In any other industry, a 15% cut would be Bad News, and people would be talking about ripple effects, they would call it a "shock" and talk about the long-term consequences.
Ive had the same experience as you, and also rather recently. I had to learn two lessons: first, what I could trust it with (as with Wikipedia when it was new), and second, what makes sense to ask it (as with YouTube when it was new). Once I got that down, it is one fabulous tool to have on my belt, among many other tools.
Thing is, the LLMs that I use are all freeware, and they run on my gaming PC. Two to six tokens per second are alright honestly. I have enough other things to take care of in the meantime. Other tools to work with.
I don't see the billion dollar business. And even if that existed, the means of production would be firmly in the hands of the people, as long as they play video games. So, have we all tripled our salaries?
If we haven't, is that because knowledge work is a limited space that we are competing in, and LLMs are an equalizer because we all have them? Because I was taught that knowledge work was infinite. And the new tool should allow us to create more, and better, and more thoroughly. And that should get us all paid better.
> Stacking the two rotors generates more thrust per unit area
But that's not a thing, and that's also not how that works. Multicopter rotor design is incredibly subtle.
(Two basic ideas for quad copters are that they need to slowly move horizontally for maximum efficiency, and that the vertical stagger between front and rear pair of rotors matters a lot.)
At the end of the day, this design is exactly what it is: Looks like a bottle which might be nice for someone. And the whole general layout thing boils down to flight time, in its weight class, with a given payload weight. There's not much more to it.
It at least doubles the thrust per swept area area, probably more, due to the counter-rotation and that the second stage rotor experiences a higher airspeed.
This isn't a multicopter. It's a coaxial helicopter. The design parameter most similar to the distance between two rotors on a multicopter is the rotor diameter.
It's obviously going to be less maneuverable though relative to the thrust, due to the cyclic being on only one rotor.
Far less than double. Putting one rotor directly in the turbulent wash of another is nowhere near as efficient as two well-separated rotors, for a number of reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra-rotating_propellers gives an estimate of "between 6% and 16% more efficient than normal propellers".
Yes, I don't know why I wrote it, since it's obviously wrong. I assumed mentally that they'd put as much power into the second propeller as into the first and that it'd go into the airflow reasonably effectively, but you don't double the thrust by doing that, you presumably double the power in the airflow, so that its velocity velocity to sqrt(2) times what it was, so you get a momentum increase by sqrt(2) and since force is the derivative of momentum the thrust is increased by sqrt(2), and then you a thrust increase by sqrt(2), and maybe you also get those 6-16% you mention.
EUV has always been about achieving high enough power to be economically viable. It was never about making chips at any cost.
I remember reading the tinfoil hat theory about three-letter agencies making low-quantity high-cost chips at incredible process sizes in order to break encryption. I doubt that's still as viable today as it was before leakage currents started dominating, but it was an impressively plausible theory.
IIRC EUV development picked plasma over synchrotron because plasma projected to be cheaper, even though technically synchrotron had more benefits. Queue many, many years of solving for technical challenges for LPP and now commercialized EUV machines cost 200m, 400m for next high NA. Which is about the cost of multiple small or single medium size synchrotron facility. It's amazing plasma EUV works, but it's also a failure in the sense that it is FAR less economical than originally envisioned, which explains why particle accelerator route is still being worked on.
Back in the day, HP advertised that the distributed amplifiers in their 26.5 and 50 GHz equipment were made with e-beams, but the process size wasn't anything special, certainly not by today's standards. I'm not really sure what drove the decision.
that tinfoil hat theory, just as basically all of them, can only be produced by people that have absolutely zero understanding of the topic. The amount of challenges that industry has faced during the relatively fast progress through nodes is just non skippable, as there were so many things to be discovered through very expensive and long brute force (just one example: high k dielectrics)
No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs.
I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around.
Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes of smaller process size were developed years before mass production.
Well sure, at many orders of magnitude more cost. If you wanted to brute-force RSA, you'd be better off leveraging economies of scale to operate ten thousand current-gen 4nm GPUs running at 2 GHz with air coolers than a single exotic prototype 1nm ASIC running at 8 GHz with cryogenic cooling.
Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor that costs twice as much.
Well I'm not an NSA engineer but I can imagine complex real-time analysis of streaming data, think processing 400+GbE link data. It quickly becomes too much too store, analysis could impose sequential packet dependencies.
proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens?
> smaller process size prototypes around
no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).
There's no hiding anything here. You can find random articles about publicity stunts companies used to try based on these. Specifically when IBM was in the game, and Intel until they got butchered by incompetence.
You can always turn a claim into a logically equivalent claim of the non-existence of any counterexamples.
“For every instance, e equals mc²”
is logically equivalent to
“There is no instance where e does not equal mc².”
