timschmidt

Yeah yeah, everyone enforces their copyrights to the maximum extent possible. But this does not prevent massive amounts of both licensed copying and free use copying. The framework I outlined above is from the US Supreme Court's rulings on fair use so applies for everyone in the US.

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Re: #1, GN's work while commercial is an educational investigative journalism / documentary piece which are well established users of Free Use protection. GN's use is absolutely transformative.

#4: Bloomberg would have to prove a financial loss to have standing. That would mean that GN must have no other option than to use Bloomberg's clip, and pay the license, which I don't think would fly. GN would have just produced the segment differently.

I've never received something other than what I've ordered. At worst the documentation is scant or missing entirely. Specifically with respect to motherboards, most of the aliexpress specials I've interacted with have had completely unlocked BIOSes. Which are easy to get yourself into trouble with, but kind of nice to have when you need them.

> If news organizations can copy each other's clips of official speeches

Brother, wait until you learn about the associate press.

In U.S. copyright law, the four factors evaluated to judge fair use are:

1: Purpose and character of the use: including whether the use is commercial or nonprofit educational, and whether it is transformative.

2: Nature of the copyrighted work: for example, whether the work is more factual or more creative.

3: Amount and substantiality used: both how much was taken and whether it was a qualitatively important part of the work.

4: Effect on the market: whether the use harms the potential market for or value of the original work.

Courts weigh all four factors together. There is no fixed rule like "under 30 seconds" or "under 10%." GN's use seems to satisfy all four factors.

I always figured that was the trade-off for paying 1/3 the price. Having to buy 3x as many to find a good one. :P

What Bloomberg proposed - sniffing the TTL signal between BMC and boot ROM and flipping a few bits in transit - is far from science fiction. It would be easy to implement in the smallest of microcontrollers using just a few lines of code: a ring buffer to store the last N bits observed, and a trigger for output upon observing the desired bits. 256 bytes of ROM/SRAM would probably be plenty. Appropriately tiny microcontrollers can also power themselves parasitically from the signal voltage as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire chips do. SMBus is clocked from 10khz to 1mhz, assuming that's what the ROM was hanging off of, which is comfortably within the nyquist limit on an 8 - 20mhz micro.

Something similar has been done in many video game console mod chips. IIRC, some of the mod chips manage it on an encrypted bus (which Bloomberg's claims do not require).

Here's one example of a mod chip for the PS1 which sniffs and modifies BIOS code in transit: https://github.com/kalymos/PsNee

"On PsNee, there are two separate mechanisms. One is the classic PS1 trick of watching the subchannel/Q data stream and injecting the SCEx symbols only when the drive is at the right place; the firmware literally tracks the read pattern with a hysteresis counter and then injects the authentication symbols on the fly. You can see the logic that watches the sector/subchannel pattern and then fires inject_SCEX(...) when the trigger condition is met.

PsNee also includes an optional PSone PAL BIOS patch mode which tells the installer to connect to the BIOS chip’s A18 and D2 pins, then waits for a specific A18 activity pattern and briefly drives D2 low for a few microseconds before releasing it back to high-impedance. That is not replacing the BIOS; it is timing a very short intervention onto the ROM data bus during fetch."

Mine was a TI-81 and a clone of Scorched Earth with multiplayer, realistic physics, wind, random terrain generation, etc. Used all 2.4kb and every single named variable provided by TI-BASIC on the machine.

Astral.

Yup. And high end GPU compute now has on-package HBM like Knight's had a decade ago, and those new Intel CPUs are finally shipping with AVX reliably again. We lost a decade for workloads that would benefit from both.

Same for the Larabee / Knights architecture. Would sure be fun to play around with a 500 core Knights CPU with a couple TB of optane for LLM inference.

Intel's got an amazing record of axing projects as soon as they've done the hard work of building an ecosystem.

I can mostly agree. I have encountered a diagnosed sociopath in the sciences, and the systems within Science often seemed engineered entirely to provide justifications to the non-science folks with the bank details, so it has the normal human failings. But most of the people involved could have made more money in industry, and were there because they cared about the subject matter. Even the sociopath to the extent that word means anything in their context.

Ethics rubrics for animal studies and institutional review boards for same are definitely an area academia is doing better than most other human endeavors. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. More to emphasize the intense moral introspection each of the researchers I've known who have done animal studies have had to do about it.

Friend, much of Science involves mass murder of complex life including mammals, for the express purpose of teasing apart how their individual bits work. If you live near an R1 university, there's very likely a facility nearby dedicated to the raising of lab animals. An ex worked at one that raised rodents and chickens for Michigan State University.

A scientist once confided in me that he became a scientist because as a child he really liked lizards, but as a scientist, he spends much of his time murdering lizards. :-/

Everyone involved has to confront this reality on their own, come to terms with it, and figure out the line where they're willing to meet it. All the researchers I've known have cared deeply about the welfare of the animals, despite sometimes doing terrible things to them for science. They worked to limit their suffering and dispatch them as humanely as possible. Many rationalize it by comparing to the food system, which raises and slaughters orders of magnitude more souls, and keeps people living, but does not discover or record as much new knowledge as science.

This has already been done via brute force for melodies: https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

Protestant work ethic? I know it's a terrible reason. Seems to be the reason, though.

