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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • So… FWIW I post often about I have a painless NVIDIA experience, including playing Windows only games, including VR games.

    I thought “Damn… how did I get so lucky?” and yesterday while tinkering with partitions (as one does…) I decided I’d try a “speed run” to go from no system to a VR Windows only game running on Linux.

    I started from Debian 12 600Mb ISO and ~1h later I was playing.

    I’m not saying everybody should have a perfect experience playing games on Linux with an NVIDIA but … mine was again pretty straightforward.

    I’d argue it’s easier with Ubuntu and accepting non-free repository, probably having the same result, ~1hr from 0 to play, without even using the command line once.




  • FWIW I did try a lot (LLMs, code, generative AI for images, 3D models) in a lot of ways (CLI, Web based, chat bot) both locally and using APIs.

    I don’t use any on a daily basis. I find it exciting that we can theoretically do a lot “more” automatically but… so far the results have not been worth the efforts. Sadly some of the best use cases are exactly what you highlighted, i.e low effort engagement for spam. Overall I find that either working with a professional (script writer, 3D modeler, dev, designer, etc) is a lot more rewarding but also more efficient which itself makes it cheaper.

    For use cases where customization helps while quality does matter much due to scale, i.e spam, then LLMs and related tools are amazing.

    PS: I’d love to hear the opinion of a spammer actually, maybe they also think it’s not that efficient either.








  • Right, and I mentioned CUDA earlier as one of the reason of their success, so it’s definitely something important. Clients might be interested in e.g Google TPU, startups like Etched, Tenstorrent, Groq, Cerebras Systems or heck even design their own but are probably limited by their current stack relying on CUDA. I imagine though that if backlog do keep on existing there will be abstraction libraries, at least for the most popular ones e.g TensorFlow, JAX or PyTorch, simply because the cost of waiting is too high.

    Anyway what I meant isn’t about hardware or software but rather ROI, namely when Goldman Sachs and others issue analyst report saying that the promise itself isn’t up to par with actual usage for paying customers.



  • I’m not sure if you played PCVR in the Summer but imagine that in a tiny room… it’s just way too hot. Again I’m NOT saying it’s good, or bad, I’m only saying you made assumption about OP usage. I’m not sure if you tried CloudXR but basically, it works and it’s not that complex to setup (e.g 1h) so it’s relatively faster and cheaper than building and owning a gaming PC.

    I don’t understand why you are even arguing about a legitimate usage.





  • Stuff like LLMs or ConvNets (and the likes) can already be used to do some pretty amazing stuff that we could not do a decade ago, there is really no need to shit rainbows and puke glitter all over it.

    I’m shitting rainbows and puking glitter on a daily basis BUT it’s not against AI as a field, it’s not against AI research, rather it’s against :

    • catastrophism and fear, even eschatology, used as a marketing tactic
    • open systems and research that become close
    • trying to lock a market with legislation
    • people who use a model, especially a model they don’t even have e.g using a proprietary API, and claim they are an AI startup
    • C-levels decision that anything now must include AI
    • claims that this or that skill is soon to be replaced by AI with actually no proof of it
    • meaningless test results with grand claim like “passing the bar exam” used as marketing tactics
    • claims that it scales, it “just needs more data”, not for .1% improvement but for radical change, e.g emergent learning
    • for-profit (different from public research) scrapping datasets without paying back anything to actual creators
    • ignoring or lying about non renewable resource consumption for both training and inference
    • relying on “free” or loss leader strategies to dominate a market
    • promoting to be doing the work for the good of humanity then signing exclusive partnership with a corporation already fined for monopoly practices

    I’m sure I’m forgetting a few but basically none of those criticism are technical. None of those criticism is about the current progress made. Rather, they are about business practices.