94 karma · joined October 3, 2017
This is just following Google's Edge TPU, which probably competes with a Raspberry Pi + Movidius stick. The market there is getting interesting.
If it wasn't for the Linux driver headaches I still might have gone for it to have another way to check if CUDA code was running properly without having to ssh to the central server.
Why not X1 Carbon? At first it was the MX150 option for deep learning on the go, but we decided to drop that because it was going to be a pain the ass in Linux and it's not a very good GPU anyway - better to ssh to the server (The variant in T480s is 25% slower even though it has the same model name). Now it's just the price... Not quite worth the upgrade price for that many machines, and the limited upgradeability means we can get 8gb now and add 8 more when there is a bit more liquidity.
I'm still using a 2015 MBP and a Hackintosh desktop (Old Intel 3770k + Titan Xp) but this year was the first time after the 2006 release of the MBP that I bought a non-Apple notebook... I needed something to replace my 11" MacBook Air that I use for travel, and the new keyboards just aren't usable for me. Bought a Thinkpad X1C6... Great machine except a few baffling design decisions, and appears to be borderline impossible to Hackintosh for now - but the keyboard is my tool of the trade. I need a good one.
Well Apple Music responded to my enthusiasm by trashing my music library, mislabeling everything automatically and losing half of the library. I don't know if they fixed that, but that managed to turn me to a permanent spotify user.
Spotify too is making me unhappy these days though, because for some time now they are heavily emphasizing geography in discover weekly playlists, which isn't what I want as an expat. It's always a bunch of songs in the same style, listened to nowhere else but where I am now, and pressing the dislike button doesn't help. I guess I should get a VPN/use a payment method from my home country/switch to an alternative.
I spent a month like this, on an always-on system, trying to shut down the upgrade downloader from the task bar whenever I can after failing to stop it from settings, group policy, horsing around in powershell etc. Before that, I had also tried to make the upgrade work by doing it manually, updating drivers, unplugging all the peripherals etc. but it kept getting stuck halfway through. So I couldn't upgrade, and I couldn't not upgrade.
Well last week there was an update to the update so I hoped at least the upgrade would work now and I would be done with this charade. Nope, it crashed again while upgrading, except this time there was no way to roll back and use my system. I am torn between cutting windows out completely and going back to windows 7.
I think I'm either going to change my workflow and use another OS or switch fully to PyTorch.
So I do get the criticism about high fees when paying for a coffee, but maybe that's not the ideal use case for bitcoin. It could've been cheaper with another cryptocurrency but it's a tolerable enough percentage at the moment compared to another widely used solution for international transfers.
Until the Mac Pro I hadn't considered that a modern, high power computer could also be dead silent. It's stupid, but that was a revelation for me. I couldn't even tell it was turned on or not, except from the occasional hard drive seeking noise - which I fixed with an SSD. And 7 years later it still is as silent.
Unfortunately Apple is now focusing on keyboards with no depth and whatnot, so I'm back to building my own but I do keep in mind the lessons. My system now has 10 fans + 1 PSU fan, all running between 700-900rpm. I can hear myself think again.
I'm all for succinct, but this is just putting a dress on vacuous unreadable nonsense.