Not every blog post written in the author’s free time needs to be manuscript-worthy. Informal benchmarks can be often really helpful in solving real world problems where it’s not worthwhile to try to squeeze out every last nanosecond of performance.
As I started my comment out with, I wish, not demand, not expect, just wish there was a little more technical meat on an article written by an absolute expert in the performance computing field. This is the author's day job. They've written a number of books on high performance and is currently an professor teaching high performance.
That said, I apologize if I came off more critical than I intended.
Trevor Milton's infamous "html5 supercomputer" quote often gets shared in discussions about Nikola, and for good reason. It's one of my all-time favorite bullshit quotes:
"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate." [1]
If I was already an investor and saw that, my eyes would bug out so fast that they'd leave my skull and achieve orbital escape velocity. That quote is peak Dilbert boss.
Why stop there? These are the obvious scams, but let's look deeper. Let's look at how "legit" companies are screwing their users by using all of their personal data and convincing the public that everything is perfectly normal
Given GM's commitment to actively removing the most popular and asked-for feature in the automotive world from their own infotainment systems, I'm not even surprised. This is a company that has proven before and continues to prove that they simply don't give a fuck about technology, they've realized they can keep throwing gimmicks or buzzwords at consumers and maintain just enough mind-share to stay relevant. It's no shock to me that a company with that sort of culture willingly bought into the same kind of flashy demos and mosaics of buzzwords that they themselves take part in.
GM does not make cars for the consumers, GM makes cars for the investors. And the investors loved the idea of additional revenue from apps&subscriptions on the entertainment system
That's a good one. But in terms of sheer cluelessness, hubris, and word salad incoherency I still prefer this quote from Jeff Davis, co-founder of Razorfish. They were valued at $4B in 2000.
"I think this definitely is not a fad, what's occurring right now. This is absolutely real; this is a revolution; we're packing rifles; and this is going to be something that's going to change the course of the way the world is functioning. We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business. We've recontextualized what it is to be a services business. We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them."
Their actual business? Building web sites for other companies.
Also this snippet: “The truck uses voice-activated controls rather than pushing buttons and reaching for various controls to help maintain a driver's focus on the driving task. “
Because nothing does more to increase driver focus than getting in a heated argument with a machine. My rental car last month, towards the end of a long drive in a snowstorm, told me it was "time to take a break" and displayed a coffee cup on the dash where the speedometer used to be. I swear if it wasn't a rental car I would have put my fist through that screen.
I was driving a new company vehicle recently and while I'm cruising at highway speeds, it would pop up a warning that my washer fluid was low. Not sure when the optimal time to tell me is, but I can almost guarantee telling me at 60 mph is below optimal.
I don't think a single one of those sentences makes any sense at all, except for HTML5 being very secure, which is trivially obvious since it's not even a programming language.
> ChatGPT CEO: Our company has spearheaded the development of Quantum Neural Cloud Computing, a revolutionary paradigm in the realm of artificial intelligence and data processing. We've seamlessly integrated quantum computing principles with neural network architectures, creating an unparalleled synergy that redefines the boundaries of computational capabilities.
Despite being on shaky ground due to local minima, barren plateaus, classical simulability, and more, variational quantum computing is definitely a real field. ChatGPT can't even hallucinate properly.
I am not very familiar with this founder and his company, but how does a guy like this make it past any level of due diligence on the part of his investors?
You clearly haven’t raised money from investors with that question. /j
Investors are sheep and follow their peers. There are only a handful of mavericks in investment circles, and they generate the best and the worst returns.
Consider that they all invested without seeing the engine or looking under the hood of the demo vehicle. It’s in the investor lawsuit — they even poke fun at themselves about it.
Bingo. You see this in public shareholder calls all the time. Today, you can't find a tech company that doesn't say something like "We are integrating AI with LLM into our technology to blah". They don't say that because it's a meaningful or good product, they say that because investors give you a 10% stock bump just for saying "LLM".
The same thing happened with crypto, machine learning, web 2.0, etc. Investors love a good buzzword and will reward a company handsomely for using them.
Hell, that's like 90% of the reason FTX became as big as it was.
My company just did a shareholder meeting. Of everything we described (and we had a KILLER year) basically the only questions that were asked revolved around our usage of LLMs. It didn't matter that we made a ton of money, new products, and happy customers. What mattered was how we are adding AI.
I say this only one-quarter sarcastically, I would genuinely like to know. The only real applications of LLMs that I have seen so far are devs "learning" new languages.