Or for what can already be purchased from a data broker on the open market.

csgrs author here. Congratulations on this release! Please swing by the csgrs discord or let me know where to join you for future discussions related to SynapsCAD. I'd love to chat about future developments. Amazing work!

Well if they had nothing to hide... /s

Jia Tan says hi.

Assuming models of a fixed size continue to improve in capability, continued advancement in semiconductors and optimization will reduce power consumption and/or improve performance over time. And used equipment will always approach the scrap price eventually. For me today, on scrap equipment, I get about 4 tokens / watt-hour, which is nominally ~$0.17 US but could run $0.40 after all the taxes and fees and surcharges. $0.10 / token. Ouch.

If I were to try to purpose build a rig for it, I would get an engineering sample Epyc/motherboard/ram combo from Aliexpress with 12 channels of DDR5 and as few cores as allowed me to still use all the memory bandwidth, and I'd run it at the lowest possible power and voltage settings with aggressive ram timings. A system like that can draw 1/3 of what my scrap rig draws, at full load. And has similar memory bandwidth to a high end Mac or GPU allowing it to crank out 5 - 10 Tokens / s on the largest models, which works out to 1/3 of a penny to 2/3 of a penny per token. But either way, Epyc or Mac is going to set you back $10k or more. Hopefully in a few years when they are scrap though...

I'm able to run the Unsloth quants on an ancient dual socket Xeon 1U server I keep around for homelab stuff. It has 8 DDR3 channels, which gives me about as much memory bandwidth as two channels of DDR5 :-/ But 16 sockets and cheaper prices. So it has 256gb in it right now. I have to run the minimum size Unsloth quant for the largest open weight models. They definitely feel a bit dazed. This machine can support up to 1.5TB of DDR3, which would allow me to run many of the largest models unquantized, but at 1/4 of the already abysmal speeds I see of ~ 1 Token / s which is only really usable with multiple agents running a kanban style async development process. Nothing interactive. That said, I picked up the hardware at the local surplus for $25 and it's vintage ~2010. Pretty impressive what this enterprise gear can do.

Power consumption? Don't ask. A subscription is cheaper.

They're still at somewhat of a process disadvantage, but they have demonstrated an ability to produce DDR4 on older processes than it's typically been produced on. So it stands to reason that their process disadvantage will not stop them from producing DDR5 at scale. Their DDR5 will just use a little more silicon, and squeeze the jigglyness from a few more electrons, but in this market, who cares if RAM cost 15% more to make and was 15% less efficient to run, if it's available to purchase at all.

Different types of DRAM can literally be made from the same already-etched wafer. The DRAM bits themselves don't change at all. What's different between DDR4, DDR5, and HBM is the IO interface to the chip. Changing this does not require significant retooling or relearning.

Read 'em and weap:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparative-Table-of-Rec...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparative-Analysis-of-...

That's lovely, but it's not what I described. Bottles aren't just taxed. They have a refundable deposit. This ensures they don't end up in a landfill.

I think the externalities of plastic recycling must be internalized economically by requiring all manufacturers of items to pre-pay for the recycling of said items up front, as part of the manufacturing cost. Similar to how bottle returns are managed, which has been very successful. Items which are provably biodegradable or designed to facilitate repair may be exempt.

Why do you assume I don't? Opinionated defaults matter, as that's what most users will end up using.

> it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable

One of those adjectives describes the plastic bag I'm familiar with. Sometimes it lasts long enough to get the food in the house without spilling through a hole which spontaneously appeared in the bag.

> it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash

Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha.

Consumers are often presented the least expensive option with the worst outcomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

We do have term limits for positions like the presidency, and what we see is a perpetual power structure one layer removed, in the party system, which effectively chooses who we're permitted to vote for.

Introducing term limits only forces the wealth and power to change it's face periodically. It is addressing a symptom, not the cause.

At least one constitutional scholar has argued that campaign finance reform strikes closer to the root of the problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers ) by enabling interested regular folk to afford to run for office. I would add some form of ranked choice voting to that, which permits folks to vote for a third party candidate without "wasting" their vote or throwing the race to an opponent. As well as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

Term limits incentivize a deep state exactly one layer removed from those to which the limits apply, as a repository of institutional knowledge about how things actually get done.

This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Inability to communicate isn't what we observe because as I already stated, meaning is shared. Dictionaries are one way shared meaning can be developed, as are textbooks, software source codes, circuits, documentation, and any other artifact which links the observable with language. All of that being collectively labeled culture. The mass of which I analogized with inertia so as to avoid oversimplifications like yours.

My point is that one person's definition does not a culture, make. And that adoption of new word definitions is inherently a group cultural activity which requires time, effort, and the willingness of the group to participate. People must be convinced the change is an improvement on some axis. Dictation of a definition from on high is as likely to result in the word meaning the exact opposite in popular usage as not. Your comment seems to miss any understanding or acknowledgement that a language is a living thing, owned by the people who speak it, and useful for speaking about the things which matter most to them. That credible dictionaries generally don't accept words or definitions until widespread use can be demonstrated.

It seems like some of us really want human language to work like rule-based computer languages. Or think they already do. But all human languages come free with a human in the loop, not a rules engine.