Greg's recent activity
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Comment on Why do so many people think US President Donald Trump is good? in ~society
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Comment on In 1975, Swedish socialists and unions devised a program to democratically seize the means of production, but terrified elites dismantled it in ~humanities.history
Greg (edited )Link ParentTaxes are also a way of forcing companies to divest a portion of their profits to the government, so in theory that part shouldn’t be too controversial - or at least no more than the amount people...Taxes are also a way of forcing companies to divest a portion of their profits to the government, so in theory that part shouldn’t be too controversial - or at least no more than the amount people currently grumble about tax rates.
It does sound like there’s a bit of nuance because the companies would be paying those taxes directly in the form of shares, rather than in cash that’s then used to buy shares; the two are functionally identical in a lot of cases, but it does make a conceptual difference because the former is diluting existing ownership whereas the latter is transferring it.
were I wanting to start a company I would think twice about it since the more successful I was, the more I'd lose control
Would you really, though? This doesn’t sound like any more of a loss of control than publicly listing on the stock market, and pretty much every founder I’ve met sees that as an absolute goal and potential endpoint rather than something to be feared. Frankly I think they should be more worried the consequences of an IPO, actually, but most I’ve known aren’t.
Like you say, it probably wouldn’t fly, certainly not in the US - but it does seem like even as someone open to the idea you’re maybe following some of that very ingrained narrative about it being scary when I don’t think it actually is.
Additionally, how could one state make this work in our modern global economy?
That’s arguably the easiest part, because it only needs to apply to the legal entities operating in your country. We already handle stock ownership internationally with very little difficulty, and taxation internationally with moderate difficulty, so this doesn’t seem like it’d introduce anything outside those existing structures. It just happens to be the government that’s the owner of the stock in this case.
[Edit] Come to think of it, you just need to look at China’s approach to partial government ownership of private entities to see how it can play out even in big money modern global economics. Obviously they’re not doing it for Scandi-style workers’ rights reasons, but it’s a nice counter example to the US private market supremacy while still operating within the same global system.
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Comment on Data centers don't raise people's water bills in ~tech
Greg Link ParentNo worries! And for what it’s worth, since you do seem interested in the mechanics at play here: closed loop doesn’t necessarily imply sealed. Most indoor swimming pools are considered closed loop...No worries! And for what it’s worth, since you do seem interested in the mechanics at play here: closed loop doesn’t necessarily imply sealed. Most indoor swimming pools are considered closed loop systems even though they’re open to the air, for example, because the same water is continuously recirculated through.
Even when a loop is isolated from the outside environment, no seal is mechanically perfect. From the single-machine level upwards you need to consider the permeability of the tubing material to evaporation, the tightness of seals between components and at disconnection points, the possibility of loop contamination when adding/removing components for upgrades or maintenance, etc etc. and all of those concerns go up in proportion to the scale of the installation.
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Comment on Moser's Frame Shop: I am an AI hater in ~tech
Greg Link ParentWe're rapidly running towards the same problem with "AI" as the meme that goes along the lines of: You've at least said "LLM", which is a far more specific and useful term, but the article didn't...We're rapidly running towards the same problem with "AI" as the meme that goes along the lines of:
Scandinavia isn't socialist, they're democratic capitalist economies with strong regulation
Cool, can we implement similar regulations?
No, that's socialism.You've at least said "LLM", which is a far more specific and useful term, but the article didn't - and most don't. On one side of the issue you've got companies trying to wedge everything even tangentially ML-related under the banner of AI, on the other you've got the layman's understanding of AI == ChatGPT, which also informs how they parse all the news stories about medical diagnostic "AI" and AlphaFold and whatever else. And on top of that you've got non-ML-related companies wedging simplistic chatbot APIs where they absolutely don't need to be just so they can tell their investors they're "using AI" too.
Throwing up our hands and saying "AI bad" is less likely to make a dent in OpenAI and more likely to blow back on the unequivocally useful and valuable ML technologies that would otherwise be too technical to reach the public eye at all.
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Comment on Data centers don't raise people's water bills in ~tech
Greg Link ParentI think you're talking about different things without realising: the articles you mentioned are comparing closed loop to open loop/evaporative cooling systems, so the advantage of the newer...I think you're talking about different things without realising: the articles you mentioned are comparing closed loop to open loop/evaporative cooling systems, so the advantage of the newer systems is they're "filled once" and then recirculate rather than being designed to have a continuous inflow and outflow. It's not implying they don't need to be topped up, just that they don't need the majority of the volume continually replaced.
@Drewbahr is saying that even in a closed loop system, a 0.01% loss rate adds up to a surprisingly large amount of water usage. The articles aren't about closing off that last 0.01%, they're about moving to a system that does only lose fractions of a percentage point rather than being deliberately designed to blast water in one side and out the other (which also may not actually be as bad as it sounds, depending on location and water source - you can potentially look at it as solar powered distillation if you're somewhere with abundant rain; but I wouldn't trust financial incentives to constrain its use to only the few places where that's true).