That combined with your belief that claims of non-existence can't be held with any degree of certainty means you believe that no claim can ever be held with any degree of certainty. Which is not a very interesting insight.
This is an equally unsupportable claim, though. This requires enumeration of the entire state of the universe, an impossibility. This is just the standard swan problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory). What you have is a model you're very confident in without the deductively-rational basis your diction implies.
People should really read more hume if they're going to weigh in on philosophy of science.
> You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?
I love condescension that is so petty it's laughable. As the commenters said below there are very well-understood precedents/principles that allow me to conclude "no" here eg
So no it's not "impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something", we actually have a whole branch of mathematics dedicated to exactly that (it's called probability and statistics).
Probablility and statistics are models that produce something we call certainty. This has no relation to actual certainty, aka knowledge. If you're making an abductive claim, you should state it as an abductive claim. Otherwise you're simply claiming true knowledge that is literally impossible to have.
Too late to edit, but probability and statistics do emphatically rely on past-certainty. The entire concept of using the past to predict the future, however, is just a convenience with no reasonable basis. Please appropriately hedge your comments as to not imply otherwise or be appropriately mocked in response.
This is precisely why I don't trust people who aver without receipts to show. Open the schools, goddammit!
Until I see some reasonable evidence that smaller process size cannot exist, i just see lazy people getting angry that someone disagrees with them. All of this "burden of proof" bullshit, aping like you're in some kind of formal debate rather than a conversation with a stranger, just screams "emotional asshole who can't deal with someone disagreeing with them and never learned how to engage in basic conflict resolution when they had the ability to engage in good faith and chose not to".
Y'all deserve all the mockery society can afford. I'm at least honest in that I see conflict is what we need more than ever if only to put people like you in your place.
Hell, even liquid nitrogen temperatures are fine. More hassle than you'd want in your pocket but yearly running costs wouldn't be too bad for most businesses.
It's a superconducting switch, not a semiconductor per se. Lookup "Josephson junction". IBM spent a fortune on a huge R&D program to make computers from this, but eventually abandoned it. I think they got some circuitry working but eventually decided it wasn't practical enough to commercialize.
Also, some of today's work in quantum computers uses superconducting qubits. Maybe that's in the same research stage now. No idea if it will ever become practical.
Trying to find the silver lining in this makes me God's advocate I guess?
I was able to reflect a lot on my upbringing by reading reddit threads. Advice columns, relationships, parenting advice, just dealing with people. It was great to finally have a normalized, standardized world view to bounce my own concepts off. It was like an advice column in an old magazine, but infinitely big. In my early 20s I must have spent entire days on there.
I guess LLMs are the modern, ultra personalized version of that. Internet average, westernized culture, infinite supply, instantly. Just add water and enjoy a normal view of the world, no matter your surroundings or how you grew up. This is going to help out so many kids.
And they're not evil yet. Host your own LLMs before you tell them your secrets, people.
It was great to finally have a normalized, standardized world view to bounce my own concepts off. It was like an advice column in an old magazine, but infinitely big. In my early 20s I must have spent entire days on there.
I guess LLMs are the modern, ultra personalized version of that. Internet average, westernized culture, infinite supply, instantly.
That's a really interesting way to put it and actually made me look back at my own heavily internet-influenced upbringing. Setting healthy personal boundaries? Mindfulness for emotional management? Elevated respect for all types of people and ways of life beyond what my parents were exposed to? Yes. These were not automatically taught to me by my inherited culture or family. I would not have heard about them in a transformative way without the internet. Maybe passively, as something "those weird rich people" do, but not enough to become embedded in my mental operating system. Not to disparage the old culture. I still borrow a lot from it, but yeah I like westernized internet average culture.
I’m in the same boat. And judging by the people I’ve met at Google and FB (before it was Meta) a lot of us are refugees from conservative minded illiberal cultures within North America, Asia, and Europe. Memes are our currency. A lot of the internal cultures of these two companies are steeped in formative memes of those born in the mid-80s who only had the internet to find their people in the early 2000s.
Although I agree with you and GP, there are cynics who will say: "Ha! You think that the totality of Reddit posts is some kind of normalized, standardized, Internet average world view? HA!" There are people deep in ideological bubbles that think Reddit is too liberal! or Reddit is too young! or Reddit is too atheist! or other complaints that amount to "The average Internet-Person doesn't match what I think the average should be!" and they would not be interested in using that ISO Standard World View for anything.
I have a feeling if there is a market for this kind of LLM sounding board, the software writers will need to come up with many different models that differ ideologically, have different priors, and even know different facts and truths, in order to actually be acceptable to a broad swath of users. At the limit, you'd have a different model, tailored to each individual.
I was also quick to dive into early internet forums and feel like I got a lot out of them, but LLMs just seem different. Forums were a novel medium but it was still real people interacting and connecting with each other, often over a shared interest. With LLMs none of the social interactions are genuine and will always be shallow.
