Anyone know how to get mail to join@ssi.inc to not bounce back as spam? :-) (I promise, I'm not a spammer! Looks like a "bulk sender bounce" -- maybe some relay?)
I honestly worry about this - I've been tinkering with ideas to try to build towards AGI, and I'd love to share them publicly to get feedback ("This is dumb and here's why" would be enormously valuable to me), but it's hard to work openly, because while I do think capitalism has been an overall good, the capitalist imperative always seeks slaves, and I'm really not excited about helping the people who'd be trying to build a new slave class.
Thoughts? Is there a ethical way to work openly on AGI?
It turns out you need very different kernels for good performance on different GPUs, so OpenCL is a nice tool, but not sufficient; you need a hardware-specific kernel library.
From the framework side, each integration is relatively expensive to support, so you really don’t want to invest in many of them. Without some sort of kernel API standard, you’re into a proprietary solution, and NVidia did an amazing job at investing in their software, so that’s the way things go.
I think we had a pretty solid foundation for doing something smarter with PlaidML, but after we were bought by Intel, some architectural decisions and some business decisions consigned that to be a research project; I don’t know that it’s going anywhere.
These days, I’d probably look into OctoML / TVM, or maybe Modular, for a better solution in this space… or just buy NVidia.
(I worked a bit on Intel’s Meteor Lake VPU; it’s a lovely machine, but I’m not sure what the story will be for general framework integrations. I bet OpenVINO will run really well on it, though :-)
FWIW, Framework also announced a new battery with the same form factor but another 10%-ish capacity. And because the system's amazingly easy to disassemble, if your battery starts to lose capacity, it's trivial to swap in a replacement.
I do the "unplug and spend a couple of hours hacking without a charger" thing all the time with mine, and mine's using the previous-generation battery. Not running Windows seems to help a surprising amount.
I've noticed the exact opposite with my 11th gen i5 Framework (purchased in December 2021). For the life of me, I cannot figure out why my Framework laptop seems to massively drain battery life when I am using Linux. I've tried just about every distro under the sun (Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, Gentoo, and even FreeBSD) and I consistently get a battery drain of like 7-10% every 20 minutes doing something simple like watching a YouTube video, reading things in Firefox reader mode, and having an IRC client open.
When I said "screw it" and installed Windows, seemingly my battery woes went away. I used pretty much the same programs (Firefox and Weechat) on both operating systems and I'm pretty much completely stumped. I thought about asking out to Framework support but I don't know what good that would do.
Another issue I've had is not being able to let the thing sit overnight not on the charger since it drains about 10% an hour with the lid closed in both Windows and Linux, so I'm having to remember to leave it plugged in or know that I'm going to be tethered to the wall in the morning.
Regardless of those negatives, I think Framework as a company has done some pretty tremendous things in the laptop space and I hope they continue to do so in the future.
Neat; thanks for posting this! I just started tinkering with ideas in the same line of thinking a couple weeks ago; it’s good to see that there’s prior art to learn from.
I landed in the same place they did, on using XML. I think there’re a couple of advantages over S-Expressions:
* There’s always a tag. So it’s like everything is a special form. Being able to omit the tag in sexprs is nice syntactic sugar, but I’m not expecting that anyone would be writing this code in text by hand (although it’s useful to preserve the ability to do so), and I’d rather have the clarity and explicit terminators.
* Namespaces are a killer feature - that’s what makes it an open datastructure, allowing you to incorporate multiple dialects at different semantic levels. (You can tell I’ve been using MLIR a lot the past few years… :-)
* There’s a whole ecosystem of standards and tools around it. Need a standard fragment identifier? Or to canonicalize an entity? There’s a good body of specs, carefully worked out by people more experienced than I.
I dunno about their Python approach; I was thinking of a structure editor (and trying to avoid all the historical pitfalls of structure editors, which will be tricky). We’ll see how it goes. :-)
NB This is even more important in VM scenarios, where second-level address translation means something needs to walk a guest-physical-to-system-physical map for each level of the guest-virtual-to-guest-physical map. So TLB locality becomes even more important, and using huge pages cuts down on a multiplier in resolving TLB misses.
I worked on the Windows kernel in the early 2000s. I really enjoyed it - I learned a lot about PC hardware, worked with some very smart people, and although a few projects were ambitious and ambiguous and didn’t really pan out, most of them were really solid; it felt great to be improving something that really made a difference for a huge number of people. I’m a much better developer, with a much better sense for how code serves business, for having spent time there.
It's unclear to me that the military is currently any less effective and efficient than it was in the 90s. In Hollywood films in those days, it was typically portrayed as being incredibly efficient, but that has nothing to do with reality.
My own anecdote says that "The wastefulness of the military budget" has been an issue for many decades -- go look up Eisenhower's warnings of the military/industrial complex, and consider that the problem had been building for quite a while at that point.
Back then, of course, "cultural rot" would've meant "Treating black soldiers as equals"; in the 90s, IIRC, it would've meant "Treating female soldiers as equals". Just wondering, are you in favor of racism and sexism as well, or are you just anti-trans? Please note that anti-trans attitudes are likely to age about as well as racism and sexism have.
IMHO, every social change feels a little weird at the time; you're used to thinking a certain way, and now you're told that it's wrong; people take that sort of things personally. Other self-righteous people sometimes realize they can use the new woke attitude to swan around and club people who're moving more slowly -- bullying, really, and this bullying is the serious problem on the left, not the wokeness itself. We'd all be better off if we were better at granting grace to people making good-faith efforts to change their habits and attitudes.
So social change is hard. But that doesn't make it wrong, or rot, or virtue-signaling; it really does make life better for unfairly marginalized people, and as it spreads, the power of the leftist bullies will dissipate, and we'll be left with a better world overall.
And: if you want to disempower those leftist bullies faster, support racial justice, support women's rights, support trans rights. You don't have to club people over the head with it; just offer quiet support, because it's the right thing to do, and it'll make the bullies all the madder if there's nothing they can use to feel superior to you. :-)
(OTOH, I’m not an einsum expert; please feel free to delight me by pointing out how it’s possible to do these sorts of things :-)