istewart

joined 2 months ago
[–] istewart@awful.systems 3 points 10 hours ago

I got a really nice omnibus edition of Blindsight/Echopraxia that was printed in the UK, but ultimately, the necessarily(?) cardboard nature of the vampire character in Echopraxia was what left me cold. The first chapter or two are some of the most densely-packed creative sci-fi ideas I've ever read, but I came to the book looking for more elaboration on the vampires, and didn't really get that. Valerie remains an inscrutable other. The most memorable interaction she has is when she's breaking her arm and making the POV character guy reset it, seemed like she was hitting on him?

[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

6G nanometer-wave, gently caressing your mitochondria thanks to the power of antiferromagnets and BORIS:

[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Wait for AI and Crypto 2.0 to burn out, we'll get there

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

Has this person turned up shilling their book on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory yet? If not, I think it's a lock for 2025

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

If you gotta conclude with, "tee hee! simulation theory!" you're not just cooked... you're seared and roasted

[–] istewart@awful.systems 11 points 6 days ago

Competitive college admissions and tech-industry hiring practices really have done permanent damage to these people, haven't they

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

On top of the disgusting subject matter, why do these people think that even unlimited-character Twitter is a good format for posting these screeds? The site design, even on the main site, is absolutely terrible for presenting this much writing. Everything mashed into the constrained center column means way too many line breaks, meaning it's a chore to read. Same thing with that freak Ackman; whatever overwrought bullshit he was posting just made my eyes glaze over.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Eliminating Mothman is our prime strattgic priority

Private Bbailcy! I see you back there! Cut it out with the oversighing, you're dragging down morale KPIs for this quarter!

[–] istewart@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think in this case, the equivalent of a compiler error for undefined behavior would be a swiftly forgotten wire story entitled "Trump promotes cryptocurrency project" published on a Friday afternoon. Just one more scam among the flood, and not one that can be offered for easy monthly payments with a banner ad in the margins of an RSBN broadcast.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My baseline understanding is that "NPUs," as such, are vector accelerators with perhaps lower precision and definitely lower peak TDP. I say this because much of the incremental ML research I've skimmed over seems to be around getting away with lower precision, dropping down to FP8 or even FP4 from FP16 when they can get away with it.

I'm still confused as to why and how this is an acceptable tradeoff to firing up an iGPU with precise power/TDP stepping. Perhaps one of those situations where the power budget and latency to fire up the whole GPU block or burst it to max power ends up costing as much as the actual calculation. I think for purposes of this discussion, we also need a source that sheds light on the architectural differences between NPUs and GPU shader/execution units.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

Just chiming in to say to hell with skeuomorphism, I still want Apple Platinum back. Bonus points if it comes with an option for Dark Platinum that was only present in the early releases of OS X Server.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

But Trump can't explain things, and Urbit defies explanation. So does the statement "Trump explains Urbit" represent undefined behavior in English?

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