Well.. Some rocks are definitely shiney. It would be interesting to see if monkeys have any affinity for well polished rocks with pretty colors. Humans do like them, maybe not as much as crystals but they're nice nonetheless.
While the ancient Romans liked transparent crystals, especially emeralds and beryls, they were not the most valued gems.
The most valued gems in Ancient Rome were the higher-quality varieties of noble opals and pearls, which are not transparent, but which show a variable play of colors, depending on the ambient light and on the angle of sight.
I don't think there are any fundamental bottlenecks here. There's more scheduling overhead when you have a hundred processes on a single core than if you have a hundred processes on one hundred cores.
The bottlenecks are pretty much hardware-related - thermal, power, memory and other I/O. Because of this, you presumably never get true "288 core" performance out of this - as in, it's not going to mine Bitcoin 288 as fast as a single core. Instead, you have less context-switching overhead with 288 tasks that need to do stuff intermittently, which is how most hardware ends up being used anyway.
Maybe no fundamental bottlenecks but it's easy to accidentally write software that doesn't scale as linearly as it should, e.g. if there's suddenly more lock contention than you were expecting, or in a more extreme case if you have something that's O(n^2) in time or space, where n is core count.
You're responding out of context. The parent was asking if there are bottlenecks specifically related to scheduling. I explicitly made the point that if there are bottlenecks, they're more likely related to memory.
The “system” should make it difficult to make mistakes.
But more importantly, why can’t both be at fault?
Having fact checkers review every articles you publish is a very low bar (as in you should not be in the business of publishing news if you can’t do it effectively).
If the Ars Technica editorial process requires assuming reporters don't fabricate quotes, then their process is inadequate. That's like a software company letting junior engineers release directly to production with just a spellcheck and no real process to catch errors. Major publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc. have a dedicated fact-checking department that is part of the process and needs to give the ok before any article is published. Why is their process so deficient by comparison? Why wasn't there any fact checking?
> That's like a software company letting junior engineers release directly to production
This person wasn’t a junior.
Editorial processes don’t actually check every single line of everything that is written. Journalists are trusted to report accurately. This person demonstrated they could not be trusted.
> Why wasn't there any fact checking?
Why do programmers ever let any bugs get to production if they have code review? Journalistic outlets do not fact check literally every line that is ever written before it goes to publication.
I agree completely, the people who are acting like it's Ars' responsibility to assume every sentence from their journalists are lies just aren't being realistic.
And even if Ars editors had caught the fabricated quote, what then? Obviously he should still be fired. Ars could probably benifit from better editors but even so this doesn't absolve the journalist of any of his own blame, for being the one responsible for introducing these fabrications in the first place.
I think this is the thing people are missing the most. Libel is an incredibly serious thing to do. Misstating a fact is a faux pas and a bad look but misquoting someone, especially if that article is taken as a hit piece, can cost hundreds of thousands or millions.
As someone coming from a family of editors and plugged into the publishing world, I think it would be really weird if that was your job. It's not an adversarial relationship. Your job is to pressure-test the arguments and the language, not to ask every time if maybe the person submitting the article didn't really write it, or didn't really interview the person they're claiming to have interviewed.
> A lapse in that non-hypothetically left me responsible, and legally liable, in situations like this.
It didn't. At worst, it exposed the publisher. And the publisher would have the defense that they had the right policies in place and that the misconduct lies with the journalist. Unless it could be shown that you knew about potential issues and still went through with it for political or financial gain, it's a nothingburger.
I clicked through the author's earlier stories when this first made waves. I obviously had no proof, but I was pretty certain that he's been using LLMs to generate stories for a good while.
When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I suspect they did, in the end?
Part of the problem with waste management is that we don't really put it in the soil. Your household garbage is mostly biodegradable, but if it ends up buried in a lined pit under tons of other garbage, even paper and orange peels will probably sit there for centuries. I'm not sure it makes much of a difference what kinds or quantities of plastic end up buried in the landfill.
I think the solutions here are more on the supply side than the landfill side. The question there is what are we trying to solve.
Energy use? Most alternative packaging materials are energy-intensive too, so it's less about plastic and more about retail and consumer preferences to have everything individually wrapped and packaged in bags or boxes with colorful graphics, nutrition information, and so on.
Environmental pollution? There, the problem is the plastic that doesn't end up in a landfill. Including our "recycling" shipped overseas.
It still biodegrades within the pit. In fact, that's actually a problem because it can generate fire starting temperatures! (Crazy I know) It's also a problem because a part of biodegrading is producing CO2 and CH4.
But I generally agree. The big issue here is we as a society have moved away from biodegradable packing and distribution. I get it, plastic prevents waste and mold. That's why we use it. It's also dirt cheap. It's a byproduct of oil refining (literally cheaper than water).
The ultimate solution to the plastic problem is making plastic more expensive, and the way to tackle that is by reducing oil consumption. Fortunately, that's sort of just naturally happening.
I'm not sure this analogy holds, for two reasons. First, even in the best case, chain-of-thought transcripts don't reliably tell you what the agent is doing and why it's doing it. Second, if you're dealing with a malicious actor, the transcript may have no relation to the code they're submitting.
The reason you don't have to look at assembly is that the .c file is essentially a 100% reliable and unambiguous spec of how the assembly will look like, and you will be generating the assembly from that .c file as a part of the build process anyway. I don't see how this works here. It adds a lengthy artifact without lessening the need for a code review. It may be useful for investigations in enterprise settings, but in the OSS ecosystem?...
Also, people using AI coding tools to submit patches to open-source projects are weirdly hesitant to disclose that.
I love that you use "fantastic creatures" to describe the world of Jansson, but "warriors" to describe Tolkien. Last time I checked, it had hobbits, dwarves, elves, talking trees... but none of that fantasy nonsense of Moomintrolls, right?
There are some seriously dark themes in there - and unlike in Tolkien, the protagonists are completely helpless when facing them. No epic battle in which magical eagles and a magical bear show up to save the day.
This looks like a vibe-coded promo for the service the parent is associated with, but what cracks me up is that not all this UI clutter is a part of the joke. For example, there are some incessant "chat with AI" bubbles that pop up in the bottom right corner that belong to the platform itself.
Almost any online service has plenty of competition, but it doesn't prevent enshittification once one of them proves that you can squeeze more revenue out of users and get away with it. Netflix charges you the same as five years ago, but you now get ads. You pay for Amazon Prime and get ads. You pay for Spotify, but they now serve you AI music from fake bands to avoid paying royalties to humans. The end game is that all consumer LLMs have ads in the free / cheap tier.
And as other folks are saying, the whole point is that it's a different type of an ad: it's not an annoying pop-up or an unskippable video. It's a subtle recommendation that you don't even notice. High conversion rates, little fatigue... getter than all the cool characters smoking in films a while back.
This appears to be an AI article designed to get clicks. I get that it says something we like, but you're literally upvoting someone for typing in a clickbaity prompt.
Why? Crystals are pretty, rocks are not. We clearly prefer shiny colorful things to dull beige things, even if shiny things are abundant.
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