frezik
@frezik@midwest.social
- Comment on Google employees question execs over 'decline in morale' after blowout earnings 5 hours ago:
“Due to current market conditions . . .” is the line my group has been given. There never seems to be market conditions where the workers get to win.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 1 day ago:
Improving the models doesn’t seem to work: arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125?
We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and five standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from exhibiting “zero-shot” generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream “zero-shot” performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend.
It’s taking exponentially more data to get better results, and therefore, exponentially more energy. Even if something like analog training chips reduce energy usage ten fold, the exponential curve will just catch up again. Not only that, but you have to gather that much more data, and while the Internet is a vast datastore, the AI models have already absorbed much of it.
The implication is that the models are about as good as they will be without more fundamental breakthroughs. The thing about breakthroughs like that is that they could happen tomorrow, they could happen in 10 years, they could happen in 1000 years, or they could happen never.
Fermat’s Last Theorem remained an open problem for 358 years. Squaring the Circle remained open for over 2000 years. The Riemann Hypothesis has remained unsolved after more than 150 years. These things sometimes sit there for a long, long time, and not for lack of smart people trying to solve them.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 1 day ago:
Do you know if the model is running locally or some cloud shit? If locally, the actual energy usage may be modest.
Energy spent training the model initially may have been prohibitive, though.
- Comment on Choose your difficulty 2 days ago:
When are we talking about, here? Europe is a disease-ridden mosquito fest if you go back a few thousand years.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals Tesla software-locked cheapest Model Y, offers 40-60 more miles of range 2 days ago:
Probably, yes.
My wife goes to work and back on a Mini EV, which is around 110 mi range. Basically a BMW i3 dropped into the chassis of a Cooper S. It’s not suitable for road trips in the US. If L3 charging was a little more reliable, you could almost do it, but it would still suck and I wouldn’t choose to do it except in a pinch.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals Tesla software-locked cheapest Model Y, offers 40-60 more miles of range 2 days ago:
None of those had close to the range of the Model X in 2015. Having less than 200mi range makes things difficult. Though with proper charging infrastructure, having more than 400mi isn’t really necessary, and is almost silly.
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 2 days ago:
Implosion-type nukes are all but impossible to make go off that way. They need a whole bunch of small explosives to go off very precisely to squeeze the core in just the right way. A short circuit or a crash won’t have the necessary precision. This isn’t entirely safe, either–it can still cause a small explosion with a flash of fallout and radiation–but it’s a manageable problem.
Gun-types (Little Boy was one) are easier to go off on accident, but the US retired its last gun-type design decades ago. I don’t think Russia used them much, either. They’re only good for smaller bombs, and their safety issues make them questionable for any use. Smaller nuclear powers aren’t bothering with them.
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 2 days ago:
You know how the Internet made fun of Stockton Rush for using carbon fiber in a sub, which is a compression structure? Similar thing going on here. Carbon fiber is a great material for tensile strength and lightweight. It can be used in compression structures, but it needs more careful engineering to pull it off. The benefits do not always outweigh the costs.
As a more general issue, if a car the size of a Geo Metro or smaller can’t be safe on roads, then motorcycles and bikes can’t be, either.
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 2 days ago:
I’m not sure you can haul more. Cargo e-bikes can do a lot more than you think.
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 2 days ago:
Just as an observation, there was a time when everyone on the Internet was gaga over the idea of Project Orion, and you didn’t dare speak out against it lest you get a hail of downvotes.
It’d work fine in deep space. It’s not a good idea to launch of Earth this way. But again, we’ll probably find something better once we’re at the stage of needing it.
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 2 days ago:
It’s also a three-wheeler, which gets around US safety regulations. It gets registered as a motorcycle or autocycle (depending on how your state handles it). However, it’s still an enclosed metal box. There’s not a lot of good data, but it’s arguably better to be sitting loose on a motorcycle with a helmet and safety gear as opposed to being crushed inside a sardine can.
There’s a certain point of shrinking cars where you have to ask “why not use an e-bike?”, and this is that point.
- Comment on How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money 2 days ago:
It’s not a solution by itself, but a library economy can form part of it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 2 days ago:
The sun gives you around 1500W per m2. If sun shines at maximum brightness for 24 hours, you get 36kwh per day. That’s enough to fully charge a small EV every day.
Bringing this to numbers that exist in the real world, the sun will only give you about 20% of that over the course of the day, and the panels are around 20% efficient. You’ll get more like 1.4kwh per day per m2. You can double or triple that, depending on how much surface area you can cover. An EV can get around 3 miles per kwh, so even tripling that number can get you 12 miles. Considering the extra costs involved (both in buying the panels and adding weight), it’s not even worth it as a supplementary source.
