Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 10 Posts
  • 3.04K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Would making software with old hardware expectations work as a way to write lightweight software?English
    311·
    2 days ago

    then why not write modern software like how that was written?

    Well, three reasons that come to mind:

    First, because it takes more developer time to write efficient software, so some of what developers have done is used new hardware not to get better performance, but cheaper software. If you want really extreme examples, read about the kind of insanity that went into trying to make video games in the first three generations of video game consoles or so, on extremely limited hardware. I’d say that in most cases, this is the dominant factor.

    Second, because to a limited degree, the hardware has changed. For example, I was just talking with someone complaining that Counter-Strike 2 didn’t perform well on his system. Most systems today have many CPU cores, and heavyweight video games and some other CPU-intensive software will typically seek to take advantage of those. CS2 apparently only makes much use of one or two cores. Go back to 2005, and the ability to saturate more cores was much less useful.

    Third, in some cases, functionality is present that you might not immediately appreciate. For example, when I get a higher-resolution display in 2025, text typically doesn’t become tiny — instead, it becomes sharper. In 2005, most of it was rendered to pixel dimensions. Go back earlier, and most text wasn’t antialiased, and go back further and fonts seen on the screen were mostly just bitmap fonts, not vector. Those jumps generally made text rendering more-compute-expensive, but also made it look nicer. And that’s for something as simple as just drawing “hello world” on the screen.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta’s star AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave for own startupEnglish
    145·
    4 days ago

    Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup focused on a different type of AI called “world models,” the Financial Times reported.

    World models are hypothetical AI systems that some AI engineers expect to develop an internal “understanding” of the physical world by learning from video and spatial data rather than text alone.

    Sounds reasonable.

    That being said, I am willing to believe that an LLM could be part of an AGI. It might well be an efficient way to incorporate a lot of knowledge about the world. Wikipedia helps provide me with a lot of knowledge, for example, though I don’t have a direct brain link to it. It’s just that I don’t expect an AGI to be an LLM.

    EDIT: Also, IIRC from past reading, Meta has separate groups aimed at near-term commercial products (and I can very much believe that there might be plenty of room for LLMs here) and aimed advanced AI. It’s not clear to me from the article whether he just wants more focus on advanced AI or whether he disagrees with an LLM focus in their afvanced AI group.

    I do think that if you’re a company building a lot of parallel compute capacity now, that to make a return on that, you need to take advantage of existing or quite near-future stuff, even if it’s not AGI. Doesn’t make sense to build a lot of compute capacity, then spend fifteen years banging on research before you have something to utilize that capacity.

    https://datacentremagazine.com/news/why-is-meta-investing-600bn-in-ai-data-centres

    Meta reveals US$600bn plan to build AI data centres, expand energy projects and fund local programmes through 2028

    So Meta probably cannot only be doing AGI work.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•I Have to Ask. Which Instance Was Online During the Cloudflare's Outage?English
    13·
    5 days ago

    I mean, it’s easy to check whether a given instance is using CloudFlare.

    $ host lemmy.world|head -n1
lemmy.world has address 104.26.9.209
$ whois 104.26.9.209|grep ^NetName
NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET
$

    You can browse anonymously on any instance that permits doing so, so if you just want to browse during an outage, you can do that anywhere.

    IMHO, having an account on a second Threadiverse instance isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, not just because of CloudFlare outages, but because instances do have outages for various reasons. I have an account on olio.cafe (PieFed, not on CloudFlare) and on lemmy.today (Lemmy, not on CloudFlare) because I wanted to try out PieFed, and I have fallen back to that to post before if lemmy.today has issues.

    That being said, I didn’t intentionally try to avoid CloudFlare. I mean, they’re used by a lot of major sites, and I don’t expect them to have a lot of downtime. I mean, every Threadiverse instance has had downtime for some reason or another. I’ve had Internet outages, as well as electricity outages. Not all that common or usually an extended thing, but they happen.