• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • And you are basically a single consumer with a personal car relative to those data centers and cloud computing providers.

    YOUR workload works well with an FPGA. Good for you, take advantage of that to the best degree you can.

    People;/companies who want to run newer models that haven’t been optimized for/don’t support FPGAs? You get back to the case of “Well… I can run a 25% cheaper node for twice as long?”. That isn’t to say that people shouldn’t be running these numbers (most companies WOULD benefit from the cheaper nodes for 24/7 jobs and the like). But your use case is not everyone’s use case.

    And, it once again, boils down to: If people are going to require the latest and greatest nvidia, what incentive is there in spending significant amounts of money getting it to work on a five year old AMD? Which is where smaller businesses and researchers looking for a buyout come into play.

    At the end of the day, every company will choose to do it faster and cheaper, and nothing about Nvidia hardware fits into either of those categories unless you’re talking about milliseconds of timing, which THEN only fits into a mold of OpenAI’s definition.

    Faster is almost always cheaper. There have been decades of research into this and it almost always boils down to it being cheaper to just run at full speed (if you have the ability to) and then turn it off rather than run it longer but at a lower clock speed or with fewer transistors.

    And nVidia wouldn’t even let the word “cheaper” see the glory that is Jensen’s latest jacket that costs more than my car does. But if you are somehow claiming that “faster” doesn’t apply to that company then… you know nothing (… Jon Snow).

    unless you’re talking about milliseconds of timing

    So… its not faster unless you are talking about time?

    Also, milliseconds really DO matter when you are trying to make something responsive and already dealing with round trip times with a client. And they add up quite a bit when you are trying to lower your overall footprint so that you only need 4 notes instead of 5.

    They don’t ALWAYS add up, depending on your use case. But for the data centers that are selling computers by time? Yeah,. time matters.

    So I will just repeat this: Your use case is not everyone’s use case.


  • Your assessment is missing the simple fact that FPGA can do things a GPU cannot faster

    Yes, there are corner cases (many of which no longer exist because of software/compiler enhancements but…). But there is always the argument of “Okay. So we run at 40% efficiency but our GPU is 500% faster so…”

    Nvidia is the Ford F-150 of the data center world, sure. It’s stupidly huge, ridiculously expensive, and generally not needed unless it’s being used at full utilization all the time. That’s like the only time it makes sense.

    You are thinking of this like a consumer where those thoughts are completely valid (just look at how often I pack my hatchback dangerously full on the way to and from Lowes…). But also… everyone should have that one friend with a pickup truck for when they need to move or take a load of stuff down to the dump or whatever. Owning a truck yourself is stupid but knowing someone who does…

    Which gets to the idea of having a fleet of work vehicles versus a personal vehicle. There is a reason so many companies have pickup trucks (maybe not an f150 but something actually practical). Because, yeah, the gas consumption when you are just driving to the office is expensive. But when you don’t have to drive back to headquarters to swap out vehicles when you realize you need to go buy some pipe and get all the fun tools? It pays off pretty fast and the question stops becoming “Are we wasting gas money?” and more “Why do we have a car that we just use for giving quotes on jobs once a month?”

    Which gets back to the data center issue. The vast majority DO have a good range of cards either due to outright buying AMD/Intel or just having older generations of cards that are still in use. And, as a consumer, you can save a lot of money by using a cheaper node. But… they are going to still need the big chonky boys which means they are still going to be paying for Jensen’s new jacket. At which point… how many of the older cards do they REALLY need to keep in service?

    Which gets back down to “is it actually cost effective?” when you likely need


  • Not small but… smaller than you would expect.

    Most companies aren’t, and shouldn’t be, training their own models. Especially with stuff like RAG where you can use the highly trained model with your proprietary offline data with only a minimal performance hit.

    What matters is inference and accuracy/validity. Inference being ridiculously cheap (the reason why AI/ML got so popular) and the latter being a whole different can of worms that industry and researchers don’t want you to think about (in part because “correct” might still be blatant lies because it is based on human data which is often blatant lies but…).

    And for the companies that ARE going to train their own models? They make enough bank that ordering the latest Box from Jensen is a drop in the bucket.


    That said, this DOES open the door back up for tiered training and the like where someone might use a cheaper commodity GPU to enhance an off the shelf model with local data or preferences. But it is unclear how much industry cares about that.



  • From a “compute” perspective (so not consumer graphics), power… doesn’t really matter. There have been decades of research on the topic and it almost always boils down to “Run it at full bore for a shorter period of time” being better (outside of the kinds of corner cases that make for “top tier” thesis work).

    AMD (and Intel) are very popular for their cost to performance ratios. Jensen is the big dog and he prices accordingly. But… while there is a lot of money in adapting models and middleware to AMD, the problem is still that not ALL models and middleware are ported. So it becomes a question of whether it is worth buying AMD when you’ll still want/need nVidia for the latest and greatest. Which tends to be why those orgs tend to be closer to an Azure or AWS where they are selling tiered hardware.

    Which… is the same issue for FPGAs. There is a reason that EVERYBODY did their best to vilify and kill opencl and it is not just because most code was thousands of lines of boilerplate and tens of lines of kernels. Which gets back to “Well. I can run this older model cheap but I still want nvidia for the new stuff…”

    Which is why I think nvidia’s stock dropping is likely more about traders gaming the system than anything else. Because the work to use older models more efficiently and cheaply has already been a thing. And for the new stuff? You still want all the chooch.




