NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
I have pretty rudimentary knowledge of the training itself outside of storage needs, but my understanding is that each node in the neural net is linked to all the other nodes in the next stage of processing. So when you’re training you need to adjust the weights on all the nodes in the net, run the data through the adjusted weights, see if it’s a better result, rinse and repeat.
There isn’t a local model, the model is distributed across the cluster.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
It's coordinating them that is the issue. You don't give them a big queue of work and let them churn through it independently for a month. Each step of training has to happen at the same time, with all GPUs in the cluster dependent on the work of others. It's much more like one giant computer than it is like a bunch of computers working together.
In those conditions you have lots of things that get more and more painful as you scale up. I specialize in storage. Where for most applications we might optimize for tail latencies, like ensuring the 99.9th percentile of requests complete within a certain target, for AI we optimize for max(). If one request out of a million is slow it slows down literally everything else in the cluster. It's not just the one GPU waiting on data that ends up idling, the other 99,999 will too.
You also have the problem that if one computer breaks during the training run you need to go recompute all the work that it did on the step that it broke on. Folks are coming up with tricks to get around this, but it introduces a weird tradeoff of reliability and model quality.
And of course constructing and maintaining the network that lets them all share the same storage layer at ultra high bandwidth and ultra low latencies is nontrivial.
Also at least in my corner of AI folks are skeptical that xAI actually operated their 100k GPUs as a single cluster. They probably had them split up. 5 20K GPU clusters is a different beast than 1 100K GPU cluster.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
Drastic surgery is not always better than the alternative.
Plenty of people out there have been made worse off from unnecessary surgeries.
Awhile back I was having some back issues. Saw a surgeon who leveled with me that he could justify surgery, but he could do it for just about anyone my age, almost everyone's got some disc abnormalities that will show on an MRI. He told me that the outcomes from surgery would almost certainly be worse than non-surgical options. And so I went the non-surgical route and don't have back issues any longer.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
If you prove it can be done without the state, then you'll have a much harder time arguing that it should be the responsibility of the state.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
Silicone rings in vaginas are commonly self inserted and removed.
NuvaRing is a fairly common birth control drug with this delivery method.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
Even worse, the funding is contingent on abiding the federal government’s whims.
Under Biden schools risked losing their funding for not accommodating transgender kids in bathrooms and on sports teams.
Now it’s probably going to be the opposite.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
The pre undress pics in my feed are maybe the first I’ve seen that lady fully clothed.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
The US has a $36 trillion debt. A quick Google shows all foreign aid is about $70 billion per year. About 0.2% of the total debt.
Later in that thread Scott shares that he donated about $350,000 to charity last year.
To analogize this to the US foreign aid situation, this would be like donating $350,000 to charity while you have debt of $175 million. And it's not a debt that you've addressed in any real way, and it grows substantially year after year.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
This makes more sense than "they can use it to spy our citizens."
There are data brokers that operate in the open that will sell you nearly everything TikTok could collect about you. Having access to an app would give you a bit more, like real-time geolocation data rather than stale geolocation data. But for targets where that matters you'd be better off having your intelligence agencies compromise the target's phone. Anyone with reason to be paranoid about the Chinese government spying on them would not have TikTok installed anyway.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
Interesting. I guess if I didn't mind the risk of financial ruin I could test my idea that operating a proxy is protected speech.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
My state legislators don't even kayfabe it, they not-my-job it. When they were considering, and eventually passed, bills that clearly violated the stipulations of Bruen, I wrote them cathartic letters expressing as such, not expecting to get more than a form letter response.
I did end up getting a substantial response from a staffer. After some back and forth, I found the position was essentially this: It would be inappropriate for the legislator, not being a constitutional scholar or a member of the Supreme Court herself, to even entertain the question of whether the bills she votes on are constitutional.
Here's one of the responses, obfuscated slightly by ChatGPT to make it difficult to link me to this exact text:
Senator X, who is not an attorney and does not serve within the judicial system, operates in the legislative branch and is unlikely to participate in any cases before state or federal supreme courts. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to expect them to form an opinion on constitutional matters or to provide historical examples for judicial proceedings.
If clarification is needed, I can share a document outlining the separation of powers and the distinct roles of each branch concerning the creation, execution, and interpretation of laws.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
If you run with the lower classes good odds you know of someone who is collecting disability but could easily work some non-back-breaking job. I know a few. One guy I know collects veterans disability but could easily do even heavy labor. His claimed disability is PTSD from an event that happened off-base in an allied country and outside the line of duty. The guy just parties all the time.
There are 8.9 million SSDI recipients in the US. The average monthly payment is $1,483.
