- Dear Noam,
I remember your nickname from the Infernu project of yours. It was one of the best attempts at typechecking JavaScript I've ever seen, and it's as needed in modern days of TS team going insane as it never has been.
The things we don't really need more of are editors, CLI software, or Rust software.
Please reconsider your goals.
- Okay, this will be a bit on a conspiracy theory side, but there was a paper recently describing how to do matrix computations on a RAM stick connected to FPGA, and they've shown it's possible to do it cheaper per flop that GPUs. Except, of course, there's a variety of RAM producers.
It might either be artificial to keep GPU prices where they are, or someone already started building their RAM-based AI datacenter.
- Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace.
It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!
The best part is the motherboard produced in a way to fail due to moisture in a couple of years, with all the uncoated copper, with 0.1mm pitch debugging ports that short-circuit due to a single hair, and the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years. How would you otherwise be able to change the whole laptop without all the walls around repair manuals and parts? You just absolutely have to love the fact even transplanting chips from other laptops won't help due to all the overlapping hardware DRMs.
I'll go plug the cable into the bottom of my wireless Apple mouse, and remind myself of all the best times I had with Apple's hardware. It really rocks.
- Oh, it's not a problem, until you're a Kuznetsov-father trying to get on a plane with your Kuznetsova-daughter, and you become a suspect of kidnapping until you don't prove it's actually your daughter. After you get your mortally scared daughter back from authorities, you probably start thinking that having the same surname is something you actually need.
And no, US authorities won't make it easy for you or her.
- I think keeping it unsupported for a couple of years, and reluctantly pushing it off to volunteers who barely have enough technical experience to support it is quite close to "was killed".
Until recently Jest had a bug that made it crash due to sl (yes, the famous steam locomotive) running under the hood. This gives a hint at, ahem, the sophistication of its architecture.
The project is long in its EOL, and the only reason for its use is inertia, the jQuery kind of it.
- Until they dump your startup for no reason, and you'll have to migrate off their undocumented proprietary infrastructure. Please read stories on HN. You're risking your business if you work with them.
- I should remind that in a similarly cheerful mood FB dumped support of Jest and a bunch of other libraries. They have a long history of killing successful projects.
Worse, Vercel is involved, and I literally don't remember anything good about that company.
I'd recommend to be very cautious with such news, and use older versions of React for the next couple of years.
- So there are - sloth on a tree - UFO in a forest - playground - alien on a beach
What's the 5th thing you have to find?
- On top of other criticism here, I'd like to add that the article optimistically assumes that actors are completely honest with their benchmarks when billions of dollars and national security are at stake.
I'm only an "expert" in computer science and software engineering, and can say that - neither of widely available LLMs can produce answers at the level of first year CS student; - students using LLMs can easily be distingished by being wrong in all the ways a human would otherwise never be.
So to me it's not really the question of whether CS-related benchmarks are false, it's a question of how exactly did this BS even fly.
Obviously in other disciplines LLMs show similar lack of performance, but I can't call myself an "expert" there, and someone might argue I tend to use wrong prompts.
Until we see a website where we can put an intermediate problem and get a working solution, "benchmarks show that our AI solves problems on gold medalist level" will still be an obvious BS.
- Loved the artstyle, but controls... uhh... let's say they were on par with a bad PC port of Sonic Adventure. I can barely control where I'm going, because the camera just rotates randomly. Something I'll never miss from the old days.
- That's not idealistic, that's how arithmetics work. If you use the same generic thing more times, you have the higher chance of discovering it broken. The fact that you've run into cases means that chance is never zero, and is irrelevant to the discussion.
As was already mentioned in the article, PB solve a problem that likely only Google has, even if that. State of the art nowadays is JSON/JSONL. If it grows too large, gzip it.
When someone is using third-party closed proprietary technologies to be "not like the rest", it usually doesn't work that well for their business.
The technology is "alive" until it didn't follow the path of Closure, GWT, and the rest of "we use it on the most loaded page of the world" technology. PB will be on the same graveyard soon.
- > would imply <1h runtime, or a >50W consumption at idle
That's the case.
- If there are errors in implementation of general constructs, they tend to be visible at their every use, and get rapidly fixed.
Some general constructs are better than the others, because they have an algebraic theory behind them, and sometimes that theory was already researched for a few hundred years.
For example, product/coproduct types mentioned in the article are quite close to addition and multiplication that we've all learned in school, and obey the same laws.
So there are several levels where the choice of ad-hoc constructs is wrong, and in the end the only valid reason to choose them is time constraints.
If they had 24 years to figure out how to do it properly, but they didn't, the technology is just dead.
- My CPU is at over 5GHz, 1% load and 70C at the moment. That's in a "power-saving mode".
If nothing would be wrong, it'd be at something like 1.5GHz with most of the cores unpowered.
- > might be my Linux setup being inefficient
Given that videos spin up those coolers, there is actually a problem with your GPU setup on Linux, and I expect there'd be an improvement if you managed to fix it.
Another thing is that Chrome on Linux tends to consume exorbitant amount of power with all the background processes, inefficient rendering and disk IO, so updating it to one of the latest versions and enabling "memory saving" might help a lot.
Switching to another scheduler, reducing interrupt rate etc. probably help too.
Linux on my current laptop reduced battery time x12 compared to Windows, and a bunch of optimizations like that managed to improve the situation to something like x6, i.e. it's still very bad.
> Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture?
Yes and no. x86 is inherently inefficient, and most of the progress over last two decades was about offloading computations to some more advanced and efficient coprocessors. That's how we got GPUs, DMA on M.2 and Ethernet controllers.
That said, it's unlikely that x86 specifically is what wastes your battery. I would rather blame Linux, suspect its CPU frequency/power drivers are misbehaving on some CPUs, and unfortunately have no idea how to fix it.
- Even though this should be the way to go, it still leaves a bitter taste.
Remember ESM fiasco? Now we have a few years of that all over again, this time with different versions of TypeScript, settings, and tsgo. Good news!
- Probably this wouldn't be a problem if Web was somewhat anonymous, so that merely stumbling upon a security issue, or using website in a regular way would not constitute a crime for the lack of the person to put that crime onto.
Also if things stored in those databases weren't plain strings, but tokens (in asymmetric cryptography sense) so that only the service owns it, and in case of a leak user can use it to get a payout from the service, this problem would be solved.
But no business is interested in provably making their users secure, it would be a self-sabotage. It's always just a security theater.
- Nice to know!
I thought about it in terms of cardinalities of types. If A and B are types with |A| and |B| values correspondingly, there are |B|^|A| possible functions A -> B.
Another funny thing is that if you consider
forall a. (a -> a) -> (a -> a)
the type of natural numbers (weird, I know, but basically we encode numbers in unary with number of times we compose (a -> a) to itself), then exponentiation on such numbers will be
a ^ b = b a
- Oh wow. I've seen so many "AI" that apparently I started reading around them.
Thank you!