to show that the Strix Halo's memory bandwidth is a significant bottleneck though. This system might be the most affordable way of running 100GB+ models, but it won't be fast.

You're giving the administration far too much credit. The policies are decided on alignment with culture war tribalism, or in some cases outright personal grift. Science and technology, or even sensible economics don't enter into it.

There's been a vibe shift. A cult of personality around an arrogant narcissist who fires people for publishing hard data when it contradicts him is apparently what a lot of people seem to want right now.

It probably depends what your objective is. One of the benefits you get from running less capable models is that it's easier to understand what their limitations are. The shortcomings of more powerful models are harder to see and understand, because the models themselves are so much more capable.

If you have no interest in the inner workings of LLMs and you just want the machine to spit out some end result while putting in minimal time and effort, then yes, absolutely don't waste your time with smaller, less capable models.

Looking at the rollout of the internet, it did take decades. There was a lot of nonsensical hype in the dotcom era, most famously pets.com taking out an ad during the Superbowl. Most of those companies burned through their VC and went out of business. Yet here we are today. It's totally normal to get your pet food from chewy.com and modern life without the internet is unimaginable.

Today we see a clear path toward machines that can take on most of the intellectual labor that humans do. Scott Alexander's 2027 time frame seems optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on how you feel about the outcome). But by say 2037? The only way that vision of the future doesn't come true is economic collapse that puts us back to 20th century technology. Focusing on whether the technology is LLMs or diffusion models or whatever is splitting hairs.

Reinvigorating economic growth is the stated intent. The effectiveness of these policies will take longer to sort out, and will probably be argued over for decades.

But I think even ascribing economic growth as the intent is generous. The economy was already growing vigorously. Most of the policies we're seeing now are performative posturing.