31–40 of 83 posts
With a clickbaity title like that, I knew this would be Veritisium before I clicked it. And now, having verified that it is, I share this information with you.
Something about Veritasium absolutely rubs me the wrong way, and I generally like Youtube education creators, but his videos are borderline unwatchable for me. Does anyone have an explanation for what it is about his videos that is so grating?
In the intro to this video he mentions analogue computers predicting tides. His video before this one[1] goes into detail on that, and it was incredible. In the 1800s, Lord Kelvin spent years working on tidal rise and fall patterns, applying Fourier Transforms to break them down into ten individual sine waves, then combining those sine waves back together to predict future tides. And built analog computers to do all…
Along with a meccano numerical analyser, and bits of babbage's original work
For a more realistic view on AI accelerators that doesn't overhype analog computing, I enjoyed the series by Adi Fuchs: https://medium.com/@adi.fu7/ai-accelerators-part-i-intro-822... At the end of the day, specialized hardware, particularly on the analog side (neuromorphic, optical, etc.) locks development into the path of highly uniform feedforward networks by optimizing large matrix multiplications, and it is uncl…
Neuromorphics aren't analog FWIW. They're just asynchronous.
First of all, there is no single accepted definition of "neuromorphic" [1]. Still, as a point in favour of the "neuromorphic systems are analogue" crowd: the seminal paper by Carver Mead that (to my knowledge) coined the term "neuromorphics" specifically talks about analogue neuromorphic systems [2].
Right now, there are some research "analogue" (or, more precisely "mixed signal") neuromorphic systems being developed [3, 4]. It is correct however that there are no commercially available analogue systems that I am aware of. Unfortunately, the same can be said for digital neuromorphics as well (Intel Loihi is perhaps the closest to a commercial product, and yes, this is an asynchronous digital neuromorphic system).
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2560/13/5/05...
[2] https://authors.library.caltech.edu/53090/1/00058356.pdf
[3] https://brainscales.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/
[4] https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/documents/ANe...
With a clickbaity title like that, I knew this would be Veritisium before I clicked it. And now, having verified that it is, I share this information with you.
Something about Veritasium absolutely rubs me the wrong way, and I generally like Youtube education creators, but his videos are borderline unwatchable for me. Does anyone have an explanation for what it is about his videos that is so grating?
His videos don't strike me as intending to educate. They strike me as intending to show how much more clever he is than you - and it's entirely that he came up with some weird gotcha that people logically assume he couldn't be talking about because it's nonsense.
It's like watching a smug teenager who never grew out of it. No thanks, I don't need that reminder of how grating I was.
If you think about it, Mythic analog AI accelerators will also develop neurological 'disease' as it's flash cells wear out.
For digital storage the data can change quite a bit before a 1 becomes 0 or vice-versa, but for analog even a small change can be a problem. So I don't know if we can extrapolate the typical Flash memory data retention number to the expected aging for this device.
With a clickbaity title like that, I knew this would be Veritisium before I clicked it. And now, having verified that it is, I share this information with you.
Something about Veritasium absolutely rubs me the wrong way, and I generally like Youtube education creators, but his videos are borderline unwatchable for me. Does anyone have an explanation for what it is about his videos that is so grating?
What I really don't like are the new video titles. At some point he started A/B testing them to maximize his revenue. He even made a video about it [3]. Of course, this selects for the most outrageous clickbait in order to get that sweet engagement. I am starting to wonder if he took into account, how much this is starting to alienate long-term followers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
This video discusses the history and principles of classical analog computing and then says that analog computers have energy efficiency benefits over digital computers. This can give the incorrect impression that classical analog computers are more efficient than digital computers, which is absolutely not correct. It may be true that modern analog phase-change memory AI accelerators are more efficient than their dig…
People always love to say some old lost tech is better than the modern version But it's like, a one in a thousand shot.Almost all modern tech is better with regressions lasting a decade at most. Occasionally there are rumors of some modern medical treatments being worse even though medicine as a whole improves, but mechanical and electrical stuff is much better understood and more controlled. The exception is a few s…
> Occasionally there are rumors of some modern medical treatments being worse even though medicine as a whole improves, but mechanical and electrical stuff is much better understood and more controlled.
Such as the iron lung probably being better than the invasive machines we have today.
> The exception is a few specific appliances that are seemingly designed to fail. Even then there's no lost tech. I'm pretty confident we could make a much better washing machine today for much less money if we tried, than anything from 30 or 50 years ago.
look at the space industry, it actually costs us more (adjusting for inflation) to try and go back to the moon than when we did before when we had no idea on how to do it.
Or look at tractors, farmers are clamoring for 1980s tractors over these new expensive (break down easy with no way to repair) 'modern' tractors John Deer is pushing.
With a clickbaity title like that, I knew this would be Veritisium before I clicked it. And now, having verified that it is, I share this information with you.
This has been disproven by people doing experiments
With a clickbaity title like that, I knew this would be Veritisium before I clicked it. And now, having verified that it is, I share this information with you.
One thing about Veritasium is that they do get things wrong. They did one on electric circuits where if you had a circuit that was miles long with the energy source sitting right next to you, you would get current as soon as you turned on the electrical circuit because 'electricity doesnt follow the wire' or something along those lines. This has been disproven by people doing experiments
Someone set up some long wires over a farm field, and measured the time to first current flow, which was faster than if the current had to travel the whole wire length. Granted, the full current flow doesn't appear until later, but the first little bit of current is there, which is exactly what Derek said in the Veritasium video