If he had fired there is a very real chance the police might have mistaken him for an active shooter. He was brave and/or foolish to tackle the terrorist but having disarmed him I think he did the right thing.

The demand for LLM inference will drop off when people finally realise it is not the road to AGI. However there is still plenty of things GPU compute can be applied to and maybe spot prices will come down again.

Thanks for that. I shall have to try out Reader.

I did watch the two LLM related talks and tried out editor-code-assistant as a result. It’s really nice being able to play with the powerful agent based workflow directly in my favourite (only) editor.

Once we summit the peak of inflated expectations and the bubble bursts hopefully we’ll get back to evaluating the technology on its merits.

LLM’s definitely have some interesting properties but they are not universal problem solvers. They are great at parsing and summarizing language. There ability to vibe code is entirely based on how closely your needs match the (vast) training data. They can synthesise tutorials and stack overflow answers much faster than you can. But if you are writing something new or specialised the limits of their “reasoning” soon show up in dead ends and sycophantic “you are absolutely right, I missed that” responses.

More than the technology the social context is a challenge. We are already seeing humans form dangerous parasocial relationships with token predictors with some tragic results. If you abdicate your learning to an LLM you are not really learning and that could have profound impacts on the current cohort of learners who might be assuming they no longer need to learn as the computer can do it for them.

We are certainly experiencing a very fast technological disruption event and it’s hard to predict where the next few years will take us.

The main thing I got from that is drug pricing is complicated. At least the extra expenditure comes from widening the pool of available drugs rather than just the prices of existing treatments being put up.

One of the things I like about Horizon Zero Dawn is they introduced cosmetics so you didn’t have to compromise your visual style for the right set of numbers for your current opponents.

Well to start with you need to stop running a deficit. Once we are spending less than we raise in taxes we can pay down the debt and bring down those borrowing costs.

Alternatively you wait for inflation to overtake interest and eventually your debt pile and interest becomes a smaller and smaller part of the overall budget.

The term I’ve heard is the “right wing grift drift”. Even the left leaning Russell Brand went through the drift when he got cancelled after SA accusations.

Modern machines have TPM so we can do attested boot and validate a system hasn’t been tampered with. They don’t need third party kernel modules to test that.

Well that looks fascinating. The first thing I thought was the Colin Mcray coders night have been ex-demo scene or at least aficionados of it.

It’s nice to see Valve and Igalia see the benefit of open GPU drivers for Proton and FEX utilise.

It’s an interesting model they have moved to (heavily discounted food Vs donations). There is probably more work to do on wages and energy costs as time to cook is the greatest reason people don’t make healthy food.

I would have thought unified memory would pay off, otherwise you spend your time shuffling stuff between system memory and vram. Isn’t the deck unified memory?

I’ll believe it when someone has put a discrete GPU in the slot that runs with open drivers and no hacky workarounds for the PCIe bus.

Google, who are not short of a few bob, raised $25B in bond issues so they can keep up with AI build out. All of big tech seen terrified they will be left behind if they don’t have oodles of floating point compute on tap.

Foundation was the first sci-fi I remember reading but I don’t understand what people want when they ask for a faithful adaptation. The individual characters weren’t especially well written, the dialog is very rooted in the 50s/60s that Asimov was writing in and the constant reference to atomics was also a function of the time.

To me Foundation is about grand space opera and the rise and fall of empires. I think the TV show captures that pretty well. The narrative hacks to introduce recurring characters across the seasons never really bothered me. The inventions and embellishments of the “lore” basically modernise the story and that is fine.

mu4e inside my Emacs session.

Things like Tianaman square aren’t Western propaganda, it was a thing that happened. There is a difference between alignment fine tuning and straight up wiping things from the models knowledge base.

It’s not like totalitarian regimes don’t have form on censoring inconvenient facts including various revolutions, the Nazis and the Catholic church.

I was aware of the phrase and roughly what it was about. I had no idea about the Discord and some of the shared practices. I guess a lesson in not looking too deeply into the darker corners of the internet.

When the transition from colonial rule happened there was a (naive?) belief that China needed Hong Kong’s dynamism in a rapidly globalising world. Time has proved that not to be the case and I guess Hong Kong just withers and is subsumed into the mainland while a brain drain of those that can leave continues.