I was interested in numbers, so I found this Microsoft report comparing water use for cooling. The figures range from 2.8 - 0.02 L/kWh, and a large datacenter can draw 100MW - multiplying up and converting units gives 2,400,000 kWh/day, so that's an upper bound of about 6.7 million litres (1.8 million US gallons) per day, and a lower bound of 48,000 litres (12,700 US gallons) per day.
Given that there are plenty of datacenters significantly smaller than 100MW (an "edge" datacenter, which is more likely to be near a populated area, could easily be as little as 10MW), and we're both just doing quick back of the envelope numbers to get the order of magnitude anyway, that lower bound is pretty well in agreement with the 1,440 gallons/day estimate above.
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Comment on What's your current PC wallpaper? in ~tech
Greg LinkOne of the OS defaults. It’ll end up behind 15+ layers of stacked application windows within an hour and I won’t see it for months at a time, so for me it’s not worth more than the 20 seconds of...One of the OS defaults. It’ll end up behind 15+ layers of stacked application windows within an hour and I won’t see it for months at a time, so for me it’s not worth more than the 20 seconds of effort to pick one from the gallery.
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Comment on Europe's rich are watching Norway's election debate on wealth taxes – changes to taxation are at the heart of the centre-right's attempts to retake power in ~society
Greg Link ParentAll good points, and I think the analogy is probably the crux of where we’re seeing things differently: to me, the people with significant wealth are the ones who bought food from the grocery...All good points, and I think the analogy is probably the crux of where we’re seeing things differently: to me, the people with significant wealth are the ones who bought food from the grocery store and let it rot, rather than the ones who didn’t buy at all.
The Musks and Bezoses and Zuckerbergs of the world control vast amounts of money because they have very consciously chosen to acquire as much as humanly possible. I see it as an active choice to hoard rather than a passive one to not spend.
Inherited wealth and nation-state wealth make for more nuanced questions, and fairly interesting ones at that, but it’s late where I am so I’m going to stick with the base case for now. There’s more than enough money controlled by individuals who’ve acquired it in their own lifetimes for that group alone to be significant.
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Comment on Europe's rich are watching Norway's election debate on wealth taxes – changes to taxation are at the heart of the centre-right's attempts to retake power in ~society
Greg Link ParentThat’s a pretty narrow semantic argument, no? A life lost to artificial scarcity is a life wasted as far as I’m concerned, even if the root cause does indeed more properly fit the definition of...You could also blame people who have a lot of power to do good in the world and don't do anything useful, but that's opportunity cost, not waste.
That’s a pretty narrow semantic argument, no? A life lost to artificial scarcity is a life wasted as far as I’m concerned, even if the root cause does indeed more properly fit the definition of opportunity cost.
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Comment on AI is a mass-delusion event (gifted link) in ~tech
Greg Link ParentEven at the billionaire scale, when money “goes away” that just means faith in the collective hallucination that it existed has been shaken. In the vast majority of cases there’s nothing actually...Even at the billionaire scale, when money “goes away” that just means faith in the collective hallucination that it existed has been shaken. In the vast majority of cases there’s nothing actually stopping people from agreeing to carry on just as they did the day before if they wanted to.
For whatever reason people seem to have convinced themselves that the economy is a real, independent thing rather than just a means of modulating the society-level trust required for people to do things. Even worse, a lot of people also seem to believe economic abstractions have value in and of themselves, rather than having value only as far as they serve society.
It’s always been absolutely wild to me how few people ever seem to question this. If the abstraction says your job was worth doing yesterday but not today, maybe the abstraction is unhelpful? If the abstraction says there’s always money but you can’t have it, maybe the abstraction is unhelpful? But even pointing out that it is an abstraction falls on deaf ears.
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Comment on AI is a mass-delusion event (gifted link) in ~tech
Greg Link ParentMakes me wonder if AMD are going to come out with an extremely high memory config for Strix Halo - NVIDIA won’t do it because they’re worried about cannibalising their datacenter market, but...Makes me wonder if AMD are going to come out with an extremely high memory config for Strix Halo - NVIDIA won’t do it because they’re worried about cannibalising their datacenter market, but that’s much less of an issue for AMD’s GPUs and they could probably undercut Apple by half at 512GB.
Could make for an interesting option as a locally hosted appliance for SMEs.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Greg Link ParentThat’s really interesting stuff - thanks for sharing!That’s really interesting stuff - thanks for sharing!