Put the solar panels over the parking places and roadways, not on the cars.
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 2 days ago:
It would probably work just fine, but it needs a huge ship. It could get up to a few percent of the speed of light.
FWIW, nuclear test ban treaties are considered to outlaw it. I think we’re more likely to solve the technical difficulties of antimatter propulsion than we are to get over the political difficulties of nuclear bomb propulsion.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 2 days ago:
OK, let’s just get rid of cars altogether, then.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 2 days ago:
Perhaps they’d like to rollback all the times we’ve bailed out the auto industry. We don’t want the government to be choosing winners and loser, after all.
- Comment on Imagine denying other living and breathing lifeforms agency to thrive amd change lol lol lol 4 days ago:
Sorry, I see how that last sentence can be read as being directed at you. I was thinking more of people in general who say “we should just change the rule"l because it doesn’t work in this one instances” without thinking of impacts beyond the immediate problem. Making the environment part of our economic and social systems is a good idea.
- Comment on we love those power laws 5 days ago:
I wonder if there’s research out there into the hottest temperature humanity can reach throughout history? So many things that advance technology depend on getting even hotter. With a simple wood fire, you can cook food to make it safer to eat and get more nutrients out of it. With a better design and fuel to get hotter, you can work copper, or glass, or steel. Hotter still and you can fuse atoms.
- Comment on Imagine denying other living and breathing lifeforms agency to thrive amd change lol lol lol 5 days ago:
You’re not totally wrong, but an important distinction is that some rules aren’t there just to be arbitrary. They’re linked into a larger system, and you can’t change one without affecting thirty other things. It usually needs more than ten seconds of thought prior to posting on the Internet.
- Comment on Comedy has peaked ladies and gentlemen 6 days ago:
It’s really contrived, too. This argument comes from people who will tell you that you have to use the whole Bible and not read between the lines. Then they have to struggle to find a reason for Song of Solomon to be there when it’s been considered canon for thousands of years.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 days ago:
I’m working outword to find a path in.
If a society can have power without money, then can the two overlap perfectly in any society?
To use a more concrete example, how do unions ever have power in our society? They tend not to have money, or at least very little in proportion to the business owners.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 days ago:
Then let me attack it from a different direction: can you have power in a society that does not have money?
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 days ago:
“Wealth and power are exactly the same”. This is the claim I’m disputing. If there are places where money and power are in conflict, then they can’t be the same. Your analysis of a situation will be have holes in it if this is not considered.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 days ago:
Oh, no, they’re not exactly the same. They wouldn’t come into conflict if they were the same.
As another example, unions. Employees often see issues early on; perhaps a machine needing maintenance. A union can bring this up to management and put the pressure on to get it done. The business will save money in the long run with machines in proper maintenance.
If it doesn’t get done, best case scenario is that it fails and the whole production line is shot until it’s fixed. Worst case, it fails more catastrophically and damages other equipment, or injures workers.
Despite plenty of stories like this, companies will fight unionization efforts every time. Why? Because money doesn’t always align with power.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 1 week ago:
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
Sure, it can, because I’m going to blow your mind: businesses aren’t about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.
None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company’s best long term asset–they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs–yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it’s still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn’t going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn’t really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.
All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it’s not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla’s ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.
Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn’t look like it’s going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.
None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
If it doesn’t make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.
- Comment on Calculus made easy 1 week ago:
That’s been an argument among educators. You can teach the basic concepts of Calculus to a fourth grader. What makes it difficult is rigor, but we don’t necessarily need to teach rigor to fourth graders.
- Comment on Tesla Exodus Continues As Top HR Exec Leaves After Brutal Job Cuts 1 week ago:
Nah, ignoring them doesn’t work past a certain point. If it did, it would have worked with Internet trolls back in the 90s.
You don’t want to give small time versions of Musk or Trump a platform. That’s when ignoring them works. Weird ass flat earther channel with 12 subscribers? Maybe don’t post them on Xhitter as outrage porn; just let it be. Once they have a hundred thousand subscribers, though, you can no longer ignore them and hope they go away. If you try, they will yell louder.
- Comment on Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling 1 week ago:
I was going to ask how WSL gets installed without the Windows Store, but looks like the install path doesn’t use the store anymore. That was one of the few things I ever used the store for.
- Comment on Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling 1 week ago:
That sort of thing probably has an outsized effect on people. They get hate it at first because everything is different, then they have to use it at work, and then they get used to it and want to use it at home.
- Comment on Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles 1 week ago:
10-80% charge time is in the range of 20 minutes. EVs already exist that will get you 4 hours of driving on that. Yes, even in the cold.
This isn’t as big a problem in practice as it’s made out to be.