vLLM in a docker container, FP16 quantized on an 8x MI300X cluster. Very lazy hackjob, I didn't even set up an interface. Was constructing curl commands from string templates. I worked out if I paid that compute cost over a whole month, it was twice as expensive as the monthlies you'd pay for owning a very nice 2000sqft non-coop apartment in Midtown Manhattan. I was paying rock bottom prices, too.
> but I see plenty of idolizing of China and how it manages to solve big problems at speeds unseen
This is actually a great example for extant romanticization of China. People lauding Chinese expediency in the context of industry and construction often don't realize it's almost entirely enabled by extreme underregulation and underenforcement of industrial safety standards. Chinese people themselves will often point this out, though depending on the person they may frame it more in a style of "The West is slow because of all of the red tape!"
Of the subset of Westerners who are aware of this, sometimes I have to balk at how many of them will take that framing to heart and paint it as a positive thing. Even most Chinese don't have a positive view of it, not in reality. At most it's a tragic necessity required to build China up, though younger Chinese rightly tend to see it for what it is: corporate exploitation of laborers.
Of course in the context of solving political problems, the Politburo readily cutting through its own invented problems is another matter.
Does it? I’ve seen Ezra Klein talk about his book and he talked about how bureaucracy is frequently a scapegoat for getting things done. Europe is very bureaucratic yet is able to build. The issue he called out is red tape yes but more so litigation by the private citizen. That any individual can stop an apartment being built because it blocks morning light into their flower bed
They're made possible because all but the most frivolous lawsuits are not disincentivized, but are in fact tolerated as a tacit, systemic feature by the state and the bar association. The example given is a stalling tactic. Stalling tactics also exist in China through property rights, it's a weird thing to hold up as contrast. Having a right to the house you own is such a fundamentally important thing to have in a society. That it can be abused because bureaucracy will tolerate it out of epistemic humility doesn't change that fact.
It’s hilarious to me all the progressives like yourself absolutely losing their shit over someone saying they want government to be more effective and accomplish things instead of just spending tons of money and nothing actually changing.
Can you please tell me which politician runs on making the government worse? No single electoral campaign has ever said "I'm running to make the government less effective." Trump ran on making the government more effective, Harris ran on making the government more effective.
Turns out you need more that just vague platitudes than "things should be better."
No shit dude. Welcome to the ground floor everyone agrees with.
This is why EK is such a fucking dork. Go follow some organizers with your preferred beliefs, that would do you better than listening to the smart boy thinking very smart things and if you disagree with the smart boy you aren't a serious adult.
> People lauding Chinese expediency in the context of industry and construction often don't realize it's almost entirely enabled by extreme underregulation and underenforcement of industrial safety standards
Kind of like Tesla's latest factories, or DR Horton building homes with massive problems from day 1?
Or Silicon Valley being a collection of superfund cleanup sites?
Or just the environmental pollution, in general, in Texas?
No one has figured out how to balance growth with safety. Ideally it shouldn't be hard, the total amount of money saved is pennies compared to the overall investment, but making everyone follow the rules via regulations ends to being a huge cost and time multiplier.
The more direct comparison is the blue collar working conditions throughout the west in the late 19th and early 20th centuries actually. It is true that environmental protections could be much better in the United States, did you assume I would disagree or find it shocking? Why?
> but making everyone follow the rules via regulations ends to being a huge cost and time multiplier.
The cost and extra time it takes saves lives. That's the bottom line. It's your attitude that gets people maimed and killed.
> The cost and extra time it takes saves lives. That's the bottom line. It's your attitude that gets people maimed and killed.
My argument, and I should have made it clearer, is that we are paying a huge penalty for people who are dishonest. The amount of money they save by being dishonest and endangering others is generally tiny, but the cost to society to prevent the dishonesty is huge in the form of regulations.
SteamOS leverages namespaces via pressure-vessel already. The problem exists exclusively on Windows. Paravirtualized drivers introduce API incompatibility issues and decades of cumulative engine infrastructure made for Windows using the Win32 API means nobody wants to swap over to using UWP and thus AppContainers are a non-starter (and that's without getting to sacrificing Wine/Proton compatibility).
The native isolation mechanisms like silos are things that require wrangling by professional sysadmins, I didn't even know they existed until I started writing this post. The real question to be asking is why is sandboxing so bad on Windows? Despite some searching, I still have no conclusive answer as to how to go about filesystem isolation in Win32-space, or if it's even possible.
Sandboxing is quite easy (user-wise), once you install the sandbox system. By default it allows only a single sandbox, and with small `.wsb` file you can drive what's visible from the host, whether the GPU should be active, etc. - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...
