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snek_case

1,925 karma · joined June 15, 2021

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snek_case··on The first million-transistor chip: The engineers’ story
The transistor was invented at Bell Labs by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in 1947.

William Shockley founded Shockley semiconductors. Eight researchers working there, known as the "traitorous eight" left to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Engineers at Fairchild are responsible for many key innovations in semiconductor manufacturing processes.

Gordon Moore, head of R&D at Fairchild left to form Intel in 1968.

... So you could say that Bell Labs indirectly birthed Intel :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Career

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor

snek_case··on Teslas running Autopilot have been in 273 crashes in less than a year
It's more capable. Autopilot can basically do 100% of highway driving from on ramp to off ramp. It can switch lanes, and it can also take an exit from one highway to another highway.

Either way, without data about how often people use each driver assist feature, it's not scientifically rigorous to assume that each system is used exactly in the same proportion. The NHTSA should have made this caveat very clear, and should have released data from Tesla about crashes per miles driven if it's available (even if it's not available for other automakers).

snek_case··on Teslas running Autopilot have been in 273 crashes in less than a year
No they mean just Autopilot which does lane following and lane switching on highways.
snek_case··on Teslas running Autopilot have been in 273 crashes in less than a year
One of the most contentious issues is that Tesla is able to provide a figure in terms of crashes per miles driven on Autopilot whereas other automakers can't do the same.

So they report crashes per 1000 vehicles, but that doesn't take into consideration how much people are using Autopilot vs how much people are using GM SuperCruise. If people with GM cars are hardly ever using SuperCruise but people with Teslas use Autopilot often, that's going to really skew the figure.

snek_case··on Google Will Eat Itself (2005)
DuckDuckGo is pretty far from Google in terms of search result quality, unfortunately. I would use it if the results were better.
snek_case··on SIMD accelerated sorting in Java – how it works and why it was 3x faster
> since allocating them is usually just a pointer bump, they can be as cheap as stack objects.

I don't think that's quite true. Even with a copying/moving GC, you still need to traverse all the live objects and then copy all of them. Asymptotically as cheap as stack objects maybe, but in reality the overhead is greater. GCs also have some amount of overhead due to all the synchronization they need to do.

snek_case··on Lilium achieves first main wing transition for all-electric aircraft [video]
I'm also highly skeptical. I've heard from someone in the industry that their original demos were intentionally misleading. They had images of the Lilium aircraft taking off and flying for a bit, but what they didn't tell you was that the thing that was flying was essentially a large foam model that probably weighed 1/10th of what the real thing would. I don't know if that's the case anymore, but I wouldn't personally invest my own money in them though. Joby seems like they have a much more promising electric aircraft.

I don't have a position in either company nor in any electric aircraft stocks.

snek_case··on A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
No, scaling a model of V1 would not yield consciousness.

The point is that V1 is a large part of the visual cortex. It's something the brain dedicates a lot of resources to, and we could implement something similar in silicon almost trivially. Your smartphone GPU may have enough compute to simulate an equivalent computation at 200 frames per second.

It's possible that in the future, we'll be able to simulate consciousness very efficiently once we have a better handle on the kinds of computations that are involved, much more efficiently than what the brain does.

snek_case··on A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
Yeah, IMO if you want a rough idea about how much compute the human brain performs, and how efficiently you could do that in silicon, it's interesting to look at area V1 which is one of the lowest level areas involved in vision. This brain area comprises 140 million neurons per hemisphere (so roughly 280 million in total). So that's about 1/300 of the human brain.

The interesting thing here is, what V1 does is it computes directional receptive fields based on raw data from the retinas. We can implement that in a tiny silicon chip, maybe even just a DSP chip, not a full CPU. We know how to implement this kind of computation super efficiently, and without using neural networks.

We don't fully understand what goes on in many areas of the brain, but if we can find efficient ways to implement equivalent computations, we might technically already have sufficient manufacturing technology to implement equivalent functionality in a pretty compact and power-efficient form factor, or we might not be that far from there.

