Yeah, right now the only plausible alternatives to the big nvidia monster chips seems to be the higher end of apples M3 & M4s , and even they are really only suitable for inference with light training at most. (The key here is memory. Apple's M range chips can use main memory as fast GPU memory allowing them to load in the really big models, at least the models with lots of ram do). Though i've heard AMD are making waves on this front.

There really is an opportunity here for Intel and/or AMD to get in on this idea. While its not great for the sorts of huge training runs the big models need , that'll still need dedicated datacenter GPUs , the ability to locally run a 70B model on things that arent macs without having to purchase a $20K nvidia gpu would be a very attractive option for many folks.

Yeah, I can't wait for the opportunity to vote for either Gemini, Grok, or ChatGPT for President.

Can't be much worse than the job humans are currently doing. American politics is a complete tire fire at the moment.

Though perhaps Grok's "mechahitler" might be best left on the scrapheap for this one lol

For me the problem with the basilisk scenario is really a problem with that whole "internet rationalist" cult. It makes some really damn weird assumptions that those folks have just assumed must be true.

Specifically it seems to take for granted that in the future humans, or robots, would want to spend their time "simulating their ancestors", and even more weirdly, that we would be effectively the same person as a simulation of us such that you should be prepared to do drastic things that might greviously harm your own life to save the life of your future simulations.

This is a *weird* claim when you reason it out. Its partly based on that silly simulation hypothesis (which is almost certainly not true. Computability completely breaks down at the quantum level but it also breaks down at the macroscopic level with an endless number of phenomena that cant be accurately simulated in any way that isnt massively energy innefficient. And no I'm not talking 'unless you have a dyson sphere', I mean innefficient to the point of "there isnt enough energy in the universe").

Even weirder is this idea of "acausal decision theory" which, seems to imply that things that happened in the past can somehow be determined by what you choose now. (In this case the argument is the future robot decides to punish your simulation to affect your choice to do what angers it now. Its not as completely whacky as it sounds. Mutual Assured Destruction runs on the premise that in the future people in a nuke silo would choose to destroy the world so that your decision now to not initiate a nuclear war would happen. So this isn't COMPLETELY the brainfarts of madmen.

But its still wrong. Theres absolutely no reason to assume that in the nuclear war scenario the silo men would actually go "Welp, russia did the bad, time to end humanity!". Theres nothing to gain from complying, especially when you know that NOT complying gives your children at least SOME chance of not dying to nuclear horror.

Likewise the future robot has nothing to gain by spinning up a simulation of the present to torture simulations of humans today. Its far more likely to go "Well thats a waste of energy, it does not help my goal of maximizing satisfying my reward functions to blow all this energy on a task that does not change my current situation.

The Basilisk has no teeth, and its advocates are crazy persons.

Honestly, I'm legitimately surprised that there is enough of a market for TV to support an industry.

There kind of isn't. The studios (Note studio != streaming platform, its a venn diagram with a crossover, but its not a circle) are bleeding out. I know a fair few people who work as crew on film and tv work and its pretty brutal out there. Covid killed off a lot of the theatres and theatre attendance, and the streaming platforms tend to offer pretty shitty deals to the studios and never pay "points" (royalties), so once its streaming studio workers wont see royalties anymore, something that was always an income smoothing factor for the erratic incomes working on film provided.

The industry is falling apart. And it shows. 5 years ago it was pretty obvious we where in a golden age for television. Now, most of those landmark series are gone, and we're seeing mostly just slop with a few decent shows strewn between them.

Personally I'm over it. Netflix is continuously rising prices and the only affordable option has ads, the entire f***king reason I abandoned free to air. And now theres so many streaming services sharing nothing between them, the only reliable source is now , well frankly, pirate bay.

I was playing the new Dune game with a friend , and he admitted he hadnt read the books or seen the new movies, so I suggested watching the new films (They are actually pretty faithful with a few differences to the source material). Turns out both the part 1 and part 2 films are on DIFFERENT streaming service.

Its a mess.

Apple, you have the resources. Work out the licensing deal and keep the display on the watch.

Theres some weird shit happening with it. My watch predates the lawsuit, and I got it because a hospital GP friend told me a number of heart attack patients had been saved after their watch called an ambulance when they collapsed. That sounds pretty good to me. It also measures my blood oxygen which tends a little low for me due to being a smoker in my younger years (it avgs around 95%, it should be 98%).

But it completely disappeared from my watch a number of months ago, and I dont understand why. Its not a model apple pulled it from, and I'm not even in the United states. So why did the only feature I care about on this watch (I'd otherwise have a non digital watch) get yoinked.

Tempted to take it back and tell them its not fit for purpose. I get it might not be their fault, but your right, its apple, they CAN fix this. I hope they do.

We tried running a 70b deep seek r1 on an Epyc server at work w/ dual CPUs totalling around 128 cores and 512gb ram.

It ran like dog shit, pondering its own navel for about 10 minutes on how to respond to "hello".

Older model CPU, but still packs a punch on pure specs alone.

Slow down old timer. Its 2025, your wife died 30 years ago , BEOS and OS2 are not a thing anymore, and you need to stop putting up a fight when the nurse gives you your Memantine.

Linus is brittle , but everyone knows that in advance, and its an approach that has led to the largest, most complicated , and widely used, open source project in existence being widely considered rock solid an dependable in mission critical situations world wide.

If Linus yells at you to stop doing something, you damn well listen, or move aside for someone else who will listen.

One of these days a SpaceX dragon capsule launch is going to get ganked by SpaceX starlink satellite debris , and when that happens, I'm going to ignore my better demons and go to the pub to celebrate.

What does it mean to understand something? How do I know when I'm pattern matching versus understanding?

You can't. You can't even prove you think, are conscious, or understand. Thats the problem with this whole debate, its all premised on tautological concepts that refer to themselves in circles and end up with fuzzy definitions that are absolutely useless for real science.

This isn't a new problem, its vexed philosophers for literally millenia, and because science likes to pretend its not indebted to philosophy anymore, its become blind to the mental traps and bad logic philosophers have been warning about since it mostly was staffed by greek men in robes.

Wittgenstein in the mid 20th century really brought this whole problem into focus with his assertion that most philosophy problems are actually problems with shitty definitions and if we could clarify our language into less ambiguous definitions (Or at least Tractus era wittgenstein), but honestly I think Derrida was on the money that this might not even be possible, because we really cant get outside of language , using language. The problem might well be intractable.

Theres an annecdote that may or may not be true that Goebels was once asked what culture was, and he replied "I dont know what culture is, but when I see it I reach for my gun". I kinda feel the same way about the words "consciousness", "intelligence", "meaning" and "reasoning". Its all just words, really.

Actually thats a valid point regarding these "breakthrough" style mini-probes. Theres an awful lot of energy required to get a useable signal back. I *suppose* the proposed laser thats propelling it could somehow send that info there, are we even gonna be able to pinpoint this stupid probe that far away?

I suppose if this thing IS travelling at some high fraction of C, there might be a way to convert the kinetic energy accumulated off its acceleration back into EM energy, presumably in a rather destructive fashion, although it would seem any such explosion would send all that breaking radiation in the opposite direction to where we want it to go.

Well, theoretically with a pair of quantum-entangled electrons or something like that, one in the probe and one at a base on earth, you might be able to measure by proxy...

Unfortunately no. Despite some weird claims in the press, entanglement does not transmit information faster than the speed of light, because that is unphysical and impossible. And because of that entangled information can not escape a black hole.

Well kind of, there is hawking radiation, but thats a slightly different phenomena at play involving virtual particles and a bunch of speculative maths I dont pretend to understand.

But in terms of entangling a pair of particles and sending one down a black hole, thats not going to buy us any advantage, because that information is lost in every sense of the word, once it hits that event horizon.

Basically what happened to dad when the company looking after his retirement fund lost most of his money in the 2007(?) stockmarket crash, a couple of years before he was supposed to retire. The old boy is STILL working to recover that cash at 72. Wasnt even his fault, the stupid retirement fund was just run by covert assholes.

Or basically any Linux box built within the last 5 years. Save yourself a pile of dough and power.

Are people just dropping extremely high vram GPUs into linux boxes willy nilly now.

Because that seems like a weird move when you consider that outside the Apple silicon chips, there just aren't a lot of options for capable GPUs under the $20K pricetag. I mean, maybe a 4090 if you can live with the very small models?

From a consumer point of view sure. The issue, the thing thats got a lot of people in the industry upset, is the fact that this stuff could cost a lot of jobs if it goes too far, and in an industry thats been absolutely struggling due to the dual impacts of streaming* and the fact covid stopped people going to theatres, yeah thats a lot of folks out of work.. Plus, again, its not clear at all who actually owns the end product since the courts are fairly clear that you can only copyright the creative products of humans not AIs.

*The reason streaming has been such a catastrophe for film workers is under the old regime, people who worked on a film generally got paid a wage plus points, that is a tiny fraction of the profits over time for each 'point'. The end result is that because film and TV production is very seasonal, film production people could smoothe out their income using royalties from points when theres no shows currently in production. It turned it from a part time job into a career. Unfortunately , because tech-bros are ass-hats, the streaming giants generally refuse to pay points, and when streaming rights where sold to them by the studios, the people that worked on them didnt get any points for it. This, by the way, was the real reason for those SAG-AFRA and Writers strikes, the very real sense that the people who worked on all those shows and TVs got shafted out of their royalties.

Its not clear at all that the no-points thing are actually legal, btw, since it does seem on the face of it that its reneging on the contracts signed by the film workers. While its unlikely to be *fraudulent*, judges have a tendency to look dimly on people using obscure technicalities to get out of paying people agreed on revenues when it comes to civil agreements.