  • Yeah…

    Your mass assassinations plan doesn’t work when there is a camera on every corner and traffic light. L Dog was always going to get caught if he hadn’t fled the country within hours of blapping that exec. You are also apparently assuming everyone is Jason Bourne in your fantasy and are a highly trained guerilla fighting force that can blend in and out of everything.

    You pick your targets when and where you can get them.

    Yeah. The difference between being the chosen one in a young adult novel and actually accomplishing anything of value is what taking out your “target” accomplishes.

    And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.

    Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.

    I believe in fighting for change in ways that can actually protect others and accomplish things. Rather than fantasizing about living in a Call of Duty commercial and just painting an even bigger target on the backs of the groups I claim to be helping.

    If you or the other “Buy a gun, it is the only thing you can do. I hear Fred’s on 4th street have great deals on assault rifles!” folk had ACTUALLY engaged in any activism whether peaceful or otherwise you would have long since had it explained to you: YOU DO NOT BRING A FUCKING GUN TO A PROTEST. Because the moment the other side sees it? They open fire. Because cops will give a bottle of water to the white kid with an assault rifle looking for some n*****s to kill. They’ll fucking murder anyone who looks even slightly brown if they have a bulge in their jacket pocket.


  • They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models.

    And that is solved just by keeping a non-processed version of the query (or one passed through a different grammar to preserve character counts and typos). It is not a priority because there are no meaningful queries where that matters other than a “gotcha” but you can be sure that will be bolted on if it becomes a problem.

    Again, anything this trivial is just a case of a poor training set or an easily bolted on “fix” for something that didn’t have any commercial value outside of getting past simple filters.

    Sort of like how we saw captchas go from “type the third letter in the word ‘poop’” to nigh unreadable color blindness tests to just processing computer vision for “self driving” cars.

    They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop.

    If you make someone answer multiple questions just to shitpost they are going to go elsewhere. People are terrified of lemmy because there are different instances for crying out loud.

    You are also giving people WAY more credit than they deserve.


  • In many ways, trump’s campaign was bolstered by the image of him standing “defiant” with a fist raised in the air and someone else’s blood all over him.

    If trump HAD gotten got? Evil deep state assassination attempt by biden and here is your new candidate that the entire party would rally behind. And democrats would be even more reluctant to say or do anything out of “decorum”.

    Because here is the thing: trump isn’t even the problem. He is an evil bastard but he is a symptom of the problem. Project 2025 is what those rapid fire EOs come from. And Project 2025 very much benefits from right wing fascists controlling basically all of social media.

    And I will just, once again, ask: What do you think your guns are going to do against a military that is cracking down on you and your buddies as “terrorists”? Because if there was ANY chance of a civilian force posing ANY threat to a government, we would have banned guns back in the late 1700s.



  • Oh. Guns are even better for that.

    On the right? They are a lightning rod for criticism and complaints. “All the jobs in our state were taken away and my daughter is dying of an easily curable disease. BUT THOSE FUCKING LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!”

    On the left? they are a way to “meet in the middle” on a lot of legislature while also being a great way to villify and target groups. For example, anyone with even a passing understanding of history knows that the Civl Rights Movement was not MLK Jr giving one speech and fist bumping Rosa Parks on the bus. The threat of violence was definitely a factor (beyond that it gets murkier). And people LOVE to argue that Blacks picking up guns is how that was “won”.

    You know what else came of that? “That kid is a gangbanger and has a gun. SHOOT HIM. Oh shit, uhm. Fuck it, we’ll just say the toy train looked like a gun”.

    And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”

    And the absolute best part? “Both sides” are fucking delusional if they think their guns are going to accomplish anything against an oppressive government. Cops won’t go near a pistol if a kid’s life is on the line. But they’ll open fire like mel gibson if they think a business is in trouble. Let alone the military with tanks and drones and there will be a lot more “combat footage” to watch online.

    If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.




  • t’s guaranteed to go before the courts and get struck down

    If only trump controlled the highest court in all the land. A “supreme” court, if you will.

    That said, trump and his allies have been pretty open that the idea is to spam EOs to demoralize people and distract them from what they are really doing. And, in this case, Legal Eagle (and Liz Dye) kind of already explained it:

    The idea will be to declare a border crisis (done) to give the potus wider reaching powers. Same with declaring Mexican cartels as terrorists (they kind of are, but not to us). The combination of those mean they can invade sanctuary cities under “national security” excuses and can argue that illegal immigrants are enemy combatants which DO have a carve out.

    The “quirk” of Kamala no longer being a citizen because her parents were here under student (?) visas MIGHT get struck down. But the real goal of populating labor camps with brown people is right on track.


  • Except it was only a disaster for one candidate.

    Which is the point. trump can be literally dismantling the country from day one and people STILL talk about biden because twitter and their favorite compromised twitch streamers do.

    THAT is the problem. In a rational world, we would have had the “turd and a douche sandwich” stupidity with how horrible both candidates were. Instead? BIDEN OLD!!! FUCK YOU BIDEN!!!

    And if you don’t think you are susceptible to being manipulated? Look in a damned mirror and do some soul searching because we all are.


  • And trump and vance said shit as insane as “concept of a plan”.

    The key is that (social) media keyed in on biden spending the first half of his debate passing out from chugging nyquil and just laughed at the “joys” of turmp saying stupid shit.

    Social media is what won this. It is comparable to JFK vs Nixon back in the day where people who listened like Nixon and people who watched loved JFK. Except it is instead that people mostly just waited for someone else to tell them how to feel period.