brucethemoose
@brucethemoose@lemmy.world
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 15 hours ago:
I elaborated below, but basically Musk has no idea WTF he’s talking about.
If I had his “f you” money, I’d at least try a diffusion bitnet model (and open the weights), and probably 100 other papers I consider low hanging fruit, before this absolutely dumb boomer take.
He’s such an idiot know it all. It’s so painful whenever he ventures into a field you sorta know.
But he might just be shouting nonsense on Twitter while X employees actually do something different. Because if they take his orders verbatim they’re going to get crap models, even with all the stupid brute force they have.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 15 hours ago:
There’s some nuance.
Using LLMs to augment data, especially for fine tuning (not training the base model), is a sound method. The Deepseek paper using, for instance, generated reasoning traces is famous for it.
Another is using LLMs to generate logprobs of text, and train not just on the text itself but on the *probability a frontier LLM sees in every ‘word.’ This is called distillation, though there’s some variation and complication.
But yes, the “dumb” way, aka putting data into a text box and asking an LLM to correct it, is dumb and dumber, because:
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You introduce some combination of sampling errors and repetition/overused word issues, depending on the sampling settings
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You possibly pollute your dataset with “filler”
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In Musks specific proposition, it doesn’t even fill knowledge gaps the old Grok has.
In other words, Musk has no idea WTF he’s talking about.
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- Comment on So um, america just started another war in the middle east. We're going to need a shit ton more memes to americans from the nightmare they are enduring. Thanks in advance... 17 hours ago:
A huge chunk of Americans enthusiastically support warring with Iran (or will, soon). Don’t like we aren’t culpable.
Is it because they’re glued to feeds and TV news? Yeah, but that’s also ours, and we basically elected Big Tech and Newscorp to the presidency so…
- Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever 18 hours ago:
I hate to sound preachy, but this is a good example of “rivals” peacefully meeting.
So many people I meet IRL seem conditioned to think this person they hate on the internet would be someone they’d shout at like they’re an axe murderer, in the middle of a murder. It’s the example they see. Death threats are, like, normal on Facebook or TV News or whatever they’re into, apparently.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever 18 hours ago:
Welcome to Lemmy, heh.
- Comment on A Completely Natural Conversation in the NYC Reddit 3 days ago:
TBF those companies don’t have the budget for a astroturfing bot campaign, or at least can’t afford the PR hit.
- Comment on Honda successfully launched and landed its own reusable rocket 4 days ago:
This is the second greatest YT video ever made.
- Comment on The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it's time to consider Linux and LibreOffice 5 days ago:
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. You can do most of your work in linux and boot windows as a ‘secondary’ OS for stuff like adobe? I do this, and share NTFS SSDs/hard drives between them.
- Comment on Trump team leaks AI plans in public GitHub repository 6 days ago:
“all-in-one API” that will allow agencies to connect their systems to models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
This is a huge red flag to me.
It means:
- They are ignorant of existing APIs and standards that are exactly this. Uh, MCP or OpenAI API? Which everyone already uses?
- They have zero interesting in models they can host themselves, or from cheaper providers.
- They have zero interest in actually useful tools. Like, say, SGLang’s cached hosting and fast fill-in-the-blanks formatting which is perfect for say, processing government forms.
In other words, it’s just full corporate capture.
One of the consequences is that it will be very shitty, unfortunately.
- Comment on Confirmed - China bans NVIDIA chips and accelerates its total independence from US technology 2 weeks ago:
Yeah honestly the Nvidia ban was stupid.
Everyone in the AI research space was saying it, but no, our old policymakers are captured by Altman, Musk and tech bros who would burn anything for their two years of pure anticompetitiveness.
The running joke is that the Nvidia ban was the best thing to ever happen to Chinese research, as it made them thrifty, while big US companies are lazily burning huge GPU farms scaling up and… not improving anything.
- Comment on The FDA Is Approving Drugs Without Evidence They Work 2 weeks ago:
Both can be true.
It can be true that the FDA was corrupted/broken to some extent and needs more ‘skeptial’ and less-industry-friendly leadership, while at the same time, skepticism in science is not the answer.
This is my dillema with MAGA. Many of the issues they tackle are spot on, even if people don’t like to hear that. They’re often right, even if the proposed solutions are problematic or even damaging.
- Comment on The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced 2 weeks ago:
Depends on the application.
In some cases, it would be fantastic. But it’s clearly not a one size fits all, yeah.
- Comment on How does HTML actually run on a computer? 2 weeks ago:
TBH 2-3 would be good, since each browser takes a monumental amount of effort/money to optimize.
Like, my best case somewhat plausible scenario would be Apple (and maybe some other vested interests?) merging Firefox and Safari into one open source effort that can keep up with Google (with Safari being a “branded” Firefox). There just isn’t enough money for a couple of open efforts to keep up with Chromium.
- Comment on X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it 2 weeks ago:
I have to wonder who this appeals to?
Most are already trapped in something established like Discord, WeChat, FB Messenger. As said, security isn’t a strong point, and there’s no engagement angle.
I guess if you already spend tons of time on X it’s kinda convenient?
- Comment on How does HTML actually run on a computer? 2 weeks ago:
Seems like your really pondering “HTML should be conspicuously slow for such a widely-used standard,” right?
The answer is that modern browsers are complex and highly optimized rendering engines.
Read back through this blog: mozillagfx.wordpress.com
But in a nutshell, there’s a lot of talk about how modern browser are analogous to tuned game engines, heavily relying on the GPU and all sorts of hacks to render HTML efficiently. V8 is another good example, taking what was a notoriously slow language (JavaScript) and hacking out a fast JIT engine for it.
