First off, well done, this looks exciting. I haven't had a chance to interact with the library yet — should torchao be seen as a dev-friendly quantization interface? I.e., if my team was working on new quantization techniques, does the API provide easy tooling for implementing and benchmarking new quantization algorithms? Or is this closer to a "toolbox of finished (generally) finished products"?
It's both! For this blog we decided to discuss our best end user facing numbers to keep things simple. We briefly hint at our contributor guide here https://github.com/pytorch/ao/issues/391 which does a tour of the APIs we provide developers implementing new algorithms
But we have had quantization algorithm developers such as HQQ or Autoround merge their code in to get composability and serialization for free. We view quantization algorithms as the top layer and going down you have quantized tensors, quant primitives like dequant/quant and finally basic dtypes like uint1-7 and float3-8. Personally why I spent so much time on AO was I was hoping we could make it easier for people to express their quantization algorithms in easy to read PyTorch code and if they must use custom kernels we also have some tutorials for how to integrate custom cuda and triton ops.
Most of those discussions have been happening on #torchao on discord.gg/gpumode so if you need to chat back and forth feel free to reach out to the team there otherwise Github also works.
I have had a lot of luck using the Plasma desktop environment (on Arch). Super customizable, to the level of hyper specificity you've described (down to the pixel, sometimes), and is mostly intuitive how to make these customizations.
My local machine basically looks/runs like Windows 10, but with the KDE Plasma logo in the corner instead of Microsoft Windows.
I'm 2/3rd of the way through Love in Time of Cholera and it's only chapter four (@200+pages, so far)... otherwise, an absolutely beautiful story of unrequited/parasocial love.
By far the worst chapter structure (and "book") is The Sound and The Fury. It seems like an exercise in-the-second-person, gone wrong. Sensorial overload... and isn't the point of a good story <TO MAKE SENSE>?
Yes and no. If you're running *nix, odds are your mostly open-source system will be running software built for ARM. And if you aren't, my understanding is that x86 emulation is pretty good.
Wine can also do this neat hybrid emulation trick. Your x86 application runs in an emulator until it hits a Windows syscall, then it hops out of emulation to run the syscall on native ARM machine code Wine, then jumps back into emulation to keep running your application.
They’re longing for more battery life. I’ve had a few Linux based laptops. The oryx pro I had about 6 years had an nvidia chip set and could game. But the battery life was miserable (2-3 hours).
But currently get decent battery life from the amd cpu in my new work and home machines. 6-8 hour working the machine quite hard.
If you want an “external” gpu I’m not sure how well that works on Arm.
I have little reason to switch, though I appreciate the competition making everything better.
To add to this, I have always found the Xbox naming conventions to be confusing, personally. "Xbox One" is the third one, not the original "Xbox" and the two newest models are named almost identically; "Xbox Series X" vs "Xbox Series S".
To make it even more confusing, the Xbox One had the mid-generation updates called Xbox One S (slimmer, a few additional features) and the Xbox One X (more powerful.)
So from oldest to newest it's
- Xbox
- Xbox 360
- Xbox One
- Xbox One S
- Xbox One X
- Xbox Series X and Series S (released simultaneously: S is smaller, X is more powerful)
So for a period of time in stores you might see a One S, a One X, a Series S, and a Series X. If you aren't a gamer, it's a complete mystery which is the newest and most powerful. I'm sure some kids got the wrong console for Christmas, as the One X was at times more expensive than a Series S, despite being an older console that would later not support many games that the Series S supports. This would be even more likely to happen if the Series X was out of stock (so the most expensive Xbox console at the store might be a discontinued model that won't support all the new games.)
In contrast, it's pretty obvious that a PlayStation 5 is going to be better than a PlayStation 4. Yes, a quick search will show which is the newest and most powerful Xbox, but if people have to do research to find out which is your best console and they don't have to do that for your competitor, then you have a confusing naming scheme.
I owned an XBox One something. I believed "Series X" was short-hand for "Xbox One X", as I believed that there were maybe other kinds of "Xbox X". I even bought a game that didn't run on my console because it was for a "series" something, which was not actually what I had. "Series" is often used as an english word to identify a product line. Like "Is that the 'premium' series?"
Sometimes I joke about how confusing the xbox names are. I probably couldn't come up with a more confusing set of names if I tried.
Rumour has it (not sure if this was ever confirmed) that one of the big reasons the second Xbox was called the Xbox 360 was to avoid unfavourable number comparisons with Sony. The Xbox launched vs the PS2, which meant the "Xbox 2" would compete against the PS3. As 3 is bigger than 2, it would make the second Xbox look bad. Hence, Xbox 360. Both have a 3, no number issues. For what it's worth, Robbie Bach (former Chief Xbox Officer) is on the record as saying one of the potential names for the second Xbox was just "Xbox 3" to catch up the PS3.