I'm sure some nerds will continue to host their own models but I would bet that 99.9% of social-type LLM interactions will be with corporate hosted models that can and will be tweaked and weighted in whatever ways the host company thinks will make it the most money.
It all reminds me a lot of algorithmic social media feeds. The issues were forseen very early on even if we couldn't predict the exact details, and it's an unsurprising disappointment that all of the major sites have greatly deemphasized organic interactions with friends and family in favor of ads and outrage bait. LLMs are still in their honeymoon phase but with the amount of money being plowed into them I don't expect that to last much longer.
I've been looking at it as an "instant reddit comment". I can download a 10G or 80G compressed archive that basically contains the useful parts of the internet, and then I all can use it to synthesize something that is about as good and reliable as a really good reddit comment. Which is nifty. But honestly it's an incredible idea to sell that to businesses.
And so what would the point be of anyone actually posting on the internet if no one actually visits the sites because large corps have essentially stolen and monetized the whole thing.
And I'm sure they have or will have the ability to influence the responses so you only see what they want you to see.
That's the next step after algorithmic content feeds - algorithmic/generated comment sections. Imagine seeing an entirely different conversation happening just to get you to buy a product. A product like Coca-Cola.
Imagine scrolling through a comment section that feels tailor-made to your tastes, seamlessly guiding you to an ice-cold Coca-Cola. You see people reminiscing about their best summer memories—each one featuring a Coke in hand. Others are debating the superior refreshment of Coke over other drinks, complete with "real" testimonials and nostalgic stories.
And just when you're feeling thirsty, a perfectly timed comment appears: "Nothing beats the crisp, refreshing taste of an ice-cold Coke on a hot day."
Algorithmic engagement isn’t just the future—it’s already here, and it’s making sure the next thing you crave is Coca-Cola. Open Happiness.
Why Coca Cola though? Sure it is refreshing on a hot day but you know what is even better? Going to bed on a nice cool mattress. So many are either too hard or too soft. They aren’t engineered to your body so you are virtually guaranteed to get a poor nights sleep.
Imagine waking up like I do every morning. Refreshed and full of energy. I’ve tried many mattresses and the only one that has this property is my Slumber Sleep Hygiene mattress.
The best part is my partner can customize their side using nothing more than a simple app on their smartphone. It tracks our sleep over time and uses AI to generate a daily sleep report showing me exactly how good of a night sleep I got. Why rely on my gut feelings when the report can tell me exactly how good or bad of a night sleep I got.
I highly recommend Slumber Sleep Hygiene mattresses. There is a reason it’s the number one brand recommended on HN.
Or, war is good peace is bad, nuclear war is winnable, don't worry and start loving the bomb. The enemy are not human anyway, your life will be better with fewer people around.
Look at the people who want to control this, they do not want to sell you Coke.
Not on her own, and not during her time. From what I understand, she felt she needed those external consultants to cut through the noise of her own org. Which had become known as an ineffective, design-by-committee place with no purpose other than to cover ones own asses.
Running that place (BMVg and Baainbw) was famous for being an unwinnable job. I dont love VdL, but I don't think this should be construed as her career failure.
As always with nuclear there are a few taboo topics. One of them being fuel supply. For European reactors that seems to be either Mali/Niger, or Russia. Both not excellent if the goal is geopolitical independence.
Solar, wind and batteries have no fuel concerns, and they are inherently decentralized.
Are you joking? Renewables mean one order of magnitude more raw materials imports from China and Chinese operated mining in unstable African countries.
With some work and investment European nuclear fuel supply could be 100% free from Russia, which anyway is peanuts compared to billions spent on Russian LNG. Uranium ore can come from Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia, not only African countries.
> As always with nuclear there are a few taboo topics. One of them being fuel supply.
It's not taboo, the answer is just extremely simple: mining needs people willing to work in a dangerous and exhausting field, so when practical, rich countries tend to prefer outsourcing this (capitalism does not tend to reward ethics). It's very practical for uranium because nuclear reactors need a tiny volume which is trivial to ship and to store. Most countries with a nuclear program keep a stockpile of multiple years.
Mining uranium in other places is very feasible, as are other more expensive options like extracting it out of the ocean. After all, with nuclear the cost of the fuel is a tiny amount of the actual cost of power generation. This is not happening because there's really no need to. In the past, there have been uranium mines in pretty much every european country, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Euro...
(Refining/processing is a different story. But that's more obviously a "money/care" problem - there's no possible physical constraint for refining/processing as there could be for mining.)
I know the soviets dug up half the Czech Republic for uranium deposits though. There's still some left there, not sure how much though. I have a feeling that the reliance on Africa and Russia is more price and environmental regulation driven.
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