It's great for testing, and Sandbox is just the tip of the iceberg of what Windows Containers support
- e.g. maybe someone can come up with "launcher" that goes through it (somehow).
Ummm, yeah, but Windows Containers is windows Pro and Enterprise only (security is an optional, paid extra on windows), and only for these using Hyper-V (meaning Virtual Box users are excluded).
I think the most punk rock, anarchist thing that could happen is someone leverages the shitty, pre-digested consumer-facing models to orchestrate a cybersecurity incident where the frontier base models are stolen and freely distributed to the public.
Is it the pursuit accumulating capital (incentive to profit) or merely to fund something? You switch from the former to the latter. Why do you believe that profit is reliant on copyright? Piracy is so widespread that copyright may as well not exist (in the context of the consumption of media) outside of moralizing rhetoric, and yet insane profits are made all the same.
I cannot at all relate to being so devoid of passions in all categories but the accumulation of capital. If we are to justify copyright and the concept of intellectual property writ large, then as far as I can see its only real usecase is in defending against precisely the people who are possessed by an obsession with capital, those dragons who merely care to see their hoard grow larger. Unfortunately, that's not how these systems are structured in our society. The transferability of intellectual property all but warps the idea into something that instead empowers those it should disarm.
Accumulation of capital is the engine by which this stuff runs. You aren't going to get a staff of full-time writers, actors, set designers, costume designers, composers, and editors to create something great off of passion alone. These creatives may love what they do but at the end of the day they need to eat. The promise of future returns are why works like movies and tv shows receive the massive funding necessary to be produced.
I most definitely don't agree with him, and I find the idea absolutely repugnant. Devils advocate though, I would be much more careful with the code that I write if regulators passed some dogshit law like that.
I understand that, though I wouldn't stop. I'd just go much slower and radically change my methodology. Failures in other engineering domains come with massive legal consequences, and they have for a very long time. In mesopotamia if a house collapsed and killed someone inside, the builder was put to death. People still built houses in the hundreds of thousands.
It really just introduces a legal burden to prove competence and work in good-faith, and nets immense power to throw out ridiculous deadlines. Your managers are legally responsible too, and if they push beyond what's reasonable you have just cause to bring them to court in a way that you currently don't. To re-emphasize, I don't think this is a better world, but it's not unlivable.
Sure, but home builders today very rarely get put to death, and it takes a particular kind of intentional fuck-up to have a plumber, or a drywaller, or electrician placed in prison.
If I was personally liable for damages, and there was an insurance program or some sort - similar to how doctors & dentists practice - sure, I'd probably still write code, very carefully. But if there was a decent change of me spending the rest of my life in prison because something I wrote on a Friday at 4pm under some amount of stress? No thanks. I can re-train as a plumber, and stand knee-deep in shit all day.
Well, one scenario would be that everybody who writes code would do so for money.
Take my friend who is a property lawyer. The firm she works for buys her insurance, because it would be insane to operate without insurance, but the only available insurance is personal insurance, it insures a specific person to do property law. So, although her day job is helping that $100Bn farm equipment company buy a $10M new factory from a $100Bn construction firm, at the weekend she is covered by that same insurance when she represents her friend buying a $500k cottage. AIUI this is a completely normal arrangement.
If that was the situation for programming, the company is going to buy your $100M exploit insurance because they need a programmer, but it's personal insurance so you could work on your Game jam game using the same insurance, and it'd be crazy to just "Go commando" if you don't have employment and thus insurance, in case somehow your "Galaga but also Blue Prince and somehow a visual novel" Game jam entry causes a $10M damages payment.
Or it becomes standardized to have exclusions - pilots for example often have extensive insurance that covers the company when they’re flying for hire, but covers nothing if puttering around in a Cessna on the weekend.
Insurance companies are very, very good at figuring out how to identify and price risk, once motivated to do so.
Sure as you'd expect lawyers are better at cutting a good deal for themselves than other professions, but I wanted to cite an example where it does work out.
Also from what I've seen there are way too many GA accidents involving airline pilots for the insurers to eat that loss. They almost invariably have superior skills, but some of them more than compensate with risk taking.
It's not about lawyers cutting a good deal for themselves. Liability issues get complicated along multiple dimensions when they involve licensed professionals, even when they're day-to-day working relationship is indistinguishable from any other employee. And lawyers, even more than doctors, are at the furthest extreme of this complication spectrum. Even were software engineering to become a mandatorily licensed profession like some other engineering disciplines, there's little reason to believe insurance products would mirror those in the legal profession. I seriously doubt we'd end up in a place where employers are common--let alone routinely--paying to cover liability for work outside the scope of employment.