While officially the meaning of the "Xbox One" name was something about it being an all-in-one entertainment system, I would put money on it being chosen as some kind of subliminal naming scheme as it sounds like "Xbox Won".
Steve Ballmer was hoping people would call it "the one". This was also around the time that SkyDrive had to be renamed to OneDrive due to trademark issues with Sky.
I always judge corporations whenever they resort to "One" as a brand because it signals a total lack of creativity and is likely the result of executives fighting each other and settling on the most mundane and inoffensive concept to represent "it does everything".
I always thought calling it Xbox One was the most bizarre choice in the history of branding and marketing. Given how common it is to retroactively refer to the first item in a series as "One" (Rambo 1, Rocky 1, Playstation 1, etc), it seems intentionally designed to cause confusion.
This is beyond being bizarre. I have never owned an Xbox, and always thought that Xbox One was a re-release of the original Xbox, similar to the Original PlayStation -> PS One. I am hearing it for the first time here that it was a third generation device.
I find that name even more baffling when the reason they apparently branded the previous one Xbox 360 was so that they wouldn't go against the PS3 with an Xbox 2. Somehow it was now fine for an Xbox One to go against a PS4.
Sure, but the problem is S and X sound very similar when spoken, causing more confusion. Try clarifying which one you are talking about in a loud room at a conference.
Can I get a reality check on the state of headsets? It seems that the only people interested in these things are Apple/Meta hype boys (if the latter even exists), and people that are interested in VR gaming. I have only ever considered a headset because of games, only to conclude that it would be a severe waste of money, and that approximates the opinion of most people I know (echo chamber acknowledged).
I'll repeat the usual sentiments of Glass being a failure, the Vive is nearly ten years old, the Quest is a VR Chat/Beat Saber machine, and the Apple Vision is a Black Mirror style immersive nightmare machine.
I want my ideas to be challenged on this, but I really believe that Horizon OS will be a "Did you know that Meta released a VR operating system?" fun fact in 10 years, probably when Apple releases a $5000 Vision Pro 4 Ultimate.
Who on Earth is using these things? I realize where I am posting, but who outside the tech world is getting excited about and actually buying/using VR Headsets?
Obviously I've been wrong before about tech trends but this one seems to be so blatantly companies sniffing their own farts in regards to "we are the future" sentiments.
Vr is compelling in a way you can’t recognize without trying it, and even peoples memories of it seem less compelling than the actual experience. However, it’s inconvenient enough to use that many people don’t use their headsets as much as they expected. And there’s locomotion challenges that are hard to overcome imho. Finally, theres some privacy and lock in issues with the current iterations of the tech. Valve seems to be the closest thing to the good guys here - is that still true?
> And there’s locomotion challenges that are hard to overcome imho.
I think this is the biggest hurdle: getting your VR legs nice and strong. It took me about two weeks of reasonable use before smooth locomotion was possible. I know other people that tried it once, felt sick, and were done with it. I think this is one of the reasons why there's such a big youngster population on Quest games; they don't seem to be affected as much.
There are a ton of headsets beyond the three you mentioned (Glass wasn't a VR anything). Valve, Pico, Pimax, Varjo are a few off the top of my head. Pico 4 would be very competitive against the Quest 3 if they had released it in the US. Presumably the decision not to has a lot of to do with the TikTok stuff. Pimax has several higher end headsets that are very good hardware wise but not the best on the software side. Valve Index is still very popular and there are rumors about a new Valve headset coming soon.
The consumer mindset looks at entertainment which is the area you’re focusing in.
The enterprise and general industry mindset is very different. These are already used for product design, medical procedures, training, vehicle development, and more.
ok I bite. I have a Go, a Quest1, a Quest2, several adaptors for mobile phones, even an old kickstarter model of a VR headset with an intel atom cpu and stock android. I have a stereo/360 camera (Vuze VR) and I love all these gadgets.
What do I use them for? 360/stereo movies are incredibly cool. It is just another way of experiencing your personal history. Also there is Oculus Labs where they have some indi games and software which does not show up in the official Oculus Store. There are some gems, like some really cool games and some scientific applications, like a protein modeller.
I have also written VR programs by myself for scientific purposes (mainly biophysics) but also data mining and 3d CFD simulations. The 3rd dimension makes so much difference when you look at objects and you have a real feeling for the objects.
What I miss: Easily exporting 3d Models to VR (e.g. Blender), a good VR web browser. No Chrome is just the 2D version on a virtual screen. Not very impressive. Firefox VR is aready dead. And a good standard fiel format is still missing. VRML was quite nice in the 90s but hey that was 30 years ago.
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