I wish this announcement weren't infused with intersectionality.
"Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information" is listed as one of three sample reasons you might use social media.
I support reproductive rights! But I don't want EFF to do that, and I don't want EFF to push conservatives out of the movement. I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.
I think the sort of person who sees any mention of a user having an abortion fund as evidence that the EFF wants "to push conservatives out of the movement" is going to see everything as infused with intersectionality.
You've leapt to such a strong conclusion on the basis of so little evidence.
> I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.
An EFF that refuses to use any word that you might one day see as related to intersectionality would not be able to do this.
> You do need constant, reliable power, as even a brief interruption makes a huge mess when the aluminum/slag freezes in the processor
On the other hand: it has a gigantic thermal mass. Combine this with the energy requires to melt it, and you end up with molten aluminium being trucked over our highways [0]. A brief interruption isn't a big deal when it takes ages to solidify.
Iceland is a tiny country with unusual amounts of energy. Not all renewable sources are the same -- hydropower is fairly reliable too, for example -- but Iceland is just not a useful example for the whole world. The largest geothermal plant in the world by far is in California, but it's a small portion of our total energy use so no one cares. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers
You can locate an aluminum plant pretty much anywhere you want, as the energy required to make aluminum is large compared to the cost of mining/shipping bauxite. This solves the main problem with geothermal, which is that it's in random locations around the world that don't necessarily have many people living there.
Any place with significant volcanic activity (e.g. Hawaii) could probably do geothermal power if they wanted to.
Hawaii did do geothermal, but in fact it's so geothermically active their main geothermal plant went offline for a while because lava got shot up their boreholes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puna_Geothermal_Venture
The energy (electricity) they use to smelt aluminium mainly comes from hydropower, around 70% of it. The geothermal boreholes are mainly used for district heating, which is quite a big energy drain in Iceland. And that means that geothermal is the source of around 65% of the energy used in Iceland.
Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri. He was very successful at Google (e.g. BERT was published just after he left), but it looks like he wasn't able to save Apple from itself.
Some of the teams that Giannandrea oversaw will move to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, such as AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge. Khan is Apple's new Chief Operating Officer who took over for Jeff Williams earlier this year ... Apple CEO Tim Cook thanked Giannandrea ...
Seems like Khan is preparing the mothership for when he eventually assumes the CEO role from Cook.
Is anyone willing to explain to me how Google is a monopolist in advertising? There are other online advertising platforms, and publishers can and do sell adds directly to advertisers.
"Monopoly" does not mean "one and only vendor of XYZ good/service that exsits ever"
Monopolies can exist when there is technically still competition. Being a monopoly does *NOT* mean you've destroyed all other competitors or that you are literally the only entity in the entire universe offering a good or service.
Whether an entity represents a monopoly is a subjective measure. It is *NOT* a binary true/false based on trivially observable data. It mostly comes down to how the entity behaves with regard to competitors. Principally, using unfair and uncompetitive pricing and sales strategies, egregious lock-ins, and using your market-dominant position to force competitors and consumers to operate in certain ways.
The fact that other ad markets exist at all does not disqualify google from being a monopoly.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
...except that he is definitely wrong about the targeting aspect as well. Almost all of the people hit by the pager explosions were legit military targets. In the videos of the explosions, you can see people unharmed who were standing within meters of the targets. It was one of the most well-targeted anti-terrorist strikes in history.
CUDA is part of our cluster install scripts, we don't manage that with uv or conda. To me, that should be system software that only gets installed once.
Not the OP but does this actually package CUDA and the CUDA toolchain itself or just the libraries around it? Can it work only with PyTorch or "any" other library?
Conda packaging system and the registry is capable of understanding things like ABI and binary compatibility. It can resolve not only Python dependencies but the binary dependencies too. Think more like dnf, yum, apt but OS-agnostic including Windows.
As far as I know, (apart from blindly bundling wheels), neither PyPI nor Python packaging tools have the knowledge of ABIs or purely C/C++/Rust binary dependencies.
With Conda you can even use it to just have OS-agnostic C compiler toolchains, no Python or anything. I actually use Pixi for shipping an OS-agnostic libprotobuf version for my Rust programs. It is better than containers since you can directly interact with the OS like the Windows GUI and device drivers or Linux compositors. Conda binaries are native binaries.
Until PyPI and setuptools understand the binary intricacies, I don't think it will be able to fully replace Conda. This may mean that they need to have an epoch and API break in their packaging format and the registry.
uv, poetry etc. can be very useful when the binary dependencies are shallow and do not deeply integrate or you are simply happy living behind the Linux kernel and a container and distro binaries are fulfilling your needs.
When you need complex hierarchies of package versions where half of them are not compiled with your current version of the base image and you need to bootstrap half a distro (on all OS kernels too!), Conda is a lifesaver. There is nothing like it.
If I find myself reaching a point where I would need to deal with ABIs and binary compatiblity, I pretty much stop there and say "is my workload so important that I need to recompile half the world to support it" and the answer (for me) is always no.
Well handling OS-dependent binary dependency is still unsolved because of the intricate behavior of native libraries and especially how tightly C and C++ compilers integrate with their base operating systems. vcpkg, Conan, containers, Yocto, Nix all target a limited slice of it. So there is not a fully satisfactory solution. Pixi comes very close though.
Conda ecosystem is forced to solve this problem to a point since ML libraries and their binary backends are terrible at keeping their binaries ABI-stable. Moreover different GPUs have different capabilities and support different versions of the GPGPU execution engines like CUDA. There is no easy way out without solving dependency hell.
It is also quite complex and demands huge investment of time to understand its language which isn't so nice to program in it.
The number of cached combinations of various ABI and dependency setting is small with Nix. This means you need source compilation of a considerable number of dependencies. Conda generally contains every library built with the last 3 minor releases of Python.
Does uv handle CUDA versioning? This is the big reason I'm still on conda -- I can save a whole environment with `conda list --explicit`, including CUDA stuff, and I can set up a new machine with the same environment just from that file.
16 years later, I'm still disappointed about this decision. The justification for it is just awful:
"6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.
But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote."
This is just false. Engineering is still about taking small parts you understand entirely and using simple techniques to compose them into larger things you want. Sussman's justification is an abject surrender to shitty complexity. Engineers need to develop a taste for simplicity and elegance, especially at the beginning of their education.
Incidentally, an overlooked advantage of teaching in Scheme is that it levels the playing field, as pre-undergrad programming classes almost never use functional languages.
His top students were capable of entirely understanding Scheme within a day or so (but not capable of entirely understanding all of Python and all of PyPI). He wanted students to be even better than that. He wanted them to lead productive and resilient collaborations even when they didn't or couldn't entirely understand the small parts.
Given a day, top students can understand enough of Python to write enough code to get the point about how programs rely on abstraction and composition.
(Of course, the latter part of the course, describing the implementation of the runtime, would need considerable rethinking.)
> Engineering is still about taking small parts you understand entirely and using simple techniques to compose them into larger things you want.
Engineering fundamentally is still about that. But what people seem to do with computers nowadays mainly involves composing already-large parts that they absolutely do not understand. Often with disastrous results.
"Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information" is listed as one of three sample reasons you might use social media.
I support reproductive rights! But I don't want EFF to do that, and I don't want EFF to push conservatives out of the movement. I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.
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