Thanks for elaborating. I totally agree with you. I wasn't implying that funding the LHC itself was misguided, for the good reasons you articulate so well.
I know what you mean. I was recently at lunch at a (non-physics) tech conference and an ex-physicist (now a systems developer) sitting next to me responded the same.
I think (physicists in the room, please correct me if I'm making assumptions here) this is a classic "falsification" trap. Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen. The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.
> felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact
Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has largely nothing to show for after spending billions of public money. Some particle physicists have even predicted so-called "unparticles", which almost sounds like trolling!)
I see, fair point. Sorry for taking a dig at you. Please know that I do appreciate a lot of work that you do. I was just worried for a moment when just reading that bit.
> No mention of the fact that Ollama is about 1000x easier to use.
The point of the article is not to expound on how user-friendly "Ollama" is. It's about exposing the deception and shameful moral low ground they took.
You seem to see a "pretty strong case" from a bombastic press release.
Don't get me wrong, I do know the reality has changed. Even Greg K-H, the Linux stable maintainer, did recently note[1] that it's not funny any more:
"Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality," he said. "It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us."
... "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now."
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I agree that an antidote to the obnoxious hype is to pay attention to the actual capabilities and data. But let's not get too carried away.
When in the middle of a group text-chat, someone replied with AI-generated blather. It was dead-clear with the usual sterile vocab, structured buzzphrases, and other LLM "tells".
I politely called him out and asked to use his own voice. In public he insisted that it was his voice and that he used AI only for "formatting". But in private he admits that he created a "gem to assist with multicultural comms", which generated the text. He claims he did it because "not everyone can take the native American English well". A load of bovine manure. I nicely told him to cut this crap and just write as it comes to him. (Basic spell- and grammar-check is fine.)
Well said. Some people are misparsing your core point here.
Skrebbel is largely referring to the OSS projects that need people to do consitent grunt work like shipping predictable releases, stable branch maintenance, backporting security fixes, etc. This is the kind of work maintains that the internet's infrastructure.
> I've found this fails on my 16 GB P550 Megrez with swap disabled but works quickly and uses maybe 50 or 100 MB of swap if I enable it.
I see, I don't have a Megrez at my desk, only in the build system. I only have P550 as my "workhorse".
PS: I made a typo above - the P550 I was referring to was the SiFive "HiFive Premier P550". But based on your HN profile text, you must've guessed it as much :)
I'm tickled pink to read this! I very much support this move. HN is one of the few internet forums I use. It'd be awful to see this riddled by bot spew.
This rule will atleast partly stem the danger of HN getting turned into what dang calls a "scorched earth" situation.
Great point; I only know about MIPS legacy vaguely. As you imply, don't listen to the "hype-sters" but pay attention to what silicon is being produced.
A couple of corrections (the blog-post is by a colleague, but I'm not speaking for Marcin! :))
First, we do have a recent 'binutils' build[1] with test-suites in 67 minutes (it was on Milk-V "Megrez") in the Fedora RISC-V build system. This is a non-trivial improvement over the 143-minute build time reported in the blog.
Second, the current fastest development machine is not Banana Pi BPI-F3. If we consider what is reasonably accessible today, it is SiFive "HiFive P550" (P550 for short) and an upcoming UltraRISC "DP1000", we have access to an eval board. And as noted elsewhere in this thread, in "several months" some RVA23-based machines should be available. (RVA23 == the latest ISA spec).
FWIW, our FOSDEM talk from earlier this year, "Fedora on RISC-V: state of the arch"[1], gives an overview of the hardware situation. It also has a couple of related poorman's benchmarks (an 'xz' compression test and a 'binutils' build without the test-suite on the above two boards -- that's what I could manage with the time I had).
Edit: Marcin's RISC-V test was done on StarFive "Vision Five 2". This small board has its strengths (upstreamed drivers), but it is not known for its speed!
On benchmarks, for more precision details, I recommend the RISC-V Vector (RVV) benchmarks[1], maintained by Olaf Bernsten. He only covers the Vector stuff, but with great depth.
Arm had 40 years to be where it is today. RISC-V is 15 years old. Some more patience is warranted.
Assuming they will keep their word, later this year Tenstorrent is supposed to ship their RVA23-based server development platform[1]. They announced[2] it at the last year's NA RISC-V Summit. Let's see.
The ball is in the court of hardware vendors to cook some high-end silicon.