epaulson
Joined 16 years ago
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721
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166
Member since
Oct 11
Recent submissions
Comment · 7 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
And every couple of days we see a post or a tweet about "Google/Apple/Microsoft just nuked my account with no notice and no recourse" so trusting them to sync passkeys rightfully makes some people nervous.
Comment · 1 year ago
The 'it's rude to show your ai(llm) output' is a reference to this: https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-...
Comment · 1 year ago
It's frustrating that there's no pricing information. The tech looks cool and all, but without knowing how much it's going to cost there's no way to really evaluate it.
Comment · 2 years ago
The National Science Foundation has been doing this for decades, starting with the supercomputing centers in the 80s. Long before anyone talked about cloud credits, NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture. (The office name is from the early 00s) - https://new.nsf.gov/cise/oac
(To connect universities to the different supercomputing centers, the NSF funded the NSFnet network in the 80s, which was basically the backbone of the Internet in the 80s and early 90s. The supercomputing funding has really, really paid off for the USA)
Comment · 2 years ago
About two weeks I came across this tweet, from a PhD candidate just finishing up:
https://x.com/CharityWoodrum/status/1808313627864440930
"For Woody and Jayson Thomas. From the local universe to the first galaxies, the brightest moments in space and time occurred during our brief epoch together. That light is unquenchable."
She had gone back to school as an adult to study physics, she was just finishing up her undergrad when her husband and child were swept away by a wave while walking on the beach.
She kept on with school and is about to finish her Ph.D. I just can't comprehend how. https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/ua-doctoral-candidate-in...
Comment · 2 years ago
Are there APIs to get the iCloud sync into my own app? I'm all for iCloud syncing to my devices I just want a way to also get a backup in a file so if Apple decides to delete my account on a whim, I don't lose everything.
Comment · 2 years ago
The fun thing about BlenderBIM is that it's IFC-native. (IFC is the 'Industrial Foundation Classes' - a data model/structure for modeling buildings and the components, systems, and intangibles like construction schedules.)
BlenderBIM is internally managing everything with the IfcOpenShell library - all of the data uses the Python interfaces of IfcOpenShell (which internally has a lot of C) to keep the model state. Blender is more a rendering backend and nice UI to manipulate the state of the IFC model with IfcOpenShell - but basically everything you can do with the Blender GUI you can pop open a shell and just type in Python and do the same thing.
This means you'll occasionally see some Blender things that don't do what you expect to the model you're editing - there are ways to have Blender do state modifications that don't all get translated to the IFC data underneath, so sometimes doing things like selections or modifiers are surprising for Blender users. (I think over time the list of things that are like this has gotten a lot smaller, and BlenderBIM is now pretty good about keeping the state of what's displayed in Blender in sync with what the underlying IFC model is storing)
The main commercial player in this space is Autodesk Revit. There is a lot of thinking that perhaps Revit has reached a point as a platform where Autodesk can't keep building on it (i.e. it has so much tech debt that it's getting hopeless) - see https://letters-to-autodesk.com/ Autodesk has a number of other 3D modeling software packages and I sometimes think that for their next generation of Revit they should consider the BlenderBIM approach and maybe build on top of Maya or one of their other offerings.
Comment · 2 years ago
Oh, awesome. I'm glad to discover I was wrong about that!
Comment · 2 years ago
I'd even be willing to pay the $99 a year, I just want the signature to last longer than a week, ideally forever. For years when I don't feel like updating the app, I won't pay the developer membership fee.
Comment · 2 years ago
It's not so much that OPML is the interesting part here, it's that it's a file. A few weeks back Andrej Karpathy had a twitter thread[1] about blogging software and shared this link on 'File vs App' - https://stephango.com/file-over-app - and that really was great for ecosystem interoperability. I can download the file using whatever tool is appropriate, store it however I want, and then upload it somewhere else using whatever tools is appropriate. I have the OPML export I took of my subscriptions from the day Google Reader shut down and there's still a fighting chance that other services could actually import that file.
It's also worth noting that OPML is only the container format here. Agreeing on a container format is obviously important and we won't get very far for interop if we can't even agree on the container format, but OPML is supposed to be a generic tree of 'outline' format, and conveniently RSS subscriptions (and folders) look like a tree.
