> then I recommend https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile which ships as a single file with no dependencies and runs on CPU with great performance. Like, such great performance that I've mostly given up on GPU for LLMs. It was a game changer.
First time that I have a "it just works" experience with LLMs on my computer. Amazing. Thanks for the recommendation!
Nice idea, but the climate crisis is not solved with technology (we already know and have everything we need) but by politics and changing our consumption habits.
People don’t want to change consumption habits and they aren’t going to vote for politicians who want to change consumption habits, so technology is the only hope.
I was hoping that this proposal would be a uniquely unilateral one. If a single state or province in the USA or Canada committed to this plan (and if it worked as well as I optimistically propose, and provided enough nutrients) then they could singlehandedly put away enough carbon to actually solve the problem.
That's a bleak point of view and simply untrue. People have been shown to shift their view on consumption habits.
Social technology is the only tech that matters, as it's not just the carbon, it's also the plastic pollution, biosphere destruction, ocean acidification etc.
If we don't change the poeples want's, we can never have a stablish society.
If this is our solution then it's going to actually be solved when a good chunk of humanity gets wiped out. Because I don't see this happening when our dominant economic system demands growth and consumption. Disappointing our science fiction missed the mark on this one assuming humanity would be wiped out by super-weapons and not by inadvertently changing our world to be uninhabitable faster than we can adapt to it.
This is all great, but while the internet is filled with auto-playing videos and invokes to external scripts from google, meta, amazon and who knows where, the example on this page is about saving... 148 bytes?
Does minifying CSS really make a big difference, in the end? I'm guessing that a page with a serious CSS payload (say, over 100k) already has more serious weight problem elsewhere.
The main problem with CSS is that it is "render blocking". If you want the user to see stuff sooner you have to make the CSS smaller and/or serve it faster (e.g. inline it to avoid another request).
I haven't measured yet but my guess would be that on current devices 99% of the CSS size saving matters for making the transfer of the CSS faster over the network (and that the speed up in constructing the CSS Object Model is negligible).
=> Users with low bandwidth and/or flakey connection benefit
CSS is a high level language used very often as a low level one. The styling doesn't use any "cascading" and everything is repeated all the time. In this context minifying can make a difference. But either way it is not among my favorites.
Does minifying make any difference if you're gzip-ing it in-flight anyway?
Edit: I mean, in the real world. Obviously in their example gzip does pretty much nothing since there's so little content, which leave very little room for compression.
CSS is text based, so it should be gzip (or brotli) compressed. Minifying something isn't as effective as compressing it. You could do both, but the difference is small.
I started linking component stylesheets directly in the component HTML, de facto eliminating unused CSS from the output. HTTP3 provides performance gains we can benefit from by serving multiple CSS files "just-in-time".
I've had great results since. No more unused CSS. No more minifying nor bundling. What you write is what you get. It's liberating! Hehe.
> There are obviously still people working in German law enforcement today, who think that harassing a node-operator NGO would somehow lead to the de-anonymization of individual tor users.
No. Their objective is to intimidate individuals, exhaust them, which leads to...
> As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my personal address&office-space as registered address for our non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes. That is a risk I am just no longer willing to take anymore.
So I'm forced to signup and give my email for a supposed trial, only to be immediately told by email that I have a "Low Account Balance - Action Required"? Seriously?
It completely ignores the influence of the indigenous languages in the "dialect" or variation of Spanish, which is actually a much better explainer than "distance from spain".
Huge mountain ranges separating people that are close in distance is a pretty classic mechanism of creating linguistic diversity / dialects in places that are physically close to each other. You see this with villages in various parts of Asia historically.
Indigenous language effecting Spanish is something that would effect everyone in South America, so even if you remove Spain from the table, Colombia, Chile, the Caribbean and Costa Rica will all stand out about how "different" they are from the rest of South America, probably from their physical barriers separating them from the rest of the continent.
I don't think that's a good hypothesis, because in that case, other countries with a huge colonized population such as Mexico or Perú would have less intelligible dialects as well.
Not all Latin-American countries experienced the same level of mestizaje and colonization. The southern part of Chile, in particular, was never successfully colonized by the Spaniards, and mapudungún, the language of the Mapuche people who live there has had (and continues to have) a tremendous influence on Chilean Spanish.
It's a monorail on two rails... But the funny part is that they label themselves as "deep tech" and the narrator is wonder what that means.
If you know there are EU grants open for "deep tech", all these weird projects start making a lot more sense. They're bleeding the states on silly ideas. At least it creates short-term jobs.