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Greg Link ParentSo this was… oof, around 15 years ago now, but I was working with various bits of existing QCD simulation code looking at compute efficiency, accuracy, and applicability to the LHC results that...So this was… oof, around 15 years ago now, but I was working with various bits of existing QCD simulation code looking at compute efficiency, accuracy, and applicability to the LHC results that were just starting to be generated.
Honestly I’m way out of date with the field now - one of the big things I learned was that I’ve got a much better aptitude for the computational part than the physics part, especially porting stuff to those early CUDA builds, so that’s been the common thread in what I’ve worked on since, but it still made me smile seeing someone talk about such similar stuff out in the wild!
Sounds like the wave of neural net development in the last few years has been an interesting one, from what you were saying above. Big shifts in the work you’re doing, or is it still more a question of waiting to see if it actually does the job you need?
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Greg Link ParentOh shit, I came here to ramble about scientific ML and the first reply is the same topic I did my master's on! I have nothing meaningful to add but I couldn't resist acknowledging it...Oh shit, I came here to ramble about scientific ML and the first reply is the same topic I did my master's on! I have nothing meaningful to add but I couldn't resist acknowledging it...
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentI'm going to say what I've found myself saying a lot in the last few months: it's a problem of terminology. I don't think you're wrong per se (sorry @Adys, but I think that framing was unhelpfully...I'm going to say what I've found myself saying a lot in the last few months: it's a problem of terminology.
I don't think you're wrong per se (sorry @Adys, but I think that framing was unhelpfully harsh), but I do think the two of you are talking about different things under the same fuzzy definition that people are calling "AI".
I'm not aware of any physical science work specifically using LLM chatbots or agents right now - there might well be some early research out there, but I haven't seen anything significant - but scientific models absolutely are using the same technological advancements and infrastructure as LLMs. Transformers, state space models, diffusion models, hell even just the renewed enthusiasm for development on pytorch - some advancements came from the scientific world and worked their way into LLMs, some came from OpenAI and Anthropic and DeepSeek and NVIDIA and found their way back into scientific work. In both cases the acceleration of development in the last few years has been vast, and genuinely represented an enormous leap forward in capability.
So no, we're not asking ChatGPT for protein folding suggestions, but we are building ChatGPT and AlphaFold as part of the same tech tree. Whether or not that's part of the "AI" world comes down to what you're attaching the word AI to, and people are spending a lot of time talking past each other without realising because they're using different meanings. Think of what a person might mean by "internet" (really the web, really just TikTok and Instagram) vs "internet" (fundamental global infrastructure comprised of a decentralised petabit-scale fiber and satellite mesh capable of linking almost any two devices on the planet in milliseconds).
[Edit] Typos
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Comment on How can we fix UK universities? in ~life
Greg LinkI think a very large part of it is too many students. How many chose to go to university because they were curious and motivated to explore their subject, compared to those who went because a...- Exemplary
The problem, it seems to me, is that the purpose of university is to educate, yet many who graduate university do not display the level of education, understanding and intelligence we would expect them to have achieved after investing at least three years of their life and tens of thousands of pounds in their education. This is not a crisis of too many students, but of a lack of quality in teaching.
I think a very large part of it is too many students. How many chose to go to university because they were curious and motivated to explore their subject, compared to those who went because a degree certificate (not the education of a degree, just the box-ticking exercise of having one) is a requirement for most jobs? Or because not going to university is seen as some level of failure? Or even just because it’s seen as the default next step and they didn’t question it?
It’s a delicate question bound up in issues of elitism, because going to university is broadly seen as a positive - so anything that makes it more targeted is inherently seen as exclusionary. Actually is exclusionary, given the current approach to employment requirements. Stack that with the fact that we’ve got a millennium of class hierarchy and a modern wealth hierarchy to deal with and it’s fair that people would question how much any targeting actually happened on merit.
But imagine a totally clean slate, imagine no inherent barrier to access and imagine that the only job really requiring a degree is academia itself, in all its underpaid but curiosity-satiating glory. Then take the attitude that it sounds like you largely already have (and that I very strongly have too), which is that university isn’t job training nor qualification, but education for its own sake. How many people choose to go to university in that world? 20%? Maybe 30?
And I think that’s what it boils down to, in my eyes: for university to be a place of education first and foremost it needs to be self-selecting down to the people who actually want that. And I truly don’t think that we navel-gazing, mildly-to-extremely-obsessive, knowledge-for-its-own-sake-even-above-practicality-or-utility types actually make up that big a part of the population.
So, forcing myself to be practical for a second: I don’t think the toothpaste can go back in the tube now. The idea of a lot of people going to university, and university being somewhat necessary as job training, is too ingrained to reverse at this point. We’ve got no choice but to lean into that, implement better funding models, and do so with our eyes open: we’re funding job training and general extended-secondary classes for a plurality or majority of the population, and “university” is now the commonly accepted name for it. It’d be near impossible to create a parallel job training system now without it being seen as less prestigious, even if that were totally unjust, so let’s just allow university to be what it is for most people and stop pretending. Let’s make the access, the funding model, and the structure reflect the purpose it’s actually serving.