Part of our software has a data ingestion and normalization process that can be somewhat costly. Basically, on a near per client basis we get data that needs to be transformed into our data model. We are currently investigating into using LLMs to setup our normalization DSL (or at least fill it out as best it can before a human signs off on it).
There's also an investigation going on to allow a client to ask an LLM about there data. I'm not sure how well that one will pan out.
I'm feeling the "we need to adopt AI because it's the hot new thing/investors want to hear it" pressure at work nonstop, including some annoying mandatory trainings on it. My brother in Christ, I'm still trying to get my teammates to use git and package management, AI is going to have to wait a little bit.
To be completely honest ChatGPT would probably generate fewer vulnerabilities per line of code than my colleagues. Sadly that's not my call, and at least I get paid well to clean up their messes and put out their fires.
They did a SPAC in 2020 so his 'investors' were mostly the general public. Actual investors were pretty skeptical of them, e.g. Hindenburg shorted them extensively and called them a fraud.
Early investors aren't trying to find valuable, profitable, or innovative companies that will make a lot of money. Their goal is to sell to someone else at a higher price sometime down the line. Therefore the actual reality of the business is not useful, and often purposely ignored if the story seems like it can pull in enough bag holders.
Do you think he would have gotten that far in today's interest rate environment? I mean, are investors paying more attention now, or does the bigger idiot theory still work?
A theory I've read on here is that VC returns come from a handful of hyper-successful firms, and the challenge is getting in on the deals in those firms at all, and the way you do that is by building a reputation as a visionary and generous investor by investing in ludicrous bullshit on founder-friendly terms. From this point of view, money given to Nikola isn't a bad investment, it's a marketing expense.
I am not a Musk fan at all, in fact I despise Musk 4.0, but what he accomplished prior to losing his mind is undeniable. He founded SpaceX, which absolutely accelerated our access to space by 20-40 years. Half of the satellites in orbit belong to SpaceX. SpaceX put more mass into orbit last year than all other countries combined.
He accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles by at least ten years. If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time... that's assuming that his naive geopolitical angling doesn't kill us all, and that his brain implants don't turn us into corporate zombies.
My point is, there is much about him to criticize, but he has delivered a lot in the past.
If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time...
Not really. Methane from cows causes more harm to the environment than cars do. If he had gotten the world to go vegan, that would have been doing the impossible. Musk made an idea fashionable and sold carbon credits.
I mean, Musk went the practical route. Make things that nearly everyone wants... fast cars that you can refuel at home for next to no cost.
But I hear you about food. However, the sad joke is: we don't need vegan purity. If we could just convince everyone in wealthy countries to skip meat for only two days per week, then the we might actually hit 2C max temp increase. But everyone is all about paleo meat-only or vegan/vegetarian purity crap. We just needed some moderation, but that's not as sexy as being a vegan or a Hummer driver.
We will pilot our extremes straight into the ground.
Making people abstain from meat completely will turn people into the meat-eating equivalent of alcoholics. I bring up the comparison because sobriety is contingent on a period of continued abstinence along with veganism or vegetarianism. You will be mocked if you called yourself vegan and ate meat a few times a month, as you would be mocked if you called yourself sober and drank a few times a month.
Many people look at a lifetime of denying themselves a basic pleasure and rightly balk at the prospect and put it off to some distant 'later' or create a rationalization for why they don't need to do it. This wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we quit using absolutist terms like 'vegan' and instead came up with a way to make it a moral issue to acknowledge the problems associated with meat consumption without shaming those who limit it but do not abstain from it.
Basically -- advocating that the solution is a 'vegan' one is probably not going to work, and if it does it will create (at least initially) a population of guilt-ridden people and an associated culture of shame. Let's think of a better way to do it.
nobody's advocating that. I used the example of making the world go 100% vegan because it is an example of a thing which would be incredibly effective, yet which any reasonable person would consider impossible.
sure. but going the practical route isn't being some kind of hero. you don't go to a hero's gravestone and see the words "well, he did what he could."
Musk harnessed a very powerful desire which a lot of Americans share: to counteract climate change by buying stuff they like. If there's any credit to hand out, it's that desire which deserves it, especially since Musk answered the "buying stuff they like" part vigorously and the "counteracting climate change" part to a far lesser extent.
And then turned around and pretended to be more interested in the part he did less to accomplish.
