I didn't do the measurment and it's been a while so it's possible I misremembered the temperature delta, or maybe it was degrees F. It was about a 2-3 square meter sheet and it made about a liter of water overnight.
I studied digital media in uni. But I had been using linux since about 1999.
I wanted to be a compositor, but failed the rotoscoping test at the company I was working at. So I fell back on my technical skills, and became an infra engineer. I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it.
> I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it.
I don't think Generative AI will make entire industries disappear, but rather make people within those industries do more with less. Seeing as you somewhat see what future of the industry is, and assuming you're right, it puts you in a good position to gain the skills you think will be sought after. You have the technical skills too seemingly. Just an idea, I'm not working in either areas so take it with a bit of salt I suppose.
Hi OP, this looks super cool. I remember hearing about this (https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) many years ago but have never done it.
Curious, what are the prerequisites for this? Do I have to know about how kernels work? How memory management, protection rings or processes are queued? Some I'd like to definitely learn about.
LFS is about building a Linux distribution from scratch (i.e. using the Linux kernel.)
The book in question is about how to build your own operating system (i.e. a non-Linux) kernel from scratch.
> We'll implement basic context switching, paging, user mode, a command-line shell, a disk device driver, and file read/write operations in C. Sounds like a lot, however, it's only 1,000 lines of code!
Thank you! If you've written some programs (ideally in C), you're good to go. You might stuck on some concepts, but you can learn one by one. IMO, implementing it makes you to understand the concepts more deeply, and learn more that you won't notice when you just read textbooks.
Also, because the implementation in this book is very naive, it would stimulate your curiosity.
Do you have a good resource for learning what kinds of hardware can run what kinds of models locally? Benchmarks, etc?
I'm also trying to tie together different hardware specs to model performance, whether that's training or inference. Like how does memory, VRAM, memory bandwidth, GPU cores, etc. all play into this. Know of any good resources? Oddly enough I might be best off asking an LLM.
I tested ollama with 7600XT at work and the mentioned 7900XTX. Both run fine with their VRAM limitations. So you can just switch between different quantization of llama 3.1 or the vast amount of different models at https://ollama.com/search
To prevent custom implementations is recommended to get a Nvidia card. Minimum 3080 to get some results. But if you want video you should go for either 4090 or 5090. ComfUI is a popular interface which you can use for graphical stuff. Images and videos. Local text models I would recommend to use the Misty app. Basically a wrapper and downloader for various models. Tons of youtube videos on how to achieve stuff.
I am really surprised. I would have guessed that a Nobel Prize would be awarded to advancements in the field itself. Not for inspirations from it or to tools that led to advancements. Although as I write this I'm sure there have been several prizes awarded to scientists / engineers who have developed tools to advance physics. Like radio astronomy? Still surprised though.
Some other recent cases of the prize being given to an engineering contribution:
- 2018 was for chirped pulse amplification, which is most commonly used in medicine (LASIK surgery for example)
- 2014 was for basically for LED lights
- 2010 was for a method for producing graphene
- 2009 was for both charge-coupled device, which is a component for digital imaging (including regular consumer digital cameras), and fibre-optic cables
Well yeah, so are neural nets. I just meant that these are engineering accomplishments, not scientific per se. Of course experimental science will often take advantage of cutting edge technology, including from computer science.
NNs have absolutely revolutionized systems biology (itself a John Hopfield joint, and the AlphaFold team are reasonably likely to get a Nobel for medicine and physiology, possibly as soon as 'this year') and are becoming relevant in all kinds of weird parts of solid-state physics (trained functionals for DFT, eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64619-8).
The idea that academic disciplines are in any way isolated from each other is nonsense. Machine learning is computer science; it's also information theory; that means it's thermodynamics, which means it's physics. (Or, rather, it can be understood properly through all of these lenses).
John Hopfield himself has written about this; he views his work as physics because _it is performed from the viewpoint of a physicist_. Disciplines are subjective, not objective, phenomena.
My personal theory is that Demis and John will win the Chemistry prize for AlphaFold this year and that they decided to also award this one to help bolster the idea that ML is making fundamental improvements in academic science.
I would prefer if there was an actual Nobel Prize for Mathematics (not sure if the Fields would become that, or a new prize created).
I did have a similar thought, but awarding a prize to AF this year would be a very bold move, given how things went today. Right folks, we've demoralized all the physicists today, tomorrow we can do the same for the chemists!
To be perfectly honest, I'm not really sure the physics community being demoralized by this prize award is a really negative thing. I think many aspects of HEP and other areas have stagnated, requiring exponentially more money for marginal gains (I don't have a problem with LIGO or other large projects, but "we found another high energy particle consistent with the standard models" not so much). Perhaps this prize will give the community a shot in the arm to move away from "safe but boring".
"Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code."
Hadn't seen that. Very complementary. We don't address staying up to date or pull in community value metrics (other than total citations). It's a somewhat different goal to broadly gather emerging ideas and stay informed.
I'm really curious - how will this affect sites that monetize off of affiliate links and ads? It seems to me that AI summarization and overview will deter, at the minimum reduce, the number of page clicks and traffic to sites that are producing information.
I am surprised and not surprised to see this here. I often see themes of burnout, wanting to get back to nature, existential questions surrounding tech and similar here on HN.
I took a permaculture class earlier this year, after having researched it on the sidelines for a few years. It started from looking at sustainability, agriculture, homesteading (wanting to "leave it all behind") and blossomed into a wonderful learning experience about a philosophy where I felt a little more at home. It was great. It introduced me to a few really cool friends whose values largely aligned with mine. Anyone interested in this, please feel free to reach out.
I don't think it has necessarily to do with burnout, or even with the more general notion "city-dwellers feel detached from nature so they romanticize it". Apart from that, there is also the entrepreneurial spirit (as well as the hacker spirit) of wanting to do things yourself, either because you think you can do better or because you want to decrease your reliance on others. And those are very well represented here.
I agree with the entrepreneurial DIYer aspect of it. But I do think sitting in front of screens all day screams for a longing for nature.
Also I think there might a counterculture aspect to it, which ties in to your reliance point. Growing your own food is one of the most subversive thing you can do. Get solar and a few other things, and you're completely self-reliant.
It allows one to take a shortcut to the fisherman life, in the fisherman and the banker story.
What course did you take, and where, if I may be so intrusive… you did mention to “reach out” if interested! I also arrived at being fascinated by the concept by ideas of sustainability and “getting away from it all”.
Search for people running PDC's - Permaculture Design Courses - in your area. These are variably well monitored / established syllabus, usually run for 5 days or so. I'm sure there's one-day intro courses, but I suspect you'd get a lot more variability, and obviously a lot less value.
Most practicing permaculturists I've bumped into tend to eschew the woo, as it were, but you may want to validate that before signing up to any particular course. (These branches of study can attract certain types of people.)
I did a PDC here in Sydney AU about 15 years ago, and like GP I found it a hugely interesting and engaging process. (The one I went to was run by a lass who had studied under Bill Mollison, which was kind of funky, but as a rule the material covered is much more practical, rational, etc - than deferential / by association to the two guys that kicked it off.)