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 2 weeks ago:
Pytorch Nightly: pytorch.org/blog/compromised-nightly-dependency/
theregister.com/…/pypi_pytorch_dependency_attack/
The malicious binary would upload files ranging in size up to 99,999 bytes and send the contents to a specified domain.
Was pretty scary from my perspective.
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 2 weeks ago:
PyTorch Nightly:
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 2 weeks ago:
There absolutely are. I barely missed a linux virus from a hijacked python package what… two years ago?
- Comment on The Witcher 3 is getting cross-platform mod support 3 weeks ago:
I have lost track of them, lol. Isn’t that just SE underneath… I think I inherited that too, somehow.
- Comment on The Witcher 3 is getting cross-platform mod support 3 weeks ago:
Skyrim Special Edition is the last stop for Skyrim modding, isn’t it? I somehow got that even though I only bought the game once, heh.
- Comment on Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition? 3 weeks ago:
I dunno. From my more isolated perspective on GitHub and small LLM testing circles, I see a lot of 3090s, 4090s, sometimes arrays of 3060s/3090s or old P40s or MI50s, which people got basically for the purpose of experimentation and development because they can’t drop (or at least justify) $5K.
They would 100% drop that money on a 7900 48GB instead (as the sheer capacity is worth it over the speed hit and finickiness), and then do a whole bunch of bugfixing/testing on them. I know I would. Hence the Framework Strix Halo thing is sold out even though it’s… rather compute-lite compared to a 3090+ GPU.
It seems like a tiny market, but a lot of the frameworks/features/models being developed by humble open source devs filter up to the enterprise space.
- Comment on Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition? 3 weeks ago:
WRT pricing, I’m pretty sure AMD is typically a fraction of the price of Nvidia hardware on the enterprise side
I’m not as sure about this, but seems like AMD is taking a fat margin on the MI300X (and its sucessor?), and kinda ignoring the performance penalty. It’s easy to say “build it yourself!” but the reality is very few can, or will, do this, and will simply try to deploy vllm or vanilla TRL or something as best they can (and run into the same issues everyone does).
The ‘enthusiast’ side where all the tinkerer devs reside is totally screwed up though. AMD’s mirroring Nvidia’s VRAM cartel pricing when they have absolutely no reason to. It’s completely bonkers. AMD would be in a totally different place right now if they had sold 40GB/48GB 7900s for an extra $100 or $200.
The biggest culprit from what I can gather is that AMD’s GPU firmware/software side is basically still ATI camped up in Markham, divorced from the rest of the company in Austin that is doing great work with their CPU-side.
Yeah, it does seem divorced from the CPU division. But a lot of the badness comes from business decisions, even when the silicon is quite good, and some of that must be from Austin.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 3 weeks ago:
That’s what I get for not clicking through!
Good! I can see a ton of gamers complaining about this, but switching to anything but in-house is a great move IMO.
- Comment on Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition? 3 weeks ago:
Except they didn’t.
They repeatedly fumble the software with little mistakes (looking at you, Flash Attention). They price the MI300X and any high VRAM GPU through the roof, when they have every reason to be more competitive and undercut Nvidia. They have sad, incomplete software efforts divorced from what devs are actually doing, like their quantization framework or some inexplicably bad LLMs they trained themself.
They give no one any reason to give them a chance, and wonder why no one comes. Lisa Su could fix this with literally like two phone calls (remove VRAM restrictions on their OEMs, and fix stupid small bugs in ROCM), but they don’t.
- Comment on DeepSeek's distilled new R1 AI model can run on a single GPU | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
Depends on the quantization.
7B is small enough to run it in FP8 or a Marlin quant with SGLang/VLLM/TensorRT, so you can probably get very close to the H20 on a 3090 or 4090.
- Comment on The Witcher 3 is getting cross-platform mod support 3 weeks ago:
No offense, but it feels a little late in the game’s life cycle to hit “critical mass” for modding. I mean, I guess it has a long sales tail and other adaptations will drive people to the game.
Still, this is good! Better now than never.
- Comment on Hideo Kojima casually reveals a Death Stranding anime is in the works 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 3 weeks ago:
Spicy take: I hope they dump 2077’s engine and go Unreal.
I recently followed this guide to try and set up “optimized” PT in 2077, and on my lowly RTX 3090 it runs like cold molasses. Not a chance. RT reflections is all I can manage, and it looks… good.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been playing Satisfactory (an Unreal Engine game from a comparatively microscopic studio), and holy moly. Unreal’s dynamic lighting looks scary good. Like, I get light bounces and reflections and everything, and it runs at like quadruple the FPS in a massively complex scene.
- Comment on I just came across an AI called Sesame that appears to have been explicitly trained to deny and lie about the Palestinian genocide 4 weeks ago:
Probably just “safety” data snuck into its alignment training + an overly zealous system prompt on political topics: I bet it blocks anything it considers “political” or sensitive.
There are models out of Israel that could have a more explicit slant (try Jamba), but this doesn’t seem to be one of them.
To me, a fundamental problem is hiding technical knobs from users. Logprobs, sampling, the system prompt, starting replies for it to continue: there are tons of ways to “jailbreak” LLMs and get them to have an open “discussion” about (say) Palestine, but they’re all hidden here.
- Comment on EA never grasped Dragon Age's value as an RPG, says Inquisition writer 4 weeks ago:
Side note, but even with all their troubles/turnover, I still love RPS’s hint of bite in their news writing (outside the columns).
