Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
Radiation would perhaps be better pictured with a light blue glow (Cherenkov radiation).

The green glow used in pop culture has its origin in the widespread use of radium paint to achieve a glow-in-the-dark effect (e.g. on watch faces) in the early 20th century. I still own a radium watch. The paint was always fluorescent green. And it did glow.

Comment · 2 years ago
Isn't JAX the most widely used framework in the GenAI space? Most companies there use it -- Cohere, Anthropic, CharacterAI, xAI, Midjourney etc.
Comment · 2 years ago
No, I am saying, with JAX you train on G.P.U., with a G, and your training runs are >2x faster, so your training costs are 2x lower, which matters whether your training spend is $1k or $100M. You're not interested in that? That's ok, but most people are.
Comment · 2 years ago
Or alternatively, do you want faster training runs (and thus lower training costs)? Then JAX is a good choice for you.
Comment · 2 years ago
It's all about cost and performance. If you can train a foundation model 2x faster with JAX on the same hardware, you are effectively slashing your training costs by 2x, which is significant for a multi-million dollar training run.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
This is not true, the initial Keras port of the model was done by Divam Gupta who is not affiliated with Keras or Google. He works at Meta.

The benchmark in the article uses mixed precision (and equivalent generation settings) for both implementations, it's a fair benchmark.

In the latest StackOverflow global developer survey, TensorFlow had 50% more users than PyTorch.

Comment · 7 years ago
7 cubic km of olivine is a staggering amount. Makes you wonder whether the effect of deploying the olivine would even offset the energy cost and CO2 emissions of extracting and moving around all that rock.
Comment · 8 years ago
If I were to divide large tech companies between "good" and "bad", the only one I would classify as "bad" is Facebook. Most are neutral-to-good. Facebook has a huge societal and human cost and has hardly any benefits to show for it (unlike, say, fossil energy companies, which are a threat to civilization but at least serve a useful role by fulfilling our energy needs).

Facebook is a democracy-threatening, attention-wasting, extractive institution, with a deeply unethical leadership. Most tech companies are neutral -- Amazon, Microsoft, Uber etc., I assume they're doing business for profit and not social good, but they do provide value and largely play by the rules. Some other companies I would classify as "good" as they provide considerable value to society as a by-product of doing business, like Apple and Google (disclaimer: I work for Google, and I am quite happy about that).

Facebook is the only large tech company I can think of that is just plain evil. There's no other like it. It's in a league of its own.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton