Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
to the computing side, and with the proviso that in my own estimation of my skills I am at best slightly less than ādangerously cluelessā: unfortunately not as much as may be desired because the kind of chips being added are fairly specialised silicon
itās not impossible that people may find other uses for it over time but to the best of my knowledge as it stands right now much of this shit is dead weight the moment this bubble pops
(I donāt think it will all go entirely away; there are some ML uses that are not complete trash. but thatās a long different arc)
Iām not sure I follow the skeu side of your comment?
that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldnāt be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuffā¦
So, from what youāre saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future
broad brush strokes, yes largely that
thereās some extremely fucking interesting details in the weeds, but thatās beyond the scope of merely a comment (and also I donāt feel equipped to make a goodpost about it as yet)
My baseline understanding is that āNPUs,ā as such, are vector accelerators with perhaps lower precision and definitely lower peak TDP. I say this because much of the incremental ML research Iāve skimmed over seems to be around getting away with lower precision, dropping down to FP8 or even FP4 from FP16 when they can get away with it.
Iām still confused as to why and how this is an acceptable tradeoff to firing up an iGPU with precise power/TDP stepping. Perhaps one of those situations where the power budget and latency to fire up the whole GPU block or burst it to max power ends up costing as much as the actual calculation. I think for purposes of this discussion, we also need a source that sheds light on the architectural differences between NPUs and GPU shader/execution units.
@istewart @froztbyte some of this stuff is not easy to reuse for other purposes because of the drivers and APIs.