EricBurnett

Two posts were merged; this comment was for the blog post with an intro animation thing.

Video contains images (frames), but not every image would reasonably be found in the frames of a video, or interpreted spatially. In the space of world model synthesis, consider blueprints, relationship diagrams, pages of instructions, sheet music, or a boarding pass.

Ooh, I'd love that. Or native steam functionality for the same. I never install games onto my SSD for that reason, so I'm at the mercy of whatever windows naturally does in that space. (Possibly nothing, as I don't remember manually configuring a SSD cache file on this computer, and last I checked that was required).

Googler here, opinions my own, etc.

From my perspective, Bard went from "literally didn't exist" to "released" over the course of about a month. GP seems correct in that it very much felt like something picked up off the shelf, slightly dusted off, and released. Is it as good as chatGPT? From my testing, no. Is it the pinnacle of what Google can create, given motivation? I'm pretty sure also no. In comparison to the state of all the research papers Google and Deepmind release, it definitely feels rushed. So I'd suggest not judging Google on its initial fast -follow project: either Google will come out with something compelling in the next 6mo or so, or we can conclude it really was leapfrogged and has fallen behind. But judging it now seems a bit too conveniently pessimistic, IMO.

(There's a legit chance Google will flub this, don't get me wrong. It's just too early to properly conclude one way or the other.)

> My mum owns a small café in Leicester. Her electricity bill has just jumped from £10k ($12k) a year to £55k ($64k) a year.

> Callum's mum may try to avoid shuttering her doors by raising her prices by more than 5x but that will result in $13 chocolate crossiants and $20 iced lattes.

What kind of flawed reasoning is this? The net prices will only have to go up 5x if the price is the product originally was 100% covering the cost of electricity. In practice, it'll probably need to go up something <2x to maintain the same profit margins, with other costs (e.g. wages, property) trickling up at a slower pace (years) as the overall economy adjusts. Which is material, no doubt, but let's not lose ourselves to hysteria here.

Thought experiment: between you and the AI, which would do a better job depicting a giraffe skeleton? A giraffe in it's natural habitat? Their favorite tree to eat? Species on the genetic tree closest to giraffes?

If we assume this AI or a successor can win that evaluation, in what way would you say you know what a giraffe is better than the AI?

You're right that the speed of light remains a constant limitation on propagation delay, but the defining limitation on the speed of computation is rather the clock speed - how long it takes for each round of computation. Electrons are comparatively slow due to the time it takes to fill and stabilize a transistor. Our hypothetical new type of computer will have to be faster to converge, rather than faster to propagate.

You're right about the bit flips though. I don't know if a gravitational wave computer is actually ever going to be feasible, just an interesting dream for the far future. Hopefully there are more options to consider in the meantime :).

I've long been enamored with the idea of learning from analog computers to build the next generation of digital ones. In some perspective all our computers are analog, of a sort - today's computer chips are effectively leveraging electron flow through a carefully arranged metal/silicon substrate, with self-interference via electromagnetic fields used to construct transistors and build up higher order logic units. We're now working on photonic computers, presumably with some new property leading to self interference, and allowing transistors/logic above that.

"Wires" are a useful convenience in the electron world, to build pathways that don't degrade with the passing of the elections themselves. But if we relax that constraint a bit, are there other ways we can build up arrangements of "organized flow" sufficient to have logic units arise? E.g. imagine pressure waves in a fluid -filled container, with mini barriers throughout defining the possible flow arrangement that allows for interesting self-reflections. Or way further out, could we use gravitational waves through some dense substance with carefully arranged holes, self-interfering via their effect on space-time, to do computations for us? And maybe before we get there, is there a way we could capitalize on the strong or weak nuclear force to "arrange" higher frequency logical computations to happen?

Physics permits all sorts of interactions, and we only really use the simple/easy-to-conceptualize ones as yet, which I hope and believe leaves lots more for us to grow into yet :).

'Conflict', not 'combat'. Doesn't have to be physical, e.g. ideological conflict.

Tapes are awkward though, since they can't directly satisfy the same random-access use-cases. E.g. even GCS's 'Archive' storage class, for the coldest of the cold, offers sub-second retrieval, so there's at least one copy on HDD or similar at any time.

Tapes are suitable for tape-oriented async-retrieval products (not sure if any Clouds have one?), or for putting _some_ replicas of data on as an implementation detail if the TCO is lower than achieving replication/durability guaranteed from HDD alone. But that still puts a floor on the non-tape cold bytes, where this sort of drive might help.

Hyperscalars use a blend of storage flavours covering the whole spectrum, and for most data-heavy purposes can mix hot and cold bytes on the same device to get the right IO/byte mix. At which point you can simplify down to _"are they currently buying disks to get more bytes or more IO"_ - if the HDD mix skews far enough that they're overall byte constrained, yeah they'll be looking to add byte-heavy disks to the pool. If they've got surplus bytes already, they'll keep introducing colder storage products and mix those bytes onto disks bought for IO instead.

> The recent change, implemented without a formal announcement, is meant to present a variety of skin tones in image queries related to beauty, such as “beautiful skin” and “professional hairstyles,” as well as simpler people-related searches like “woman” or “happy family,” the Alphabet Inc.-owned company said Tuesday.

How is this not what you searched for? Is there an implicit constraint you think Google should be applying?

Note that search results have long favoured giving you an intentionally diverse selection of results in ambiguous cases, so you can narrow down for what you want more easily. Otherwise you'd probably get 12 different images of whoever the most popular celebrity is, which is probably not the most useful result in practice.