I don't think there are many people who believe the state shouldn't intervene at all and that humanity will blossom without it. I'm sure most people strive for some kind of balance.
For those of us who are old enough and were born in the USSR, it feels like we've seen how a similar scenario with too much state intervention has played out before. On one hand, we were so proud of putting a man in space before anyone else; on the other hand, we used to hoard a year's supply of toilet paper and other basic necessities.
Honestly, I think the problem for the USSR were more closely tied to early on becoming a military dictatorship than the particular economic ideas that military dictatorship took on.
If you eliminate economic gain as a motivation for doing things, what's left is to motivate through fear. You aren't working hard enough? You're a breaker; off to the gulag for you!
States have always been able to Get Things Done quickly, at the expense of individual rights (eminent domain, conscription, ethnic cleansing, etc.), and private enterprise has always been able to Get Things Done quickly at the expense of collective rights (union busting, ignoring pollution externalities, discrimination, etc.).
The state is a reflection of the populace. Western populations are presently geriatric and averse to change. So they set up things like NRC so that 50 years will see one reactor open.
Many Eastern populations are young (though aging) and are growth-oriented. Hence the people there lean into the state.
The US, in particular, is all about "never sacrifice grandma for a dollar" which means unlimited dollars are targeted towards grandma. If she says Wind Power is scary then grandma knows best. No surprise that growth-oriented people are anti-state in that universe.
fortunately grandma is politically irrelevant in china (ayi's are worse than Mao), though the age of its leadership is showing, as they are still obsessed in trying "socialism" and see skyscrapers as the ultimate hallmark of development (they built so many cathedrals in the sky the government had to put moratoriums on financial requirements to build them)
The diffusion of information from innovation is a positive externality, so it makes sense there's a government role here.
But one of the pathologies you see in government-funded activities is sticking with funding because a group has become dependent on it, long after the effort ceased to make sense. Arguably nuclear is in that category now.
It’s both, a good state sets up the rules that help solve the game theoretic tragedy of the commons. Without a good framework and smart investment by the state, the 1000x more individuals in the private sector wouldn’t have been able to physically build the internet.
Government agencies like DARPA literally invented the internet, so it was definitely more than solving the tragedy of the commons, although that was important too.
DARPA is designed to limit how long they will fund any technology, and be very willing to terminate funding for any effort that isn't delivering. As I recall, even a 1% success rate is considered acceptable there.
If you look at the list of the corporate sponsors for this think tank, it is pretty obvious that tech has awoken to what the state can do to foster "innovation and advance".
I'm sure a lot of party officials got plenty of nice gifts in the process of building out nuclear. But still - it got built. I guess we'll see in a couple of decades if the quality didn't get compromised.
It's not like the state doesn't do that in Western nations. Look at solar power in the US. Tax incentives from manufacturing, installation and the end user.
The issue is that the state doesn't have a crystal ball. It's still just picking winners and losers (and often gets it wrong).
It can't predict which technology will be the winner in the end. And in fact it tends to "force" it's choice of technology which can end up retarding adoption of the actual winner.
Imagine if the US government had gotten behind the technology of video cassette recording. It would have gone all in on Betamax.
I'd much prefer the government making it easier for private entities to pursue the research themselves and let the market determine the winner.
State has a lot of power. The tricky part is how to wield this power wisely, when individual people are anything but wise.
Chinese government can do whatever they want, but the result may be two years of Covid Zero lockdowns so that the Great Leader doesn't lose his face, or mass incarceration of Uyghurs because they don't want to give up their religion and identity.
Looking at the current Western politicians, I wouldn't trust them with such massive power either. If you are an American Democrat, imagine Trump having the same unrestrained power as Xi. Is it worth some nuclear power plants built quickly? You decide.
But if you've been to Xinjiang or look at some of the releated bloggers or youtubers, these are obvious rumors. China's freedom of religion is doing better than most countries because the majority of China's people are non-religious and there is no religious conflict.
I see these things as a waste of time and resources. We already have all sorts of ways of storing energy, from chemical to mechanical to biological, which are known to work. There are myriad open questions regarding the practicalities of incorporating a battery as the frame of your house, and given the "technological inertia" of the building sector and its regulations, it would take several decades before we even start experimenting with this in real houses. Meanwhile, the world burns and we increase our energy consumption. Again, a waste of time and resources.
First time that I have a "it just works" experience with LLMs on my computer. Amazing. Thanks for the recommendation!
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