gghh

Gotcha, thanks for explaining. Indeed I noticed it was 128G of memory just like the DGX.

Fair :)

I'm tourist in Zig land too, follow Kristoff / A. Kelley etc, Tiger Beetle DB (written in Zig) and stuff, but only as observer / bystander.

Sorry for lazy question but some people here know this off top of their head so asking. Memory bandwidth of this chip?

Last time I check an NVidia situation was for DGX Spark (the GB10 chip), it has regular LPDDR5X which by JEDEC standard cannot go beyond ~270 GB/sec, ie 8533 Mbit/s on a 256 lanes bus.

So yeah Lemire seems to go "OMG unified memory, they're following Apple path..." ok, but Apple pulled off a much faster interconnect, 800 GB/s ballpark, and I'm trying to understand (not really, I'm asking you to try understand, he he) how is this laptop faring in that regard.

It's bland and generic because it's a manifesto. Author (and HN submitter) is Loris Cro, aka @kristoff_it, VP of Community at Zig Software Foundation.

In his role, devising as set of general guidelines to use as compass when things (inevitably! and often!) get very very muddy and Right v. Wrong is hard to tell apart -- both objectively, and also from the point of view of being a community leader with ton of vested interest -- is essentially one half of his job. Other half is abide to said guidelines.

So @kristoff_it last week sat down, came up with three simple rules short enough he can print on a business card (or hang on his office wall or whatever), and posted them here to test if they make sense to the wider community.

TLDR: yes can seem bland / generic but within context it makes sense to me author needed to distill his ethics in a nutshell.

Thanks

Can you please spell out the spell out? You're linking 1300 words.

Right, Dwarkesh's episode with Reiner Pope. Didn't watch the full video but as soon I saw both going to an old school blackboard with an actual chalk in hand I could tell they meant business hehe :) Thanks for recommending the vid and for the info about DS V4.

Ah ok, sharing context/KV cache, I can see that helping. I need to learn more about DS V4, you seem to hint it has some advantages over previous generations in this respect. I haven't followed that closely to quite catch this argument, I'll check it out.

> _50 watts over 2 hours is 100 watt hours (Wh) which is 360 kJ._

Yes of course that was a brain fart of mine. Watt is Joule per second not certainly Joule per hour. I made the point of "lecturing" readers on power v. energy since Antirez (OP) wrote _"50W of energy usage..."_ (instead of power consumption) and it's a mistake people often make. So my side point was: ok 50W but for how long.

The other thing I'm arguing is 50W is nothing to be shocked by. I would like to see an argument for the opposite. I'd like to know what's the power consumption of playing eg. Baldur's Gate for a couple hours on a gaming rig and I wager we surpass that by a margin.

Now, the data center economy of scales. You're saying they almost certainly exists. Okay whatever I don't know. Requests served in parallel. Amortizing memory access for model weights. Likely. I'm writing this with some thinly veiled dismissive attitude because I believe that it would be very useful to have hard data on whether or not serving many users v. just one user makes LLMs more efficient. It's an important point with wide ranging implications.

If there is scale, like you claim, and one day a wealthy patron gifts me a 40k USD rig where I can run a frontier LLM locally, then I'd still be making selfish use of the commons (energy, which belong to the planet, all of us, that kinda stuff) because the efficient/responsible choice is to pool and use a cloud vendor (or pool your rig with neighbors etc).

But saying a machine can be more efficient if it serves many users sounds to me a bit like nine women making a baby in a month.

I'm sorry I don't understand. From the way you frame it, and the sentiment of the replies, seems like this is some scary big number. MacBook M3 Max is a beefy machine and doing inference means it's going at full send. 50W is... what tiny appliances consume. Sure it's more than reading emails but... it's still not a number to be shocked at. An on-the-go laptop has a TDP (max rated power) of 45W. Regular work laptop is 70W. Gaming laptop 230W. The servers I have in the lab on which I run benchmarks counting syscalls per seconds for days on end (you know, performance engineering!) are now going north of 1kW.

Washing machine 900W. Hair dryer 1500W. Pizza oven 2000W. So yeah, you say 50W, yeah sure same as video rendering or gaming I guess, yet not really an OMG-level number.

And frankly I'm not quite sure there's anything like economy of scale where it gets more efficient if you serve more users (like some sibling comments seem to imply).

Last thing, and I know many know but also many others don't or have forgotten: Watts is a rate of consumption, not an absolute amount. That is Joule, energy. So you say 50W, but what you pay for (or the planet pays, whatever) generally is the amount of energy, hence you need to say for how long that consumption was sustained. 50W over 2 hours, that's 100 Joules, the actual resource you consumed and paid for.

Power (watts) is like speed (m/s). You say 50 miles an hour, need to say how long was the drive, so we know how far you got.

As the person who posted the quote, gonna be direct: no idea.

I have to say, I don't identify myself as a anarchist (maybe a bit of a sympathizer), yet I'm middle aged and finding myself a little dissatisfied by many things I see around me, so if I see people making the equation anarchist = degenerate, my immediate reaction is "yeah let's slow it down shall we."

Fair. But I think that statement isn't meant as a strict and precise definition (eg. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or whatever), more like a "gateway" description directed at those who associate anarchism only with utter chaos and "burn the house down" kinda attitudes.

Now, I'm aware that when you need to say something is "gateway" that's a bit of a red flag, i.e. "milk before meat" (describing something as friendly and innocent at first, then only later showing the more aggressive indoctrination) is exactly what cults do. Having said that, I'd grant that the late David Graeber is quite the straight shooter so I think he's in the clear here.

Exactly. I see elsewhere in this page people comparing this project to Linus Torvalds starting an OS in his dorm room while studying CS. Like these were "young and clueless" devs writing an OS for fun.

From the looks of it, this seems like a serious corporate backed project made by employees of the Ant Group, the chinese fintech giant. A more fair comparison would be with Google's Fuchsia OS (defunct) or Huawei's HarmonyOS. It may succeed, it may fail, but it's nothing like a couple of kids doing a passion project to learn Rust.

What I meant by it is "the fine article", meaning the post. Actually using acronyms goes against "Don't assume knowledge", incidentally a point in Eva's list (the article).

I've learned the acronym here on HN, googled for a second and found "the fine article" as explanation, but now that you ask I've checked wiktionary... and apparently the commonly accepted meaning is derogatory (the f*king article, like "RTFM", "read the F-ing manual).

Lesson learned, won't be saying "TFA" again unless I mean f-ing