Posts by cyberdemon 1884 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Genuine question, how do VM hypervisors allocate, schedule and prioritise GPU resources? Since a 750MW bitbarn sounds like it will involve a lot of "AI" crap ..
At best, I suppose when the wind stops blowing, your GPU app could be unloaded and replaced by someone else's GPU app, but if someone else was offering to pay more than you, then the GPU would already be running their app and not yours, regardless of the power source. The bit barn won't want to have idle silicon -ever-, since it is so expensive.
I think what is coming is "limit pricing" whereby your smart meter switches you off when the price goes above what you have set as your limit..
People tend to forget that ALL smart meters have a remotely operable contactor that can be used to disconnect you for a variety of reasons.. E.g. you have been switched to prepayment mode (with no need for a warrant), or there is a load-shedding event i.e. if the grid frequency (nationally) or voltage (locally) are too low due to excess demand / shortage of supply, and you are deemed to be an "optional" customer, or there has been a cyberattack and Putin switched you off..
I'll stick to my old fashioned electromechanical meter, thanks
And it's not as if there haven't been improvements in the efficiency of manual reading..
The customer (or the meter reader if an attendance is deemed necessary) simply snaps a picture of the meter and uploads it to be processed automatically.
A very simple Computer Vision problem solved decades ago, is one of the few sorts of things which modern "AI" is pretty good at.
Hmm I wonder why it is so difficult, for us in the West to get hold of these modules, assembled in er, China, from components made in Taiwan, eh?
Embargo or no embargo, China holds all the cards.. Even without Taiwan, China is in a much better position to fabricate this sort of thing than the US/Europe (never mind miserable old Blighty with its new-found Sovereignty)
.. I'll be in my bunker
With the main "American" EV manufacturer, Tesla, facing "disastrous" sales and decimating its workforce is the world finally waking up to the issue of EVs being unsustainable hype?
In the UK, for even half of vehicles to be electrified, even if we had the generation and transmission capacity, we would need to dig up every street and lay new underground cables- at a time when we don't have enough civil engineering workers to maintain leaking gas pipes, water pipes and sewers ...
I applaud them for trying, but..
Here, Adobe, buy my huge library of labeled clips that definitely are my own copyright and definitely weren't generated by your competitors' products using plagiarized material
Also, they would have to pay an unfathomable fortune to get anywhere even approaching on a log-scale the amount of data that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, TikTok et al have already stolen been granted an unconditional license to use by their data-cows platform-users
Maybe this is being built on top of a foundation model from someone else, which would make more sense, but would not quite be the same moral high-ground PR position that they are hoping for
I'm sure there are various big cheeses at POL who would argue that they couldn't POSSIBLY use an off-the-shelf EPOS system, and the idea of trusting SPMs to run it themselves would make them choke on their Chivas Regal.
No no no, it has to be a big centralised bespoke system, ideally one where we can fiddle the books remotely and fit people up for Fraud if we don't like them but can't fire them..
With a bit of luck though, some of those Cheeses will be rooted out by the Inquiry and sent to jail. One can only hope.
s/customers/shareholders/ ?
But seriously, does Mr Jassy know what Generative AI even is or does? The only use for it on Amazon's platform is by fake Chinese sellers to make up nonsense names and bullshit products with fake reviews.. If he really thinks that is going to make anyone's life easier, then I don't know what he is smoking, but i'll pass on it, thanks.
Maybe by "customers" he doesn't actually mean people who BUY from the platform (for those are simply mugs..) but, he means the ones who advertise and sell from it?
I suspect that one reason why this might make "business sense" is because of the wonky Biomass carbon-accounting rules that mean tree-burners (and food-burners) can attribute their emissions to the country(/state?) who supplied the fuel.. So there may also be an incentive there to use imported oil instead of producing it locally..
Yay, because it's green.
Not that i'm a fan of Diesel-powered datacentres, but what is the efficiency of shoving veg oil into a diesel genset compared with solar + electrochemical storage?
The most efficient crops are (IIRC) 2%-5% efficient at creating fuel, and then you have to burn it in a Diesel engine that is itself 20-30% efficient, so overall solar efficiency in the 1% range, and it is taking away land from food crops, using up nutrients in said land (or requiring energy-intensive and polluting fertiliser). And there is a risk that someone will start using imported Palm Oil if they can't grow enough rapeseed.
Put them next to nuke plants? Great. But Biomass/Biofuels are and always have been a load of greenwash.
Is that I am told the UK's electricity demand has apparently dropped significantly in recent years.
But with the advent of EVs, Heat Pumps, Electric Arc Furnaces, increased train electrification, increasing population and now AI bit-barns, I would have expected it to have grown significantly.
So, what is going on? It can't just be lightbulbs.. I suppose a lot of heavy industry has closed down, people with electric heating have moved to gas, and maybe we are drinking less tea? And the transition to EVs HPs and EAFs hasn't really kicked in yet.
Given that this is only 10-20% of what even a low-end laptop GPU can do, and as JessicaRabbit mentions, uses the system RAM via DMA and so chokes out any other memory-intensive tasks, so it's not terribly impressive.
I'm sure it will be used by the likes of Dell and Lenovo to flog "AI PCs" though.
On the upside, at least system RAM is usually upgradeable to well beyond the 16GB provided by high-end laptop and midrange desktop GPUs though, so it may cope with larger models than could run on your GPU, even if it is slower
It's 2024, who the hell is still using Batch files?
On the occasions when I am forced to use Windows, the first thing I do is install a proper shell, be it Cygwin or MinGW, WSL or a VM
It's time that CMD.exe and Command.COM are retired for good, along with the rest of MS-DOS that still persists in Windows, shirley
Where have I heard that before..