I sorta expected that there would be a second standard that says "here's how you use this generic OPML container format to represent RSS feed subscriptions" but oddly that's actually included right in the OPML spec[2]. In fact RSS subscriptions are the only application format defined in OPML - there's a 'type' field defined for <outline> element and if type is set to 'rss' then there's also a required xmlUrl of the feed and optional things like the html link for the blog, the version of RSS used. This is the data and part of the spec that makes the actual subscription list exchange work.
But again the only entry for 'type' defined in the OPML spec is 'rss'. If you want to use OPML as a container for something else, like Youtube subscriptions or Twitter followers, you of course can but you gotta find some way to get everyone to agree on how to interpret the 'type' you set for that <outline> element. And as far as I know, no one's done anything like that for any other domain.
So it'd be awesome if more domains defined 'type' fields and set out some specs so I can export my video streaming subscriptions or Amazon wishlist or whatever but without defining more 'type' fields OPML is really not any more interesting than a CSV of URLs.
[1] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1751379269769695601 [2] http://opml.org/spec2.opml
Comment · 2 years ago
This sentence is doing a lot of work: "Hypothetical S2 does a bit more to simplify the layers above – it makes leadership above the log convenient with leases and fenced writes."
It'd be awesome to have a bit more transactional help from S3. You could go a long way with 'only update this object if the ETags on these other objects are still the same'. I know AWS doesn't want to turn S3 into a full database but some updates you just can't do without having a whole 2nd service running alongside to keep track of the states of your updates.
Comment · 2 years ago
One of the long-standing challenges in the federated identity space has been that most of the solutions are built around domain names, which are a pain for most users to create on their own. There's a sense that people would prefer email addresses as their identifiers, but without some server help that's hard to do. The WebFinger protocol works well for translating email addresses into something that could be used for federated data servers, but alas most of the big email providers (ala gmail) don't participate in WebFinger.
A while back Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick built out a protocol called 'Web FistBump' that could bring WebFinger to people who's email providers to support it. It was a clever hack with DKIM - you emailed their webfist.org server with what you wanted to be your Webfinger info, and because Gmail signed the message with DKIM anyone could verify the message. The webfist.org server just proxied WebFinger requests into lookups for those signed emails. Even better, because it's just a signed email you can treat it as a blob and have a pool of different resolvers do the proxying, kinda like a blockchain. I think there was a post from Brad somewhere that estimated that the total data needed if everyone in the world used WebFistBump for storing a blob was in the low 100s of GB, which is pretty managable for a wider community to keep online.
I need to read up on DIDs but it feels like DIDs just standardize on what the message format should be that would come back from something like WebFinger/WebFistbump, but if WebFistbump were actually up and running, it could make WebFinger more widely available. (Alas, I think the webfist.org server has been shut down but maybe they could flip it back on!)
https://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/06/bootstrapping-webfinger-...
Comment · 2 years ago
I wish there was a good nonprofit 'infrastructure cooperative' that could provide some of these core services but have a corporate governance that could be trusted. The place I most want it for is a domain name registrar but DNS and mail servers would be good additional services.
Comment · 2 years ago
Bluesky is a different protocol than Mastodon, but conceptually I think it's fair to say they're similar.
I think Bluesky would clean up if it could also interop with Mastodon - people want to leave Twitter but it sucks having to choose between Mastodon and Bluesky and so I think some folks are just in a holding pattern waiting to see what wins. Bluesky feels more like Twitter so I think it would get a lot of folks, but I think people hesitate to bet on it just yet.
"This is what's happening to the parameters of models when they're quantized down to sizes that are possible to run on your laptop. Instead of floats, small integers are what get stored and loaded into memory. When the time comes to use the quantized values, to generate an answer to a question for example, the values are dequantized on the fly. You might think this sounds slower, but we'll see later on that this actually ends up being faster as well as smaller."
I thought that most GPUs supported floating point math in these quantized formats, like they can natively do math on an float4 number (that's maybe packed, 2 float4s into a single byte, or more probably 16 float4s in an 8 byte array or maybe something even bigger)
Am I getting this wrong - is it instead the GPU pulls in the quantized numbers and then converts them back into 32-bit or 64-bit float to actually run through the ALUs on the GPU? (and the memory bandwidth savings make up for the extra work to convert them back into 32 bit numbers once you get them onto the GPU?)
Or is it some weird hybrid, like there is native support for float8 and Bfloat16, but if you want to use float2 you have to convert it to float4 or something the hardware can work with.
I am confused what actually happens in the vectorized ADD and MULT instructions in the GPU with these quantized numbers.