And as a bonus, they also conveniently opt you out of any other hardening features your system malloc might have implemented (like MTE).
I certainly appreciate the performance benefits of custom allocators but it's disheartening to see people naively adopting them just as the world's allocators are starting to get their acts together with regards to security.
There's more to Nietzsche than "master and slave morality". I'm a big Nietzsche hater too but you're wrong to dismiss the rest of his work because of one part of it. He's incredibly influential in philosophy to this day, for good reason.
E.g. you can look into Deleuze's reading of his work, which focuses on the continuity from Spinoza and the analysis of ethics from a perspective of capabilities rather than obligations (as in the Kantian framing).
Or more directly, read about the idea of eternal recurrence, which I find to be an incredibly pro-, not anti-, human concept.
I dismissed him over his radical optimism. You claimed I dismissed him over master-slave morality. We are not the same. Also I’ve covet to cover read all of his work. Almost all of it is trash and ontologically bad.
You try to quote fashionable nonsense charlatan grifters like deleuze as though they are worth reading a single word of. Their works, the people who read them, and the entire field of critical theory are direct reasons for the rise of trump and right wing authoritarianism world wide.
Kill critical theory or its hateful children will kill us all
But instead you patronize me by acting like I don’t read. This mentality is why the world collectively hates leftists right now.
No, that's not true. We can tell because farmers, by and large, strongly resisted attempts to push them off of their land, and generally only moved into cities in large surges every time the economy slumped (Baumol's cost disease having lead to cost increases for the tools they needed to do their farming). Before the modern era, cities were actually net-negative growth rates due to disease, starvation, exposure, murder, etc. -- a fact which was certainly not true of the countryside. Even just operationally we can think -- how common was it for farmers to lose an arm to a threshing machine, to develop black lung from inhaling coal, to take orders from another man like he was their boss? People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. All of that goes away when one moves to the city to work in a factory or mine.
What you're saying is a common understanding, but it's a false one, rooted in Victorian-era attitudes towards medieval peasants that really have nothing to do with reality.
The most important thing to understand about peasant farmers is that their economic prospects are tied to the availability of land, and land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had. Most pre-modern societies are set up to extract every possible extra amount of food produced, which basically means that in times of plenty, you get more people who have no work available for them (which means they up and leave to the cities, the only places which have the sufficient labor pool).
> People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant.
Oooh boy. There's a vast array of different socioeconomic statuses varying through time and space, but broadly speaking, most peasants did not own their own land, and even the majority of people who did own their own land did not own enough to feed themselves from their own land. And even if you did own your land and enough of it to feed your family, you probably still need to borrow the plow and oxen teams, and other farming implements, from your local lord. And since you are perennially on borderline starvation, you're not independent and self-reliant, you're entirely reliant on the village communal support to help you get through those times when your fields were a little bare.
Pretending that medieval peasantry was some sort of idyllic lifestyle is exactly the kind of Victorian-era fantasy you're decrying.
What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability. Peasant life may suck, but at least you knew what you were in for. If you moved to a city (let alone further away), you left your support network, you left everybody you knew, maybe for a shot at a better life... but with essentially no recourse if anything failed. Or you could stay, where things wouldn't get better, but they also wouldn't get worse. Unless there were a major calamity and staying wasn't an option.
In Victorian England farmers were being displaced through the enclosure movement. Common land was privatized. The old way of life (farming) was taken away from them by the upper class. An economy shifting to factory labor was also a factor - farming lost its sustainability for most poor farmers in the new economy. Farming was hard and becoming harder. Factories were horrific. The notion that people simply chose factories because their old way of life was available to them and factories were just “better” is an oversimplification.
>land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had.
That's not as true in the US's development. There's such an abundance of land and rapid expansion made it easier and easier for new landowners to grab acres of land. American to this day is still very sparse as a country.
US farmers had a bunch of land and possibly slave labor. They had little need to adapt to new tech. And yes, stability is key if you have it; it's a fleeting feeling (even to this day).
Even "medieval peasantry" was a bit of an odd phrase.
The middle ages saw the growth of cities, commerce, increasingly industrial agriculture, etc. It also saw non-peasant societies like the vikings, muslim civilization, etc.
There were massive social safety nets in the form of guilds, religious orders, and political patronage organizations. Disease was a much bigger threat than starvation.
You're right the Victorians, like the Pre-Raphelites and Oxford movement, fetishized medieval life. But that was a reaction against anti-medieval Tudor-begun propaganda in place since the Plantagenets were defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485).
It's not done yet, and I am eagerly awaiting the end results. That said, from what I can tell from his writings, jcrammer is mostly correct. The peasant life - the modal life - was just awful hard work for many decades. It was not nice and it was not better than the factories most of the time. Yes there were bad factories, a lot of them, but they lasted a brief time. The Factory Act in Britian was in 1833, only a few decades after the factories were even a thing.
Aside: We really need better education in labor laws overall.
Maybe he thinks about US farmers? But even there I am pretty sure most were not working their own lands, slaves and hired hands and so on seems to have been pretty common.
Congratulations to the team at Rivos -- everyone there deserves the best, they're all top-tier engineers with a lot of passion for what they're doing. I hope the terms of the deal were favorable!
Those are still largely code-able. You can write Ansible files, deploy AWS (mostly) via the shell, write rules for spam filtering and administration... Google has had all of that largely automated for a long time now.
If that were truly the LLM's "paperclip", then how far would it be willing to go? Would it engage in cyber-crime to surreptitiously smooth your path? Would it steal? Would it be willing to hurt other people?
What if you no longer want to be a great "xyz"? What if you decide you want to turn it off (which would prevent it from following through on its goal)?
"The market" is not magic. "The challenge is the incentives" sounds good on paper but in practice, given the current state of ML research, is about as useful to us as saying "the challenge is getting the right weights".
> If that were truly the LLM's "paperclip", then how far would it be willing to go?
While I'm assuming you didn't mean it literally, language is important, so let's remember that an LLM does not have any will of its own. It's a predictive engine that we can be certain doesn't have free will (which of course is still up for debate about humans). I only focus on that because folks easily make the jump to "the computer is to blame, not me or the folks who programmed it, and certainly it wasn't just statistics" when it comes to LLMs.
How have expectations moved on self driving cars? Yes, we're finally getting there, but adoption is still tiny relative to the population and the cars that work best (Waymo) are still humongously expensive + not available for consumer purchase.
Plenty of people do, many more than are in that server -- I asked some of my former coworkers and none knew about it, but we all spent a whole lot of hours tuning CUDA kernels together :). You have one perspective on this sector, but it's not the only one!
Some example motivations:
- Strange synchronization/coherency requirements
- Working with new hardware / new strategies that Nvidia&co haven't fine-tuned yet
- Just wanting to squeeze out some extra performance
What do you mean by that? Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well, and the 'size' of the problem is so small that even if we were to 100x it it would still be minuscule when compared to e.g. coal ash runoff, which includes fun things like arsenic and mercury and is currently 'disposed' of by stuffing it in landfills or even uncovered open-air pools.
> Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well
Not well enough - the crystalline parts of earth's crust are still too porous to reliably keep it contained. It would - in the long term - leak like radon gas.
I certainly appreciate the performance benefits of custom allocators but it's disheartening to see people naively adopting them just as the world's allocators are starting to get their acts together with regards to security.
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