Posts by JParker

AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them

Power Usage Is a Short Term Issue

All this talk about power usage by AI companies is simply a tempest in a teapot. Yes, at the moment, a great deal of electricity is being used; however, substantial (as in orders of magnitude) reductions in the power needed are coming online rather quickly. On the hardware front, technologies such as Re-RAM, and the introduction of analog computing elements to expedite the calculation of weights. On the software front, we have seen vast improvements via MoE architectures, and the new TITANS architecture which mixes fast and slow processing to significantly improve performance (not to mention increased learning capability).

The anti-AI contingent is pushing FUD as hard as they can, truth and progress be damned! Their attitude would have left most people continuing subsistence farming, or led to a huge portion of the female workforce in the US working as telephone operators (it peaked at about 4% of women, and was growing quadratically. A similar phenomenon would have left most women stuck working as typists.

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Moore's Law Revisited

I think announcing the death of Moore's Law is somewhat premature. Memristors promise to accelerate GPU performance and lower power needs just as they are doing with AI processing.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: C is the new COBOL

How, pray tell, would one handle memory management in a shared address space, where a thread in one process might write to memory, a thread in a second process update it, and thread in a third process read it? I've done it in C++.

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: Some weird doublethink here

Those who buy HiSense TVs aren't looking for "top dollar" units; they are looking for bargain value units.

Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze

Dealing with Open Source Maintainer Burnout

The biggest problem I see is that we don't find new developers taking over at least some of the maintenance effort. A prime reason I see for this is the startup difficulty. I have been casting around to get involved in an Open Source project, but each one I've examined lacks internal documentation.

I would strongly encourage current Open Source software developers and maintainers to begin preparing internal documentation. Architecture documents, class hierarchies and descriptions of owned functionality (if object oriented), outside resources used and interfaces, processing model, rules regarding things such as memory responsibility (who allocates, deallocates), thread usage, design patterns, etc. Formal documents not necessary, a wiki would be fine for this.

I know it's a lot of work (having written these), but the work spent now will reduce the work needed substantially in the future.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

Someone who thinks "All the interlocking components of the state, carefully designed [...]" reflects reality, as the author claims, has no credibility.

Absolute Linux has reached the end – where to next?

The Advantage of Dynamic Linking

The discussion of dynamic vs. static linking omits a key advantage of dynamic linking: cache utilization. Shared libraries increase the likelihood that a given code segment will be in the CPU cache, which executes dramatically faster than code which much be fetched from main memory. While this is not generally visible when benchmarking individual applications (which is why it tends to get overlooked) i can have a significant impact on system performance.

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

Re: Approach? What approach?

If Torvalds is indeed limited by "regulatory reasons", then he needs to cite the specific regulation as well as the regulators, so that the objections can be addressed to the correct person. His failure to do so is to his detriment.

If anyone has problems with these drivers after this point, complaints should be addressed directly to him until he resolves the situation.

Microsoft China staff can't log on with an Android, so Redmond buys them iThings

So far, none of the articles have mentioned HarmonyOS, which is, of course, a significant option in China. Is HarmonyOS banned as well as Android?

Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to ignore copyright law in race to AI

Re: "Everyone else is doing it."

One glaring omission from the article is what, if any, response their legal department had to the objection. I suspect that they did not object to that particular usage of copyrighted material; otherwise, I would expect her boss to be told to stop.

You break it, you ... run away and hope somebody else fixes it

Great Developers Have Great Crashes

One of the things I learned in my 30 year career is that the greater a developer is, the bigger the crashes they ultimately cause. The best developers always push the systems harder, and closer to the "bleeding edge" than others.

Re: grizzled veteran Windows admin

The "Registry" is just Microsoft's implementation of LDAP. Linux admins understand LDAP.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: The *three* things that make a microkernel.

Based on my experience with large in-memory database development (DataBlitz, aka Dali) and the performance increases that can be obtained by not copying data (both disk/memory and memory/memory) I've wondered if it perhaps a fundamental mistake to use messaging as the fundamental IPC mechanism rather than something akin to memory-mapped files.

After bashing Nvidia for ‘arming’ China, Cerebras's backer G42 alarms US govt with suspected Beijing ties

Biden Needs To Back Off Bans

It is time that Biden come to his senses and call off this ridiculous ban on computing technology to China. While it is slightly slowing Chinese technology growth, it is resulting in their building a parallel set of industries to compete head to head, while also slowing US technology growth since US industries cannot take advantage of Chinese breakthroughs

The result is that the US will have less influence over China, and reduce the Chinese desire to see potential American suppliers succeed. The result is a less peaceful world.

FTC interrupts Copyright Office probe to flip out over potential AI fraud, abuse

Training humans on copyrighted works

I cannot take the complaints of creators seriously with respect to AI trained on their works when that's the same technique that human art students have used for centuries.

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

With all these claims of plagiarism by artists and writers, I have to wonder why no one points out that humans "ingest" (more commonly referred to as "read" or "study) other works, and incorporate ideas, language, idioms, etc. from those same types of works. AI LLMs are doing nothing new beyond this, and the complaint is simply FUD and Luddism.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

It could easily be worse

As an "old timer", I remember when people required documents to be in MS-word format. PDF (which I often argued for, vociferously, as the preferred format for document transfer) was a HUGE improvement.

As it stands, I've used any number of PDF readers, and I think the number of documents that I found that I couldn't read can be counted on two hands, using just the thumbs.