A classic quote from Dijkstra: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."

snek_case··on Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
Whenever I see "qualia" being discussed I just roll my eyes.

Asking whether a CPU can experience qualia is kind of like asking if atoms can experience anything. The CPU is just the substrate on which software runs.

snek_case··on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
You could set up a payment system to buy items that's not a player account. You buy an item just to give. There's still a phishing incentive, but is it worse than any of the other content you can buy online?
snek_case··on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
If you can't gift items, it seems like a huge missed opportunity because I feel like there's a lot of things people don't buy for themselves but they might be willing to buy for other people as a gift.

For instance I don't think I would ever spend 30 dollars on a bottle of wine to drink at dinner, but I could pay 50 or 60 to buy a bottle of wine as a special gift to a friend.

snek_case··on Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
The Ryzen 7 2700X chip I bought back in 2018 is still fairly close to the latest Ryzen 9 chips in terms of single-core performance on benchmarks (within 10% IIRC). The Ryzen 7 is an 8-core (16 thread) CPU, and now you can get 12 or 16 core Ryzen 9's, but most workloads don't take proper advantage of even an 8-core machine.
snek_case··on Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
The 1 kbit RAM chip probably also would have difficulty running at 166MHz. That being said, having the master clock of the system running at 166MHz doesn't mean the entire thing does. You could use a high clock rate to generate a video signal but have the actual logic of the system behind a clock divider running at a much lower frequency.
snek_case··on DARPA moving forward with nuclear thermal engine design
Seems like you could probably get more efficient by using a nuclear reactor to power an ion drive? Also wouldn't need to cool fuel down to cryogenic temperatures.
snek_case··on Bugs are evolving to eat plastic, study finds
It almost certainly consumes O2 and excretes CO2, which might actually be worse than just letting the carbon be trapped in plastic in a landfill.
snek_case··on Minimalism in programming language design
Can you elaborate on why the 5.1 GC is so bad?
snek_case··on I made an AI write a story about AI then I made another AI illustrate it
Well, I think that ideally, if you have AI-generated content, the AI would generate content that's tailored specifically for you. It would have a good model of what you're interested in, and would know how to create an intrigue that you specifically will find interesting.
snek_case··on I made an AI write a story about AI then I made another AI illustrate it
It's hard to say because even a model like GPT-3 is limited in its ability to generate a textual story that remains coherent over time. When you're talking about generating video, you need to have lots of story and visual details remaining coherent over a very long time horizon. Generally speaking, I think this is an area where deep neural networks are fairly weak and symbolic AI shines. It's much easier to program a symbolic AI that generates a story that remains coherent over time. Though you might argue that the story probably wouldn't be very interesting. There's probably something to be done with a hybrid model that uses symbolic AI to enforce coherency constraints, and a deep network model that fills in details and generates visuals.

So yeah, I think we'd need new, much more sophisticated architectures. We'd also need a lot more compute, like 10x, 100x or maybe even 1000x more, to generate high-resolution video. Actually, the problem is probably not the amount of compute you need for inference, but the amount of compute you'd need to train a model with hundreds of billions of parameters or however much is needed to make that happen.

snek_case··on Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
I agree and I think it's kind of like that quote from Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

If you look at what people like in your current library of content which you've classified into 10 different categories, you get an incomplete picture and you're kind of looking in the rear view mirror. Steve Jobs understood this too.

snek_case··on Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
I'd say part of the problem here is that consciously or not, people tend to follow influencers, and flock to brands that are more aspirational (e.g. Apple). If you cater specifically to people who like mediocre content, you lose the interest of the people with better taste. Your brand then becomes a brand associated with people that have poor taste, and eventually, even people with poor taste see that the brand is not cool, and they leave too.
snek_case··on Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
I feel like Netflix always kind of had an issue with poor taste. They have crappy reality shows and pseudo-documentaries about how the aliens build pyramids. A metric fuckton of content that caters to people with below average intelligence. In addition to this content being unhealthy because you either don't learn anything, or are actively being fed falsehoods, I think it just gives the platform a poor image.

