HTML
Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
31–40 of 177 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is new in display panels?
Extreme panel curvature, new panel sizes, software baked into the display, technologies like quantum dot reaching near-oled quality at a fraction of the price.
Where can I find out about "software baked into the display" vendors, people to talk to? I've long been musing about resurrecting the drafting table for architecture.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#33[flagged]
lol
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#34WebGPU. It’ll be live in Chromium stable this Thursday and will be the biggest step change for browser-based GPU since the original WebGL.
Excited to see WebGPU support for this become stable with three.js! They've been working on it in a beta-state, but I foresee huge perf improvements once it's widely accepted on the major browsers.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#35A lot of smart people in my network (infrastructure stuff) lately doing things around data on kubernetes and data / storage orchestration.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#36One of the questions I've been asking is we've basically had physical servers -> VM -> cloud -> container orchestration on about a decade long cadence. So what's next--especially considering you can argue a lot of the low-level architectural things haven't really changed during that period. But, then, perhaps architectural details don't matter a lot at this point relative to things like AI/ML. Even WASM is mostly in…
The trendy (meaning both that it is hyped and that it follows the trajectory of the trend you identified) answer is serverless/scale-to-zero (Lambda, Cloud Run, etc.).
That said, Lambda has been out for a while and seems to have avoided taking over the world. Generic vCPU-hours are so cheap now though that it isn't compelling from a a cost perspective (serverless will either cost you more at the high end of the scale, or else save you a few bucks a month on your idle instances at the low end). Also, the developer experience isn't as good yet IMO. Thinks like LocalStack help, but it's still not natural-feeling to deploy a big application this way. (scale-to-zero it's great for small side projects though -- I have a few apps in Cloud Run that cost me like a nickel a month, a few dollars if I have a good month in terms of traffic).
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#37WebGPU. It’ll be live in Chromium stable this Thursday and will be the biggest step change for browser-based GPU since the original WebGL.
Are WebGPU "libraries" at a point where instead of being recommended Python + PyTorch for neural network training (then exporting the model to ONNX and turning around and loading it and using it)? If not, how far? I've had trouble understanding why the PyTorch "GPU" (CUDA, MPS, etc.) code can't convert to WASM + WebGPU. Something has to be missing/it has to be a huge effort, but in theory you're supposed to be able t…
Yes, it's definitely lagging the CUDA ecosystem. I did a write-up a few weeks back on the various approaches people are taking to do inference in the browser (WASM, WebGL, WebGPU): https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-th...
Matt Rickard also had a short write-up recently: https://matt-rickard.com/implementing-llms-in-the-browser
My take is that we probably won't see much training done on WebGPU, because training is done upfront and it makes sense to standardize on a single GPU vendor and use an interface that can squeeze all the juice out of those GPUs (CUDA). But for inference and run-time computations, it could be very interesting to take a model trained with CUDA/PyTorch and export it (maybe with Apache TVM or tensorflow.js) into WebGPU that can run on end-user devices.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#38One of the questions I've been asking is we've basically had physical servers -> VM -> cloud -> container orchestration on about a decade long cadence. So what's next--especially considering you can argue a lot of the low-level architectural things haven't really changed during that period. But, then, perhaps architectural details don't matter a lot at this point relative to things like AI/ML. Even WASM is mostly in…
I'm excited by the idea of WASM being 'the thing' because it basically boils down to passing raw executables around, and running them in trusted contexts. It's the ultimate end to the cycle of removing all operating systems.
I'm excited too, but be advised, people said the same thing about the revolutionary "write once, run anywhere" programing language and platform coming out from Sun Microsystems in the 90s...
"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." ;-)
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#39Something I'm personally excited about: colour e-ink displays. There are a few decent colour e-ink tablets on the market already, for surprisingly low prices ($400-500). So far the colour reproduction and refresh rate is still somewhat suboptimal, but development appears to be progressing rapidly. I predict that in a few years there will be little reason to get a conventional tablet over an e-ink one, at least for th…
I agree with this and would even go as far as to say color E-INK screens are basically ready to push out greyscale ones right now. The problem is that no one is making a device with them that's any good. I owned one of the boox color e-ink devices for like a week and the experience was awful because it's a full android os shoehorned into something that kind of works on an e-ink display.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#40Stuff that's actually innovative.
ChatGPT knows a lot about existing tech - even more than people who think they're pretty steeped in it (including myself here) - but inventive stuff that doesn't show up after a bit of googlefu, it's much less helpful (even useless).
So great assistant, great rhythm section but falls down as lead.
For now, anyway (and open question, for how long?)