A bit like Nuclear Power, Chip Fabrication is one of those industries where suddenly the politicians realise they need it and desperately throw money at it, when the country has long lost the expertise and culture required to build it..
I assume by altnet sector you mean alternative networks i.e. small, fast ISPs with FTTP for very little money?
I often wonder how my ISP toob can make any money at all on its offering of 900Mbps symmetric speeds, for £25/month, and a promise of no mid-contract price rises
It's not that they are supporting one or other party. My theory is that they would want all western votes to have a 50/50 outcome. Maximum division, hung parliaments that can't make a decision, potential for civil war.
So they stir up vitriol as much as they can, track voting intentions, and tweak the signals very carefully for the perfect non-result, with as many frothing maniacs on both sides as possible.
Simple divide and conquer. Democracy is doomed in a world controlled by TikTok.
You don't mean this particular optometrist, do you?
(tbh, not sure if that was a genuine error on the part of the van driver or a piece of guerrilla marketing.. by a firm of optometrists that apparently spends more on marketing than it does on optometrists)
The Open Source community (which I love) is based on fundamentally Communist ideals - everyone works for the good of everyone, and if literally everyone did that then there would be little need for money and everybody would be happy.
But then it only takes someone to come along and say "Ooo, free stuff, people working for free, I can exploit that to my own end." to disrupt the whole ideal. Basically this is why there are so few good open-source Android/iOS apps for example, because the Android/iOS systems are so heavily monetised that as soon as anyone releases a good open source app, someone is immediately coming along to clone it and release it as their own paid and/or data-slurping app.
Microsoft is the mother of all open-source exploiters, buying GitHub and using it to build a code-plagiarising bullshit machine, stealing every commit and comment any open source dev has ever made, and using them to both put future programmers out of work and simultaneously pollute the entire ecosystem with autogenerated shite, because managers who want a quick buck would rather use autogenerated shite full of security holes but which "seems to work", than pay actual engineers to do stuff properly.
But a secondary effect of that is that the entire open source community is demoralised, anything we contribute is going to be appropriated by some dickheads who want to make money and then blame us when it all goes wrong..
Frankly I hope that when WWIII kicks off, the ultra-wideband fibres will all be chopped and we all have to go back to 56k dialup speeds. Messageboards like The Register will work perfectly fine, but "social" media, data-slurping, AI, ransomware etc would become that much harder again...
I wonder if the plan is to eventually replace the Waymo with either a starship "mothership" or a Yamaha Motodroid..
I also wonder if it would be simpler to install a system of pneumatic delivery tubes under each city, so that the meatbags never have to leave their pods
.. Although that solution is less flexible if the meatbags one day decide to come out, and need to be forcibly returned or neutralised
Upvoted Paul, although I disagree that "The problem is not AI fakes," - the problem is not just AI fakes.
It's a product of two very serious problems. And, I don't think simply fining, boycotting or otherwise de-monetising social media platforms would solve it. There are major vested interests behind this. I.e. hostile states.
So, short of chopping all the fibres and switching off the Internet for good, I think sadly AI deepfake propaganda distributed over the Internet is here to stay.
They -are- good, CLion is functionally the best IDE for embedded C/C++ IMO, same for PyCharm - I haven't used the others, but they do only seem to give half a Hoot about security.. For example, they host their own package index for some languages, and don't seem to give a toss about typosquatted packages or even nonsense packages with names like '~~~~~~~~'.
They also have some very powerful collaborative development features and a IDEA server that connects the IDE's backend on a remote/embedded host to your local GUI, but the security implications of that makes my teeth itch.
They also are VERY slow to respond to issues, some important but complex or low-priority to fix ones have had commenters post "happy 12th birthday to this YouTrack issue" images on the thread..
Who needs to grow wood when you can just chop down forests in other countries, dry it out and make it into pellets at great energy cost, ship it over to the UK in diesel-powered boats, belch out CO2 and carcinogenic particulate smoke in the UK but attribute all the emissions to the country you just deforested, and collect billions in carbon-credit subsidies! Trebles all round!
If I was insecure or not wanting to engage as a peer, then I'd be posting as AC..
It's also not that I believe climate change isn't a problem, it's more that I find the idea of modern-day CO2 emissions being the primary cause questionable. There are plenty of other reasons for it to be happening. Methane, solar activity, etc etc. (see Jellied Eel posts ad-nauseam).
I also find that the prioritisation of reducing CO2 emissions above all other things has become something of a quasi-religious cult, a sort of cognitive dissonance. We are told that by releasing CO2 we will cause the world to go on fire, we will go to Hell. That stuff irks me.
I also worry that by betting the farm on renewables, net zero, carbon capture, smart grids etc, we are both weakening our economy (by spending on ultimately frivolous projects, unsustainable markets and subsidies) and weakening our resilience to a major crash. We all know that world wars start when large economies crash, and WWIII is looking perilously close.
Sorry for using a post-modern curse-word, but the trigger-phrase that made me use it was "burning planet". Obviously, the world is NOT on fire. But it will be when we have crashed the economy and start lobbing nuclear warheads at each other.
No women-hating. I just hate the idea of AI being used to replace actual doctors.
Instead of training doctors, we will be uploading all of our health info into the cloud, for a machine to diagnose us instead.
Not nice finding out after all that slurping, that your cancer was just a 'hallucination'
One possible explanation is nefarious SEO-optimised auto-generated webshites are now being used to poison AI models..
That, or GitHub really is ingesting private repos into CoPilot, and there could be an unlimited number of private repos full of malicious code designed to poison any AI model. These days it is possible to optimise that poisoning to cause model collapse.
The only way to win is not to play.
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