It's kind of sad because Netflix had over 5 billion in net income last year, and 30B in total revenue. Suppose that Netflix can afford to spend 15-20B on content a year. You could do so much with that money. I mean, 20B is 20 thousand million dollars. Assuming you take just 5 billion and fund indie movies at 20M a pop, you could produce 250 indie movies a year. If they were smart about it, they would give scholarships to kids coming out of movie school. Create movie making contests. Give a lot of fresh young creative people a shot, and keep funding the creatives that produce the better reviewed content... Like, you know... A meritocracy of sorts...

Most people coming out of movie school never get to produce movies. There's just a lot of wasted talent out there. If you have tens of billions of dollars, there's no excuse for producing shit content year after year.

snek_case··on Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste
I think the main problem is that the average Joe/Jane confuses all types of pollution as equally bad. The real, most imminent threat is really CO2. That's what we have to spend the most money/energy on, because it could have absolutely catastrophic consequences in the next few decades.

Plastic in a landfill is just... Stuck there. It's unnatural, sure, but it's not immensely harmful, not nearly on the same scale as CO2, and realistically, in the future, we'll be able to mine it out of there and refine it into something usable if we need it.

snek_case··on NaturalSpeech: End-to-end text to speech synthesis with human-level quality
Often you can prune parameters as well. You might be able to cut that down by a factor of 10 without any noticeable loss in accuracy.
snek_case··on Among a certain set, counterfeit luxury bags may be more popular real ones
I've never bought brand name sunglasses. I just don't feel comfortable spending hundreds on something that I could easily lose, scratch or break.
snek_case··on Half a million people watch me study on TikTok
I clicked on the post thinking it must be because the streamer is a hot young woman. That was the stereotype of popular streamer doing something uninteresting that came to my mind based on what's been going on with the game streamer community on twitch. Some girl in a microbikini with fake glasses pretenting do read a book and winking at the camera from time to time. Like, yeah, ok, I'm sure you could get as many viewers with sexy beekeeping.

It actually seems a lot more wholesome that people are wanting a virtual "study pal" as motivation. That's pretty normal and healthy. We're a social species. If this helps people not feel alone and it helps them get started, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. I'm sure some people also watch this guy because they think he's attractive, but at least he's giving them a positive stereotype, attractive because he's doing something good for his own development vs attention grabbing and attractive because skimpy outfit.

snek_case··on Nearly the hottest place on Earth, India swelters under intense heat wave
It's probably not that simple. If you have food shortages and displaced populations as a result in climate change, then you might get an increase in poverty. More poverty means less education, and less access to things like birth control. So you could see somewhat of an acceleration in population growth and energy demand as a result.
snek_case··on Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources
My impression is that twitter has algorithms to try to maximize "engagement", and by "engagement", I mean conflict. I follow very few people, and the people I follow post things that are tech-related... But twitter will regularly try to show me inflammatory political tweets. These tweets are not coming from people I follow. I'm careful not to take the bait, but twitter definitely does try to bait you.
snek_case··on Long-term risks of surgery: ‘It gives people’s brains a hard time’
I agree. It's a bit tricky to study these things because you can't necessarily (ethically) assign people to different trial groups and use different dosages, but just recording data on what type of anesthesia was used and doing a subsequent followup a few months later could already be valuable.
snek_case··on Long-term risks of surgery: ‘It gives people’s brains a hard time’
This article suggests that inflammation in response to the surgery is the problem, but as far as I know, anesthesia itself is very dangerous. It can reduce the amount of oxygen the brain is getting for several hours, and if the brain doesn't get enough oxygen, neurons can die. Some of the cognitive changes following anesthesia could be brain tissue death due to the anesthesia itself. Careful dosage and monitoring is required, and you should probably get local anesthesia if possible.

Anesthesia kills brain cells, but what does it mean? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5119529

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