What we can create in parallel is something for us weirdos. Something structured for exploration of knowledge and academia-track learning rather than career building. I think that it’d be a lot easier to carve that out into something new than it would be to convince tens of millions of people to change their perception of what university is for and how it relates to their lives.
Or maybe I’ve just spent far too many words reinventing the distinction between a first degree and a PhD, I don’t know. But I stand by the idea that we need to recognise what a first degree actually is to the vast majority, rather than continuing to pretend it’s something it isn’t.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Greg Link ParentIf it's not, then you and I find ourselves in a very similar boat - and right now I'm about a third of a career deep into feeling out that balance whilst trying to avoid getting steamrolled by...If it's not, then you and I find ourselves in a very similar boat - and right now I'm about a third of a career deep into feeling out that balance whilst trying to avoid getting steamrolled by soulless profiteers. I wouldn't say I've truly found it, but I haven't failed yet either.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Greg Link ParentSo yeah, doomed. I don’t want to be glib, because I share a lot of the same feelings and I don’t really know if I believe things will get better in our lifetimes or if I’m just deluding myself...So yeah, doomed. I don’t want to be glib, because I share a lot of the same feelings and I don’t really know if I believe things will get better in our lifetimes or if I’m just deluding myself because I can’t fully deal with the likelihood that it won’t.
But it’s not the tech that’s doing that, it’s all the other problems you’ve identified. I guess I just hold on to advancing science, advancing technology, as something meaningful and exciting for its own sake in a world that’s otherwise going to shit.
And for what it’s worth, I didn’t mean that tech of any kind will do (significant) good in the face of oppressive power structures co-opting it to do harm. I also used to believe that and have since had the idealism burned away. I just meant that since the tech isn’t the problem either way, it’s a nice tool to have available to us if we can take back control of the power structures.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Greg Link ParentThat seems like another way of saying we’re already doomed? I’m not even entirely sure I disagree about that, to be honest, but if technological advancement is just going to be co-opted in a way...That seems like another way of saying we’re already doomed? I’m not even entirely sure I disagree about that, to be honest, but if technological advancement is just going to be co-opted in a way that makes life worse, the only real answer is to fix the root problem or to stop advancing. And if we don’t have the power to stop people co-opting that progress for harm, we don’t have the power to stop the progress happening either.
So we either find a way to take back control - at which point the tech can be used for good anyway - or we’re toast.
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Comment on Light-field displays offer true, focusable depth perception in ~tech
Greg LinkThis just looks like really cool tech! No stereoscopic trickery, it’s true depth of field that allows your eye (or a camera, as shown in the video) to mechanically focus on different objects at...This just looks like really cool tech! No stereoscopic trickery, it’s true depth of field that allows your eye (or a camera, as shown in the video) to mechanically focus on different objects at different distances within the same displayed scene. The display itself seems to be real and working, although not yet integrated into any production devices.
I always thought light-field cameras were a fascinating idea, so it’s exciting to see the same tech coming back in the other direction. Makes me wonder if some of the original patents from that first time around might have expired, actually.
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Light-field displays offer true, focusable depth perception
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I’ve seen a lot of takes in this vein, and I could stomach them a little more in the pre-Trump Republican years when there was still some vaguely plausible veneer of disagreement on policy, false though it was.
But I don’t see how we can be expected to accept that outright reality denial on major issues, incredibly heavily skewed to one side of the political spectrum, can just be bridged with a smile and an understanding that we’re all alike in our failings really. I don’t see how we can look at people buying fucking merchandise for prison camps and pretend they’re justified in their behaviour. I don’t see how knowingly supporting a party that tears the rule of law to shreds while kidnapping people in the street can be forgiven.
Because you know what, fuck it: the people supporting those things are worse than the people opposing them. And I feel like I’m going crazy reading the whole “oh, but you might have been one of them if your life played out differently, it’s not productive to just write them off” narrative.
It’s a counterfactual, there’s no way to know for sure how I’d act if x or y or z had been different - but what am “I” but the product of my biology and my experiences? The “I” that exists wouldn’t have supported slavery, wouldn’t have supported the nazis, and won’t support the growing fascist movements that we’re dealing with now. So why are we tiptoeing around the fact that those who do are choosing to do harm?
I’m flawed in a million ways, sure, but I do not and will not accept that I’m flawed “in the exact same ways” as someone who can watch what ICE are doing right now and feel anything but disgust. Call me arrogant or misguided or whatever else for this whole rant if you like, but acting as if we’re all fundamentally the same really just feels disingenuous and performative to me.