It's because it's simpler to insure "everything real estate" or whatever than to try to cut out exclusions for (relatively) cheap properties.
But if they noticed that they were paying out more than expected on these $500k deals, the insurance would change quite quickly.
The same thing happened with GA insurance - there was an assumption that airline pilots would be safer but it didn't really turn out as expected, because a 747 has a heck of a lot more "keep you safe" doohickeys and doesn't fly low to the ground much.
People should have the right to refuse to allow data centers in their areas in the same way that they have refused other things that could be described as a public benefit like landfills, wind and solar farms, new highways or high speed rail service, etc.
They will be the ones affected by their refusal when that industry passes them by and the local economy remains stagnant or in decline. It is ultimately their right to decide their own fates and if they gather opposition to a project and vote it down locally then the state and any industry should have no recourse other than to follow the will of the people on down the highway to some place where the locals are more accepting of the risk/rewards for the new infrastructure.
We don't need shit like this everywhere. There is plenty of room and somewhere, some group of gullibles will jump on the opportunity to be bled for someone else's benefit.
There is zero treason in that. I think you don't understand that word. That is freedom in its most pure form. Local people decide their own fates without lobbyists or other serial prevaricators spinning yarns about how great it will all be if they just accept all the downsides without arguing.
> Do you believe that there will be happier marriages and less domestic violence when brides are 16 years old and have little to no agency in choosing who marries them?
Comparison isn't necessarily binary. I'd posit these things are more likely determined by other socio-cultural variables, the individuals involved (which is partially contextualized by said variables) and a noisy baseline than whether or not a marriage is arranged. In otherwords, an independent variable (which means I disagree with the both of you)
> In every country in the world, higher quality of life (wealth, education, longevity, etc.) has lead to a decrease in population.
I'm not sure that holds. Do you mean that a higher quality of life leads to a decrease in fertility rate? It's obviously true that population booms eventually end, and historically large ones are usually followed by contraction as a correction. But overall those things you list result in an increase of population, it simply hits a ceiling and stabilizes. We just had the largest population boom in observable (more than recorded!) history, the industrial revolution dwarfs the agricultural one. It stands to reason we should see a pretty hefty population contraction which tapers into a very mild amount of growth until we raise the population ceiling once again.
I don't think he's particularly right that low fertility rates are caused by "marriage for love". It's more like many places with low fertility rates are currently correcting for overly explosive growth experienced in recent history. Other places are only just now having their local population booms, or correcting for other population effects (like war.) It's very unlikely we will contract more than a few billion over the next couple hundred years. Keep in mind the industrial revolution is what caused us to rocket into the billions in the first place. For reference the upper bound estimated population of the 10th century is 400 million, and the upper bound of the 17th is about 500 million. 25% global growth over 700 years. The last 300 years is something like 1700%.
Almost all rhetoric about birth rates never accounts for any of this. So again, independent variables.
> many places with low fertility rates are currently correcting for overly explosive growth experienced in recent history
Huh? Korea is "correcting" for past growth by having 0.8 children per woman? i.e. less than half the replacement rate? Such a wild swing in fertility, when it swings below replacement, solves zero problems while creating existential ones, so I don't see how anyone can call it a 'correction' as though it is helping to 'balance out' something.
The West is literally killing itself off with this, not because it's necessarily so bad that we might simply have fewer people in a given country in 50 years, that certainly sounds fine if it the remaining population were still in a healthy ratio of young to old. But that's not how it works. Populations age of course, and fertility rates crashing the way they have means the 45-year-olds who are so plentiful today but had 0-1 kids will be 70 in 25 years and there will be almost no working people to pay for their expensive healthcare and living expenses.
And yes, the low fertility rates are caused by our 2-income-standard economic system + unaffordability (countries are doing nothing to support people at a healthy childbearing age to start families).
While women in other cultures, or women of 1950 may have felt they had no choice to have a career, women in the West today don't feel they even have a choice to even have kids, at 22, which physiologically is a great age to do it, or sometimes ever. Why? Because, for instance in the US, at 22 you likely have high 5-figures of student loan debt and shaky job prospects, zero guarantee of paid family leave (maybe a temporary pittance is provided in some states in some circumstances), and a one-income family is not able to compete for scarce expensive housing.
I'm not saying this is black and white, rather I'm saying that our enlightened Western system (A) has downsides too, (B) robs people of choice in another way, and (C) is so unsustainable that no matter what you think, our societies inevitably will fail - in large part because of this issue.
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