bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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2 yr. ago

Oh no, it's a very serious (in context of a psychological tragedy sci-fi anime with bionic mecha fighting lovecraftian kaiju) paramilitary national (or maybe a supranational) goverment body affiliated with a shadowy cabal of conspirators.

Its logo is also quite heavily featured on the unscalable mountains of promotional merchandise for the franchise, so it's an easy thing to name drop if you don't know or remember much from the show but want to feel like you're making a deep cut reference because you remember the name from a coffee mug you have or something.

NERV is the organization that runs the eponymous mech suits. It's a bit like if someone asked about the Simpsons and he just replied "Springfield!" like yea that's a thing from the show, but couldn't you think of a quote from a character or something?

Ok, maybe cryptocurrencies made those a little bit easier than doing the same thing with MMO money or having to mail physical goods. I can even go out on a limb and credit the blockchain itself for them, even though the design kind of makes transactions inherently more traceable than some possible aleternatives do.

I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of "well I don't know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology" and sometimesI wish I'd collected receipts to say "I told you it's not".

Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:

• Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
• Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home's evil cousin
• Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies

And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.

I don't think "victim" is really a word that's even used especially much in "woke" (for a lack of a good word) writing anyway. Hell, even for things like sexual violence, "survivor" is generally preferred nomenclature specifically because many people feel that "victim" reduces the person's agency.

It's the rightoid chuds who keep accusing the "wokes" for performative victimhood and victim mentality, so I suppose that's why they somehow project and assume that "victim" is a particularly common word in left-wing vocabulary.

Could have called yourself anything and you go for "Creamy Recoil"?

to /dev/null preferably

Finally it turns out torturing the kid was unnecessary and spreading out the suffering would have worked fine. All Omelas had to do was raise their income tax a little bit.

GPU programs (specifically CUDA, although other vendors' stacks are similar) combine code for the host system in a conventional programming language (typically C++), and code for the GPU written in CUDA language. Even if the C++ code for the host system can be optimized with hand written assembly, it's not going to lead to significant gains when the performance bottleneck is on the GPU side.

The CUDA compiler translates the high level CUDA code into something called PTX, machine code for a "virtual ISA" which is then translated by the GPU driver into native machine language for the proprietary instruction set of the GPU. This seems to be somewhat comparable to a compiler intermediate representation, such as LLVM. It's plausible that hand written PTX assembly/IR language could have been used to optimize parts of the program, but that would be somewhat unusual.

For another layer or assembly/machine languages, technically they could have reverse engineered the actual native ISA of the GPU core and written machine code for it, bypassing the compiler in the driver. This is also quite unlikely as it would practically mean writing their own driver for latest-gen Nvidia cards that vastly outperforms the official one and that would be at least as big of a news story as Yet Another Slightly Better Chatbot.

While JIT and runtimes do have an overhead compared to direct native machine code, that overhead is relatively small, approximately constant, and easily amortized if the JIT is able to optimize a tight loop. For car analogy enjoyers, imagine a racecar that takes ten seconds to start moving from the starting line in exchange for completing a lap one second faster. If the race is more than ten laps long, the tradeoff is worth it, and even more so the longer the race. Ahead of time optimizations can do the same thing at the cost of portability, but unless you're running Gentoo, most of the C programs on your computer are likely compiled for the lowest common denominator of x86/AMD64/ARMwhatever instruction sets your OS happens to support.

If the overhead of a JIT and runtime are significant in the overall performance of the program, it's probably a small program to begin with. No shame to small programs, but unless you're running it very frequently, it's unlikely to matter if the execution takes five or fifty milliseconds.

"Wow, this Penny Arcade comic featuring toxic yaoi of submissive Sam Altman is lowkey kinda hot" is a sentence neither I nor any LLM, Markov chain or monkey on a typewriter could have predicted but now exists.

Counter-objection: so do all species of the nazi genus.

Meanwhile I'm reverse engineering some very much not performance sensitive video game binary patcher program some guy made a decade ago and Ghidra interprets a string splitting function as a no-op because MSVC decided calling conventions are a spook and made up a new one at link time. And it was right to do that.

EDIT: Also me looking for audio data from another old video game, patiently waiting for my program to take about half an hour on my laptop every time I run it. Then I remember to add --release to cargo run and while the compilation takes three seconds longer, the runtime shrinks to about ten seconds. I wonder if the above guy ever tried adding -O2 to his CFLAGS?

I hear Private Reasoning of the first through nth LLM Understander Corps is highly motivated

There's no way to know since they didn't have the money to test.

Almost nostalgic to see a TREACLES sect still deferring to Eliezer's Testament. For the past couple of years the Ratheology of old with the XK-class end of the world events and alignof AI has been sadly¹ sidelined by the even worse phrenology and nrx crap. If not for the murder cults and sex crimes, I'd prefer the nerds reinventing Pascal's Wager over the JAQoff lanyard nazis².

1: And it being sad is in and of itself sad.

2: A subspecies of the tie nazi, adapted to the environmental niche of technology industry work

I'm so used to bad rat science being expressed in obscurantist math and quantum physics jargon that the kindergarten neuro woo like "each half-a-brain has a 1 in 20 chance of being ontologically Good" and "nonbinary people have one half of their brain be transgender" throws me off.

Where are the Planck units and the h-bars, category theory, maybe something about Turing machines or Gödel? Can't you at least throw in a square root or something? Is this all it takes to stroke the a modern STEM dweeb's ego? I guess all the talk about "debugging" and "jailbreaking" compensates for the infantile aesthetics of the crankery.

the first playet to press X 10,000,000 times wins

Hey look, you found another one of Elon's favourite games.

The advanced sinophobia where the Chinese are so much better at everything than the west that even when they make better and cheaper bullshit machines than the Americans do and hand them out for free, it has apocalyptic consequences.

I get being privacy conscious and that sharing crash dumps and logs you don't really understand yourself can be scary. Making demands of urgent free tech support from strangers is just rude, though.