The state religion in Kuwait is Sunni Islam. It's much more nuanced than "Muslim brethren", except perhaps less so when Israel is directly involved, as it is today.
It's also important to note that these are not democracies. The state frequently does things that people aren't entirely happy with, it's only when the people (or religious leaders!) become sufficiently unhappy that it becomes a problem.
Do not mistake leadership and regular people. Afghanistan president Ghani handed over sovereignty to US too but Afghans disagreed. I am confident that there is significant minority in Kuwait wishing for Iran victory. As a datapoint, there were videos from Bahrain with people cheering for Iranian rockets hitting American bases.
I'm not being cynical about Islam. The principle is the thing that I'm being cynical about.
We look for these shortcuts all the time because we're meant to interact with much smaller groups of people than we do on a societal scale now. For most of human history the average person was born, lived, and died within the same community of maybe a couple hundred people at most. This thing where the average person lives in metro areas of millions and can do business with people on a completely different continent is really new and we're trying to find methods for figuring out who is and isn't trustworthy. Most fail, and you can throw "in group vs out group" in the failure pile.
Any sort of shortcut to "this person is an ally and/or worthy of my trust" based primarily on race, religion, nationality, etc. is a very good way to set yourself up for exploitation. You see it all the time. Televangelists scam money out of people's pockets by the same mechanism. A "good Christian" man is asking for your donation after giving you the Almighty's blessings.
You also see it in criminal organizations that tend to group themselves by ethnicity like the American La Cosa Nostra, where you have to be full-blooded Italian to be a made man. The people considering your induction into the further depths of the criminal organization won't let you join if you're not full-blooded Italian, because that's the "in group", but the "out group" of everyone else is less likely to kill you in that lifestyle than the members of the "in group".
You can do novel work with an LLM. You can. The LLM can't. It can be an aid - exploring papers, gathering information, helping to validate, etc. It can't do the actual novel part, fundamentally it is limited to what it is trained on.
If you are relying on the LLM and context, then unless your context is a secret your competitor is only ever one prompt behind you. If you're willing to pursue true novelty, you need a human and you can leap beyond your competition.
Maybe, but I'm not really convinced. LLMs make some aspects of the job faster, mainly I don't have to type anymore. But... that was always a relatively small portion of the job. Design, understanding constraints, maintaining and operating code, deciding what to do, what not to do, when to do it, gaining consensus across product, eng, support, and customers, etc. I do all of those things as an engineer. Coding faster is really awesome, it's so nice, and I can whip up POCs for the frontend etc now, and that's accelerating development... but that's it.
The reality is that a huge portion of my time is spent doing similar work and what LLMs largely do is pick up the smaller tasks or features that I may not have prioritized otherwise. Revolutionary in one sense, completely banal and a really minor part of my job in many others.
I think the core issue (evidenced by constant stream of debates on HN) is the everyone’s experience with LLMs is different. I think we can all agree that some experiences are like yours while there are others that are vastly different than yours. Sometimes I hear “you just don’t know how to use them etc…” as if there is some magic setup that makes them do shit but the reality is that our actual jobs are drastically different even though we all technically have same titles. I have been a contractor for a decade now and have been on projects that require real “engineers” doing real hardcore shit. I have also been on projects where tens of people are doing work I can train my 12-year old daughter to be proficient in a month. I would gauge that percentage of the former is much smaller than later
I don't think this is an issue of experience here. I don't know that anyone has claimed that LLMs can create truly novel solutions to complex problems given that the technology is token prediction.
i am working on my side-product [1] where i was exploring a Rockchip which required external memory (just 1G) which went from $3 to $32 and completely destroyed economics for me. I settled with one with embedded memory and optimizing my code instead :)
I suspect game development will be similar - game companies will optimize their games given customer cards are not going to be released for a while or will be too expensive.
Resource usage has been on a hedonic treadmill at least since I came online in the 90s. Good things have come from that, of course, but there's also plenty of abstraction/waste that's permitted because "new computers can handle it."
With so many gaming devices based on the AMD Z1 Extreme platform (and its custom Valve corollaries) over the past few years, it'll be great to see that be the target/baseline for a while. Brings access to more players and staves of e-waste for longer.
I'm not sure how we got on to games as resource hogs when Teams uses 2GiB of RAM and Windows itself uses 4GiB of RAM.
I work in gamedev, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive, and I understand that general purpose engines aren't as light on resources as the handcrafted ones that nobody can afford to make anymore... but we're not anywhere close to the layers of waste and abstraction that presents itself when using webtech for desktop apps by default.
Still, isn't part of the hedonic treadmill merely marketers dream of number goes up? If your software needs more specs, then surely it's doing more work and the hardware boys will gladly give you a monitor with more hz.
So, the causal link is more: why would software makers need to optimize when it benefits them to pretend the user _needs_ more hardware. Especially in the games realm. Surely going from 60hz to 240hx refresh rate was a practical loss in benefits per hz halfway through. But it ate up hardware resources along the way.
Not really new, Nvidia's GTX 1070 launched in 2016 with 8 GB of VRAM and they've been slow walking VRAM increases for the last decade.
Today's RTX 5060 has 8 GB for basically the same price that the 1070 did.
For $650 you can go up to 12 GB in the 5070, if you want 16 GB it's $1000 for the 5070 Ti, or hundreds more than that for the 5080.
I know there's inflation and $380 in 2016 was more money than it is today, but if you'd asked me 10 years ago I would've bet on VRAM capacity doing better than "the same money is worth less but still gets you exactly same amount of memory 10 years from now."
With prices going up, I half expect Nvidia to launch the RTX 6070 and tell everyone "It has 4 GB of memory and we think you're going to love it. $900." Or they'll just stop bothering with consumer GPUs entirely.
1060 6GB here. Figured the headroom would get me a couple extra years out of it. At this rate I’m wondering if the card is going to outlast the concept of owning graphics cards. Partly because, as you mention, maybe NVIDIA will stop selling them. Partly because, maybe APUs will get good enough…
About 3 years ago I got an RX 6750 XT with 12 GB of VRAM for $330 and I expect to be using that until either it dies or my computer's RAM dies and I don't have $10,000 to replace it. If only I'd maxed out all my DDR4 slots when DDR5 was the hot new thing and you could get it for cheap.
Strix Halo looks quite good. Hoping the stars will align, and my GPU will hold on long enough for the RAM famine to end and some Strix Halo successor to come out.
Games are actually pretty well optimized nowadays. I mostly "game" on a 10 years old computer with a mid-range GPU I bought maybe 3 or 4 years ago and on a Steam Deck.
I sometimes have to disable graphical options but it's more the exception than the rule. On a lot of games, I can even play in 4K.
Of course as you can imagine, I don't game at 245 fps :D
For reference, Octopart is useful to track prices from many distributors, linked below [0] is a commonly used memory (1G) for Rockchip, Amlogic, Allwinner on many Radxa and Orange Pis.
It's not a secret. It started in the 80s and lasted until they won the election in 2005. It's not a conspiracy theory, this is History. Official History everyone one agrees on, even israel and Hamas themselves.
reply