Viewing profile — jiggawatts

Batch mode execution has been in Microsoft SQL Server for a while and just recently gained AVX-512 support. I’ve done some experiments replacing spatial SQL queries with custom vec…

GPT 5.6 has similar language quirks that makes its comments nearly unusable. I wonder if this is a side effect of MoE models — they can write excellent prose, but not simultaneousl…

I had a similar conversation with a global warming sceptic friend. It turns out that the "more CO2 = more warmer" model is hilariously simplified, and the real modelling gets into …

> reduced to rubble By whom? China would be mad to destroy the most valuable building on that island. I doubt Taiwain would bomb themselves. I can't see anyone in the US acting lik…

Both NVIDIA and Apple derive much of their wealth from off-shored manufacturing to… drumroll … China! (PRC+ROC) If China decides to take over Taiwan and nationalises TMSC, redirect…

"X is less than Y". "X is literally more than Y". "You are exaggerating how much X is!" "It's still a lot more than Y." PS: This whole thread reminded me of several managers I've w…

They might be head hunting other Apple staff and wish to control the narrative to avoid scaring them off.

“If you have the prerequisite hardware, then… know which model you want out of thousands of a variants… and your drivers are up to date, then it is fast!”

Three hours is a lot longer than one minute.

You two have just listed several tools needs to clean up after another tool: not a strong argument for “simpler”.

Neural nets can extrapolate past their training data, and there is no reason to think LLMs don’t inherit this capability. The extent to which they are able to do this is the more i…

This is the diametric opposite of the rent-vs-buy scenario that this entails. Local: You need to invest $thousands into GPU and/or very-high-end CPU+Memory hardware. Vendor: You ca…

A big part of the metaverse was "buying land" in exclusive locations, a similar concept to NFTs or crypto in general.

Tulips, NFTs, and the Metaverse all revolved around exclusivity and collectibles. Art with no real utilitarian value. I pay OpenAI $100/mo, twice what I pay for my mobile phone ser…

That's not my meaning. There is a larger game being played. Sometimes one side is the aggressor in one particular local skirmish, sometimes the other. Over the last few decades, th…

This is what it feels like to look in at Linux from the outside as a Windows admin used to corporate-enforced consistency. Sure, Microsoft has stumbled a bit recently, but around t…

Somewhat over-estimating the numbers, but even if your stats were accurate it wouldn’t change the critique that “the west” does the exact same thing. This isn’t what-about-ism, thi…

The same FIFA that made a documentary about how their leadership were battling corruption… a year before they were arrested on corruption charges? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni…

Literally: BEGIN TRAN BEGIN TRAN COMMIT TRAN ROLLBACK TRAN

"Latency" is my answer to the Fermi Paradox. As species become more intelligent, develop digital technologies, and their equivalent of the Internet, they become interconnected . In…

Database engines I've worked with generally support nested transactions, so you can open a transaction, open another transaction, commit it, then roll back the outer transaction...…

Can you imagine trying to explain any of the current world leaders to little green men? “After they killed their first hundred thousand other people, why weren’t they arrested and …

My mental model is this: There is a vast ocean of human knowledge, far beyond the capacity of any human brain, even within specialised fields. Books helped "plug the gaps" in our k…

Read it twice already! Something I noted -- trying to avoid spoilers here -- is that Rorschach is awfully similar to LLMs, but the book pre-dates ChatGPT by several years, which I …

It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection. (Disclaimer: The rest is a per…