The invisible guardrails are a test run for the invisible enshittification. Just wait til they start dialing down ability to better absorb peak demand or simply to have more profitable inference
I doubt it. Companies that have moved to the cloud are already trusting the cloud with their IP. You can rent time on a high end Nvidia system from various clouds. OpEx means there's no write down in three/five years as that system goes out of date so it would only make sense if the performance/$ is there, or the company is highly protective of their IP and doesn't trust the cloud, at which point they're not on the cloud anyway.
My observation is that the true believers really don't want to think of models as an inert pile of weights. There's some mysticism attached to imagining it's the ship's computer from Star Trek, HAL-9000 or C-3PO. A file loaded into memory and executed over is just so... _pedestrian_.
Canonically, the Star Trek computers have pretty much always been just computers, not themselves sentient because the software running on them just isn't.
I'm still not sure if HAL-9000 was supposed to be conscious or just an interesting plot device with a persona as superficial as LLMs are dismissed as today.
LLMs could definitely play the part of all three of your examples, given the flaws they showed on-screen. Could even do a decent approximation of Data (though perhaps not Lore without some jailbreaking).
Still weird that even the best of them isn't really ready to be KITT.
I have to show people extremely zoomed-in screenshots of how $VENDOR default monospaced fonts get rendered compared to Terminus at the correct size in order for them to understand my pain. The hinting is just blurry bleh.
These days, because I am also old, I want a comparatively large pixel-perfect font. I've yet to find a good one but haven't looked much beyond Terminus honestly. Maybe I can render it an acceptable integer multiple without it being too large?
For Linux and *BSD, UW ttyp0 (v2.1) goes up to 18x40px. Greybeard is essentially UW ttyp0 ported to Windows, but since it's based on UW ttyp0 v1.3, the largest bitmap size is only 11x22px.
Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected!
If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.
> too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers
You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.
What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.
I always thought a company like Railway would be an Oxide customer. But Railway is building their own servers in their own datacenters. So I am really curious who is small enough to buy Oxide, but large enough to need Oxide?
The same sorts of customers that SGI used to sell to in the pre-cloud era. DoD. Oil and gas. Finance.
People with deep pockets and good reasons to want to keep certain parts of their infra very close to home. Also the kind of people that expect very highly skilled people to show up and get their in-house app running.
(I was an SGI HPC customer once. I still miss the old SGI. Sigh.)
Of topic, but where the hell did Nutanix come from? I've never heard of them until recently and all of a sudden, they are being marketed as a serious competitor to VMware etc.
They have been around for a long time and were one of the first to have a hyper-converged solution where all storage in the nodes is pooled and usable by any node. They also have their own hypervisor. You can get 4 nodes per 2U so pretty dense. In the datacenter my company uses a company had dozens of Nutanix boxes sitting in the hallway for months before they finally installed them. They are pretty notoriously expensive so only really used by companies with big IT budgets.
They have been around for nearly 20 years. I viewed them as an also-ran until Broadcom decided they didn’t need any of us as VMware customers anymore. Now Nutanix seems like a viable path for on-prem VM workloads that need a new home for those who don’t want to part with an arm and a leg on licensing but can’t move to public cloud either. I’m not sure how much of that market Oxide can capture. Not sure Nutanix is still doing the hyperconverged hardware themselves anymore.
I've been curious about Oxide for a year or two without fully understanding their product. People talking about the "hyperconverged" market in this thread gave me an understanding for the first time.
Given this, can you help me understand in what ways they are different?
When I went to the Nutanix website yesterday, the link showed that'd I'd previously visited them (not a surprise, I look up lots of things I see mentioned in discussions) but their website does an extremely poor job of explaining their business to someone who lacks foundational understanding, even once I'd started reading about "hyperconverged" just before.
If you want to KNOW the chain of custody for all of your OS and software, from the bootloader to the switch chip, and you want to run this virtualization platform airgapped, buying at rack-scale, you want Oxide. They are making basically everything in-house. That's government, energy, finance, etc. Customers that need descretion, security, performance, and something that works very reliably in a high-trust environment, with a pretty high level of performance.
If you need a basic "vm platform", VMware, Proxmox, Nutanix, etc. all fit the bill with varying levels of feature and cost. Nutanix has also been making some fairly solid kubernetes plays, which is nice on hyperconverged infrastructure.
Then if you need a container platform, you go the opposite direction - Kubernetes/OpenShift and run your VMs from your container platform instead of running your containers from your VM platform.
As far as "hyperconverged"...
"Traditionally" with something like VMware, you ran a 3-tier infrastructure: compute, a storage array, and network switching. If you needed to expand compute, you just threw in another 1U-4U on the shelf. Then you wire it up to the switch, provision the network to it, provision the storage, add it to the cluster, etc. This model has some limitations but it scales fairly well with mid-level performance. Those storage arrays can be expensive though!
As far as "hyperconverged", you get bigger boxes with better integration. One-click firmware upgrades for the hardware fleet, if desired. Add a node, it gets discovered, automatically provisions to the rest of the configuration options you've set. The network switching fabric is built into the box, as is the storage. This model brings everything local (with a certain amount of local redundancy in the hardware itself), which makes many workloads blazing fast. You may still on occasion need to connect to massive storage arrays somewhere if you have very large datasets, but it really depends on the application workloads your organization runs. Hyperconverged doesn't scale compute as cheaply, but in return you get much faster performance.
theyve been marketed as a serious competitor to vmware for 15 years. their sales reps mightve just not found you until recently. but we did a poc with them 10 years ago and i dont believe much has changed since
bcantrill gave a great talk many years ago about compute-data locality. would be nice to know if those ideas panned out for some customers, but it seems the world has by-and-large continued to schlep data back and forth.
it's too bad too. The concepts behind Manta were such a great idea. I still want tools that combine traditional unix pipes with services that can map-reduce over a big farm of hyperconverged compute/storage. I'm somewhat surprised that the kubernetes/cncf-adjacent world didn't reinvent it.
Random assortment of projects as time allows with the $JOB.
- Prototyping a cute little SSH-based sorta-BBS, inspired by the Spring '83 protocol, but terminal-centric rather than web-based. It's called Winter '78, and if we get another Great Blizzard this year, I'll be able to make some progress on it!
- Another prototype, for an experimental HPC-ish batch system. Using distributed Erlang for the control plane, and doing a lot of the heavy lifting with systemd transient units. Very much inspired by HTCondor as well as Joyent's (RIP to a real one) Manta.
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