All the scientifically relevant stuff would have gotten into space, Musk, SpaceX or not. All those Starlink satelites? I am still not convinced they provide any actual added value, besides giving SpaceX another product to raise funds against (Elon tried the same thing with FSD, which worked out less good so far).
Also, we were well on our path to EVs, Tesla (not Musk himself alone) accelerated that. Ten years so is bold claim, and attributing that all to one single person is just nonesense.
Edit: Tesla made shit tons of money by selling CO2 credits to legacy car makers, so in reality Musk (rather Tesla, but that distinctions is difficult) had close to no positive impact on climate change and instead profited of others continue to polute. All Musk cares about is his image as being the tech-god savior of mankind, that and money.
Oh, they work. Issue is, I know for a fact that there would have been alternative solutions for that. Or how do you think other militaries operate their communications?
Billy Mitchell is a liar and a cheater, but he actually is really good at Donkey Kong. He has a publicly verified (in front of a crowd) score over 900,000. Much like how Lance Armstrong is both an excellent cyclist and a doped up cheater.
Billy is definitely an awful human being in other regards than just his cheating though, at least from what I've been able to tell.
Honestly, it doesn't - I can't imagine ChatGPT producing this density of blatant bullshit, not without a specialized prompt forcing it to. Bad as it is, ChatGPT by default still has some statistically average dignity.
I agree with the OP. VS Code using the Jupyter protocol is superior to notebooks in almost every respect in my experience. It gives you an excellent debugger, the ability to track changes in Git without any modification, and you can also run as a regular Python script.
Excellent points, but perhaps part of the reason for the price difference is because the US population is much more geographically dispersed, so the infrastructure costs are much higher.
It depends how you define metro area. The US census 80% urban has a very broad definition of urban. My 7000 person town with many houses on dozens of acres is classified as urban because it’s within 50 miles of a major city and near some smaller ones.
In my experience, most people learn much better from being shown concrete examples inside the workspace they already use compared to abstract examples on a whiteboard with lots of lines and arrows.
Also, when viewing/listening remotely, I will record the session -- especially if they're assigning a complex task or series of tasks. This allows me to playback and get things exactly right.
In person, I would have to smuggle in a recorder and it's often awkward or infeasible.
Slightly tangential, but for those who have gone through vulkan-tutorial.com and still felt lost even knowing a bit about basic graphics programming concepts, I highly recommend Brendan Galea's Youtube video series on Vulkan [1]. I'm about halfway through it and so far it has really tied together a lot of different concepts and cleared up a lot of my lingering confusion.
For me, it was the "I Am Graphics And So Can You" [1] series, where author progresses from the similar concepts up to a working renderer for DOOM 3, linked in the intro of this article [2].
I agree. I read the first edition to Intro to Statistical Learning and it went into just the right level of mathematical depth. The authors also have Youtube lectures that accompany the chapters, and these are a great reinforcement of the material.
I agree, I don't know anyone offhand who uses two computers for recreational diving, and I would absolutely use an Apple watch as my sole dive computer. If you have a computer malfunction you can still safely return to the surface. The only reason to perhaps carry a backup is if you've traveled a long way or otherwise invested a lot of money in the trip.
I was a shy, socially awkward type when I enlisted--definitely not military material. The experience did me a lot of good. For the first year or so I was a target of relentless bullying, but slowly I learned how to stand up for myself verbally, and got better at not attracting negative attention in the first place.
I'm a former U.S. submariner. Probably 90% of my shipmates who had served at least 3 years would have said the same thing. They hated the Navy, hated sea duty, hated all of it.
And then towards the end of their commitment, with a several thousand dollar re-enlistment bonus on the table, most of them would sign up for another 6 years. The bonus would usually be blown in a week on a new vehicle.
Huh, looking at [1] and [2] she's looking at a $100k bonus...I can see how that would be tempting in spite of feelings that have dissipated with some shore leave.
Fortunately, I think she's connected enough to find employment worth that much in private industry, disciplined enough to be wise in how she spends the money if she does take it, and rational enough to make a good decision (kinda hard to drive the new Tesla when you're underwater as much as she is), but I can understand how a lot of sailors might look at a number with a lot of zeros and make an impulse decision.
My boat used to deploy to the Persian Gulf, and for many years as long as the boat spent at least a little time in certain areas, pay for that month was tax-free. A LOT of re-enlistments (with those 6-figure bonuses) were done to take maximum advantage of those rules.
