From Plato's Phaedrus, on the invention of writing:
Theuth: "This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."
Thamus replied: "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
You have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
Which is to say: "All this has happened before, and will happen again."
NPUs were pushed by Microsoft, who saw the writing on the wall: AI like chatgpt will dominate the user's experience, edge computing is a huge advantage in that regard, and Apple's hardware can do it. NPUs are basically Microsoft trying to fudge their way to a llamacpp-on-Apple-Silicon experience. Obviously it failed, but they couldn't not try.
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NPUs were pushed by Microsoft, who saw the writing on the wall: AI like chatgpt will dominate the user's experience, edge computing is a huge advantage in that regard
Then where is a demo application from Microsoft of a model that I can run locally where my user experience is so much better (faster?) if my computer has an NPU?
> AI like chatgpt will dominate the user's experience
I hope not. Sure they’re helpful, but I’d rather they sit idle behind the scenes, and then only get used when a specific need arises rather than something like a Holodeck audio interface
I think the reason why NPUs failed is that Microsoft's preferred standard ONNX and the runtime they developed is a dud. Exporting models to work on ONNX is a pain in the ass.
> Even a normal spreadsheet is fairly complex beast. But the novel thing about bidicalc is the backwards solver. Mathematically, updating a spreadsheet "backward" is a (potentially underdetermined) root finding problem, because we are trying to find a vector of unknowns such that , where F is the function computed by the cells formulas, and G is the objective value entered in the cell. Note that F is not necessarily a single formula, but the result of composing an upstream graph of cells into a single function.
> The actual root-finding solver is a custom algorithm that I made. It a general purpose algorithm that will find one root of any continuous-almost-everywhere function for which a complete syntactic expression is known. It uses a mix of continuous constraint propagation on interval union arithmetic , directional Newton's method and dichotomic search. It is of course limited by floating point precision and available computation time.
But that really doesn't answer your question. I see no reason why the solver wouldn't decide every time it had a two-variable summation that ADD(X+Y) doesn't reverse to X=-90 and Y=100.
Sounds good, but what happens when everyone else uses ideological purity filters too?
Because if what this guy is saying is reasonable, then it immediately follows that it's also reasonable for every ideology and religion to exclude the ones they don't like. For example: how does an antisimetic software license strike you? Because that would be a perfectly reasonable license for some people to enact, and fully justified by this article's logic.
No, I did not. From the article. This is, unfortunately, a straightforward case of poorly-considered moralizing with extremely bad consequences.
> Overall, these ideas lead me to believe that the open source movement needs to see itself as in a larger social context. Can we shift the balance of power away from massive companies and their massive harms? Can we prevent Nazis from using our software? Should we even try?
> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.
Whoops you're right. I read it twice and completely overlooked that part. Also one of the seven bullet points points in that direction.
I read it as a more "big corps exploiting open source devs" take (as were six out of seven bullet points), but they did indeed slip that in, and concluded with it even.
Upvoted but felt bad for not replying. Yeah, I initially read it as a generic "big corps exploiting open source devs" take as well. Not often someone actually says "whoops you're right" so kudos - not sure I would've done the same.
The article is an interesting philosophical situation where you know the intent is good. But maybe, they took it too far without any of the necessary caveats.
I think it's generous to say anything after 7 was good.
8 was just so offensively bad with getting rid of the start menu and replacing it with a fullscreen tablet UI, 10 was celebrated for backtracking on that.
But it was also famous for shoving bullshit like Candy Crush into everyone's start menu. I haven't forgotten that.
> As an aside... Because one node didn't start, and my Proxmox cluster has only two nodes, it can't reach quorum, meaning I can't really make any changes to my other node, and I can't start any containers that are stopped.
I've recently added another Zigbee dongle, that supports Thread, and it happens to share same VID:PID combo as the old dongle, so due to how these were mapped into guest OS, all my light switches stopped working. I had to fix the issue fast.
Lesson in here somewhere. Something about about a toaster representing the local intelligence maxima?
Yes, but then I'm going to have to manually go around my house and turn off all the lights when I leave the house and when I come back I have to turn them on manually instead of them just turning on when I open the door to a room.
Also my AC/heating automatically turns off when I leave the house and turns on when I come back, my lights automatically dim/change to a warmer temperature in the evening as it gets closer to bed time, my desktop goes to sleep when I leave the house, my TV automatically turns on when I power on the living room media PC, etc. etc.
For even n>2 you define a tie breaker node in advance and only the partition connected to that node can make a quorum at 50%. For n=2 going from no quorum to quorum requires both nodes but losing a node doesn't lose quorum, and when you lose a node you stop, shoot the other node, and continue. For split brain the fastest draw wins the shootout.
proxmox even makes it easy by letting you run something like a raspberry pi as an additional quorum member if you dont have enough hardware for a 3rd node
At least I was laughing at the Cloudflare oopsie, since all my light switches (et al) are all local. Unlike those people with a fancy smart bed that went into a W shape because it couldn't talk to AWS.
I'm sure it felt very real at the time.
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