Say you paid investigators to go out and spy on one person each working day. There are 240 working days in a year.
If you paid the investigator $70,000, they'd need to catch four people to break even on their salary.
If more than 1.7% of people are committing such obvious fraud that you'll catch them with one day of observation, then it's worth it to hire the investigator.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
At least for engineering, the bar was never raised or lowered to actually get hired, they just fucked with the top of the pipeline. So for what they called under-represented minorities the standards were lowered to get a call back on your resume and to get to the first set of screening interviews performed by engineers. But once you reached that point the pipeline didn't differentiate.
I'm sure given the size of the company and how so many are outwardly ideological on these issues that there was some very concious bias being applied by interviewers, but that won't change because we're done with the company officially endorsing DEI.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
I’m open to arguments that Maidan was going to happen regardless of western involvement. I think the evidence points to the west being heavily involved, but I can have epistemic humility here.
But how can you argue that it wasn’t deposing a man who won a fair election, and that his supporters, who happen to be geographically concentrated, are right to be angry to the point of secession?
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
I think we agree.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
Roughly $5,000, dog had another surgery later on to remove a bunch of tumors.
Got the dog in 2018, at about $60 per month since then, I'm still ahead, but that's very luck of the draw. I'd prefer not to have some other incident that would make the insurance pay out and deliver more value for my premiums, I'd rather he just die in his sleep when the time comes.
These products are regulated and competetive, I expect the rates to be actuarily fair and the median customer to have been better of self insured.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
The good ones have no trouble filling their schedules, there's no incentive for them to join such a system.
If someone advertises you can treat it as signal that they're not good enough to book clients via word of mouth only.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
I've expressed before that veterinary care has a lot of medicine, especially the business side, figured out better than humans.
Insurance, for the most part, really is for the big stuff that can't be anticipated, and is priced as such. It's $60 a month to insure my 14 year old beagle with 50% coinsurance. It doesn't cover the cost of exams or checkups. It does cover things like surgeries and cancer treatment.
I once used it for a spine surgery. The total cost was about $7,000, quoted upfront. I paid about $3,500 and the insurance covered the other half. This would have been well into hundreds of thousands of dollars if performed on a human.
I was able to have conversations via email, not through some dumb HIPAA compliant portal.
That most dogs are uninsured probably keeps costs down, as does that typically pet insurance has a higher coinsurance figure than human insurance. There's an unavoidable principal-agent problem that we exacerbate with regulations that practically remove all incentive for people to price shop.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
That assumes that you need to smash particles together at higher and higher energies to test your hypotheses.
If you're on the hunt for gravitons and antigravitons, would that even be part of the research? Can gravitons even collide?
If you're starting fresh with an unexplored branch of physics you'll not have gotten to the point where testing hypotheses is so far along the curve of diminishing returns that the next advancement requires billions of dollars of capital. The first particle accelerator had a diameter of 4.5 inches. The first one that managed to split an atom was about 2 meters wide.
What of all the secretive Space Force X-37B missions? If you're looking for graviton signals it would be helpful to be in an environment where there are fewer of them.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.
This is the core claim, that the USG has sequestered an elite cadre of physicists and kept their discoveries under wraps. One observation in favor of this claim: the dearth of fundamental breakthroughs in physics for the past fifty years.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
Did the police not perceive this as a threat to their own daughters? Are any of them on record?
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally.
16 year old me had been exposed to what the Taliban was all about and thought the world would be better off without it. A just punishment for the Taliban for cooperating with the group that struck at America, and a nice side effect of liberating the people of Afghanistan.
40 year old me sees this as a fool’s errand. To think this would work requires an ignorance of how the Taliban gained power in the first place. The documentaries I’d consumed at sixteen weren’t at all concerned with that question.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
At my get-married-in-a-hurry-to-secure-immigration-status wedding we had about this many.
At my wedding about a year later in China it was about 400. This is a typical size.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
Had it been universal it would have been very Catholic of him, which isn’t something you can often say.
Awhile back I learned from The Pillar that his marriage isn’t even canonically valid. He and Jill were married in some random non-Catholic chapel, and never obtained a convalidation.
Jill also has a still living husband from a previous marriage that was never annulled.
So forget the politically charged question of whether he ought to be denied communion for his many public statements that conflict with church teaching. He ought to be denied for the plain reason that many others are: he’s publicly living in sin.
That something was a color revolution doesn't imply that the participants were altogether fake.
Every country has its dissidents. An intelligence agency can help them to fund their activities, grow their networks, spread their message, etc. I would say that for something to be a color revolution it wouldn't have happened but for the covert participation of another state.
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