Viewing profile — briansm

Cerebras have special techniques to work around etching errors / bad cores on their wafers. This is possible since their wafers are effectively hundreds of identical copies of redu…

Reminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)

Make hay while the sun shines.

I think so, specifically lossy compression though. A modern version of the book would include an extra section in the 'Lossy compression' chapter - 'Text' (alongside Images/Video/A…

LLM's seem to be the weird interesting outcome of applying lossy (de)compression concepts to text instead of the audio/image/video domains where they have traditionally been used.

Strange that they are feeding raw audio in. Even in humans, there is a hardware transform to the frequency domain (the cochlea) before data is fed to the brain, effectively doing t…

My favorite is 'spongy', an underwater journey through a Menger-sponge fractal in 128 bytes: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53871 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36BPql6Nl_U …

For a more laid-back chill 'rain' demo, have a look at "Rainy 32b" 32-byte x86 demo: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=86923 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCgIQuPHb5w

I had to read that twice, I first thought you meant 4 GB of _storage_... Worrying about only having 4GB of RAM.... that's how I know I'm getting old I guess. Kids these days don't …

I've always wondered if it was perhaps the inspiration for the novel Neuromancer (2 AI's in different continents plotting to combine with each other to form a global super-intellig…

We got both, so twice as good.

Ah, 'demand destruction', which in sounds positive in theory but in practice will likely mean poverty, famine and 'population reduction'.

You are assuming that a battery is full at 4.2V and empty at 0V. In practice a Lithium Ion battery is empty at 3V. You are also assuming the relationship between capacity and volta…

In the developed world we have 'energy slaves' instead; around 100 per person in the USA in the 2020's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave This is arguably the reason why t…

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That will happen on the day there is enough to go around. Unfortunately I fear that time has long gone. As long as the population is growing and/or the (fossil) energy is falling t…

I keep reading this, is it meant to be a joke? What is being won?

People are losing their minds at the prospect of oil availability dropping just 20% for a month or two with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz - even just this could collapse the …

Just to mention the original was cited in the most recent Veritasium video: "The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ …

Economies die from lack of produce though.

I wonder if you could use the same technique (RAM models as ROM) for something like Whisper Speech-to-text, where the models are much smaller (around a Gigabyte) for a super-effici…

I think this lack of 'G' (generality, or modality) is the problem. A human visualizes this kind of problem (a little video plays in my head of taking a car to a car wash). LLM's do…

Has overtaken Saudi Arabia as nation with largest proven oil reserves. Although it is 'heavy' oil, the 'brown coal' of liquid fossil reserves (i.e. low quality). The fact that such…

At least HDMI is a 'low frequency' connector, often only ever plugged in once, as opposed to USB (or refueling a car)

I believe this is what "Cargo-Cult Programming" is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming