utopiah

joined 2 years ago
[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago

In case others are interested on the general compute aspect, e.g inference for self hosted AI, here is something related I found :

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 96 points 12 hours ago (13 children)

What's driving me nuts is that people will focus on the glasses.

Yes, the glasses ARE a problem because Meta, despite being warned by experts like AccessNow to SHOW when a camera is recording, you know with a bright red LED as it's been the case with others devices before, kept it "stealthy" because it's... cool I guess?

Anyway, the glasses themselves are but the tip of the iceberg. They are the end of the surveillance apparatus that people WILLINGLY decide to contribute to. What do I mean? Well that people who are "shocked" by this kind of demonstrations (because that's what it is, not actual revelations) will be whining about it on Thread or X after sending a WhatsApp message to their friends and sending GMail to someone else on their Google, I mean Android, phone and testing the latest version of ChatGPT. Maybe the worst part in all this? They paid to get a Google Nest inside their home and an Amazon Ring video doorbell outside. They ARE part of the surveillance.

Those people are FUELING surveillance capitalism by pouring their private data to large corporations earning money on their usage.

Come on... be shocked yes, be horrified yes, but don't pretend that you are not part of the problem. You ARE wearing those "glasses" in other form daily, you are paying for it with money and usage. Stop and buy actual products, software and hardware, from companies who do not make money with ads, directly or indirectly. Make sure the products you use do NOT rely on "the cloud" and siphon all your data elsewhere, for profit. Change today.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 hours ago

No doubt, the kernel itself is also quite complex... but my comment here is on the user experience perspective, namely, for me at least "it just works". So I'm not trying to imply it will work for anybody flawlessly nor that it's due to the simplicity of the stack, solely that it works, for me.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 6 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

I'd argue... Alpine?

Why? Well, because it's small. So Alpine isn't the programming distribution itself but rather the distribution for the container your run whatever you build inside of just because it's very VERY small (like... 5MB?!).

Obviously that makes sense only in some cases. For example for a frontend Web developer or a game developer (or a WebXR dev like me) it might not help much but otherwise,... maybe?

Anyway if you are into this kind of things check also Gitpod, it's about wrapping your dev environment inside a container then having it anytime, anywhere, including for other developers and facilitate their onboarding.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

HP Laser 107w, driverless, over LAN.

I just Ctrl+P from any software and it prints.

It also prints programmatically (for e.g. folk.computer ) thanks to IPP.

I didn't have to "think about printing" since I have that setup so I don't know where you get that sentiment.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

Indeed, AKA the OpenAI playbook.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

As per usual, in order to understand what it means we need to see :

  • performance benchmark (A100 level? H100? B100? GB200 setups?)
  • energy consumption (A100 performance level and H100 lower watt? the other way around?)
  • networking scalability (how many cards cards can be interconnected for distributed compute? NVLink equivalents?)
  • software stack (e.g can it run CUDA and if not what alternatives can be used?)
  • yield (how many die are usable, i.e. can it be commercially viable or is it R&D still?)
  • price (which regardless of possible subsidies would come from yield)
  • volume (how many cards can actually be bought, also dependent on yield)

Still interesting to read after announcements, as per usual, and especially who will actually manufacture them at scale (SMIC? TSMC?).

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

PS: full disclosure, I still believe self-hosting AI is interesting, cf my notes on it https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence but that doesn't mean AGI can be reached, even less that it'd be "soon". IMHO AI itself as a research field is interesting enough that it doesn't need grandiose claims, especially not ones leading to learned helplessness.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago

Read few months ago, warmly recommended. Basically on self selection bias and sharing "impressive" results while ignoring whatever does not work... then claiming it's just the "beginning".

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven't seriously read the article for now unfortunately (deadline tomorrow) but if there is one thing that I believe is reliable, it's computational complexity. It's one thing to be creative, ingenious, find new algorithms and build very efficient processors and datacenters to make things extremely efficient, letting us computer things increasingly complex. It's another though to "break" free of complexity. It's just, as far as we currently know, is impossible. What is counter intuitive is that seemingly "simple" behaviors scale terribly, in the sense that one can compute few iterations alone, or with a computer, or with a very powerful set of computers... or with every single existing computers... only to realize that the next iteration of that well understood problem would still NOT be solvable with every computer (even quantum ones) ever made or that could be made based on resources available in say our solar system.

So... yes, it is a "stretch", maybe even counter intuitive, to go as far as saying it is not and NEVER will be possible to realize AGI, but that's what their paper claims. It's a least interesting precisely because it goes against the trend we hear CONSTANTLY pretty much everywhere else.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 45 points 3 days ago (7 children)

It's a classic BigTech marketing trick. They are the only one able to build "it" and it doesn't matter if we like "it" or not because "it" is coming.

I believed in this BS for longer than I care to admit. I though "Oh yes, that's progress" so of course it will come, it must come. It's also very complex so nobody else but such large entities with so much resources can do it.

Then... you start to encounter more and more vaporware. Grandiose announcement and when you try the result you can't help but be disappointed. You compare what was promised with the result, think it's cool, kind of, shrug, and move on with your day. It happens again, and again. Sometimes you see something really impressive, you dig and realize it's a partnership with a startup or a university doing the actual research. The more time passes, the more you realize that all BigTech do it, across technologies. You also realize that your artist friend did something just as cool and as open-source. Their version does not look polished but it works. You find a KickStarter about a product that is genuinely novel (say Oculus DK1) and has no link (initially) with BigTech...

You finally realize, year after year, you have been brain washed to believe only BigTech can do it. It's false. It's self serving BS to both prevent you from building and depend on them.

You can build, we can build and we can build better.

Can we build AGI? Maybe. Can they build AGI? They sure want us to believe it but they have lied through their teeth before so until they do deliver, they can NOT.

TL;DR: BigTech is not as powerful as they claim to be and they benefit from the hype, in this AI hype cycle and otherwise. They can't be trusted.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago

DIY is difficult

Well, arguably it's difficult at first then become much easier BUT I understand one might not want to dedicate time to it. There are solutions though to buy hardware that is open hardware and with open-source firmware. I personally do NOT recommend reverse engineering except for the pursuit of knowledge. I do NOT recommend RE for "liberating" products because even though it is amazing, it is adversarial. The companies are making money still while NOT supporting Linux or even preventing it from being supported by the community without them spending a cent. That's fine, that's their strategy. I don't approve of it but from a business standpoint I can understand it.

What I do recommend though is spending few minutes looking for proper alternatives. I clarified that a bit in another thread about inputs, cf https://lemmy.world/comment/12550034 so please consider having a look.

TL;DR: DIY/RE can be too much work but there are open hardware with open-source firmware projects sold on e.g https://crowdsupply.com which are "just" plug&play.

 

"Venture capital finance has dried up amid political and economic pressures, prompting a dramatic fall in new company formation"

Posted in technology as most of the funded companies are into technology. The most shocking piece is arguably the number of funded company pear year with a clear peak in 2018 which is 50x (!) more than last year, 2023.

view more: next ›