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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • but i still think that itā€™s a little suspect on the grounds that we have no idea how many times they had to restart training due to the model borking, other experiments and hidden cost

    Oh ye, I totally agree on this one. This entire genAI enterprise insults me on a fundamental level as a CS researcher, thereā€™s zero transparency or reproducibility, no one reviews these claims, itā€™s a complete shitshow from terrible, terrible benchmarks, through shoddy methodology, up to untestable and bonkers claims.

    I have zero good faith for the press, though, theyā€™re experts in painting any and all tech claims in the best light possible like their lives fucking depend on it. We wouldnā€™t be where we are right now if anyone at any ā€œreputableā€ newspaper like WSJ asked one (1) question to Sam Altman like 3 years ago.


  • Okay I mean, I hate to somehow come to the defense of a slop company? But WSJ saying nonsense is really not their fault, like even that particular quote clearly says ā€œDeepSeek said training oneā€ cost $5.6M. Thatā€™s just a true statement. No one in their right mind includes the capital expenditure in that, the same way when you say ā€œit took us 100h to train a modelā€ that doesnā€™t include building a data center in those 100h.

    Beside whether they actually lied or not, itā€™s still immensely funny to me that they couldā€™ve just told a blatant lie nobody factchecked and it shook the market to the fucking core wiping off like billions in valuation. Very real market based on very real fundamentals run by very serious adults.




  • donā€™t even get me started on ā€œwhole language learningā€ and ā€œnew mathā€

    I donā€™t know what ā€œwhole language learningā€ is, and Iā€™m way too young to have experience it, but wasnā€™t the curriculum before ā€œnew mathā€ like arithmetic and nothing else? In other words, not math at all?

    I didnā€™t read much into it but from what I did it seems like they started teaching children actual math like algebra and logic and parents got frustrated because they were too stupid to help with homework anymore. Brings into my mind the whole ā€œmath was cool before they involved lettersā€ thing that makes me want to throw a book at someone.




  • This is a really weird comment. Assembly is not faster than C, thatā€™s a nonsensical statement, C compiles down to assembly. LLVMā€™s optimizations will most likely outperform or directly match whatever hand-crafted assembly you write. Why would BEQ 1000 be ā€œconsiderably fasterā€ than if (x == y) goto L_1000;? This collapses even further if you consider any application larger than a few hundred lines of code, any sensible compiler is going to beat you on optimizations if you try to write hand-crafted assembly. Try loading up assembly code and manually performing intraprocedural optimizations, lol, thereā€™s a reason every compiled language goes through an intermediate representation.

    Saying that C# is slower than C is also nonsensical, especially now that C# has built-in PGO itā€™s very likely it could outperform an application written in C. C#'s JIT compiler is not somehow slower because itā€™s flexible in terms of hardware, if anything thatā€™s what makes it fast. For example you can write a vectorized loop that will be JIT-compiled to the ideal fastest instruction set available on the CPU running the program, whereas in C or assembly youā€™d have to manually write a version for each. Thereā€™s no reason to think that manual implementation would be faster than what the JIT comes up with at runtime, though, especially with PGO.

    Itā€™s kinda like youā€™re saying that a V12 engine is faster than a Ferrari and that they are both faster than a spaceship because the spaceship doesnā€™t have wheels.

    I know youā€™re trying to explain this to a non-technical person but what you said is so terribly misleading I cannot see educational value in it.





  • This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.

    Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.

    Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I donā€™t fucking think so.

    Weā€™re unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldnā€™t you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after youā€™re gone? If you canā€™t spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then thatā€™s a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.

    And I donā€™t think thereā€™s a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.