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Whenever I hear libertarian economic theory I always picture my physics professor prefacing every problem with "assume a perfectly uniform sphere..."

Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. After investigation, the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow


I started doing media/codec work around 2007 and finding experienced media engineers at the time was difficult and had been for quite some time. It's always been hard - super specialized knowledge that you can only really pick up working at a company that does it often enough to invest in folks learning it. In my case we were at a company that did desktop video editing software so it made sense, but that's obviously uncommon.

> The main challenge is latency since you have to do much more frequent communication.

Earlier this year I experimented with building a cluster to do tensor parallelism across large cache CPUs (AMD EPYC 7773X have 768mb of L3). My thought was to keep an entire model in SRAM and take advantage of the crazy memory bandwidth between CPU cores and their cache, and use Infiniband between nodes for the scatter/gather operations.

Turns out the sum of intra-core latency and PCIe latency absolutely dominate. The Infiniband fabric is damn fast once you get data to it, but getting it there quickly is a struggle. CXL would help but I didn't have the budget for newer hardware. Perhaps modern Apple hardware is better for this than x86 stuff.


That's how Groq works. A cluster of LPUv2s would probably be faster and cheaper than an Infiniband cluster of Epycs.


Yeah I'm familiar; I was hoping I could do something related on previous generation commodity(ish) hardware. It didn't work but I learned a ton.


what is an lpuv2


The chip that Groq makes.


A take I saw recently is: if people are still asking "are we in a bubble" then we are not yet in a bubble.


Bubbles occur when undue attention is directed towards something. When people are asking "are we in a bubble", there is no question that we are in a bubble. Nobody pays attention to things aligned to the fundamentals.

That doesn't mean there will be a crash, though. Not all bubbles pop.


what are some historical examples of bubbles that didn't pop?


Since this is HN, I'll go with the most obvious: Software development. Unsustainable, speculative growth through the COVID-19 period, but on the other side relatively slow decline.


This is the perfect example of people who constantly cried that it is a bubble but it wasn’t.


Nobody pays attention to things aligned to the fundamentals. When people are crying that there is a bubble, it is a bubble. Plain and simple.

We know for certain it was a bubble as non-bubbles have sustainable growth. As all the software developers now struggling to find work will be happy to tell you, the growth wasn't sustainable. The proof is in the pudding.


How do you prove that software development is a bubble?

Stock prices are at all time high and continuously growing.


> How do you prove that software development is a bubble?

By looking at the software development market. How else would you do it? Salaries rose sharply from 2020-2023, but then plateaued and are now starting to decline. Slowly, however. It did not crash. It ticks the boxes: Rapid price appreciation, speculation, a disconnect from fundamentals, widespread media attention, and an eventual correction.

> Stock prices are at all time high and continuously growing.

If we're sharing random facts: Global average temperature is also at an all time high and continuously increasing.


1. the labour market has not much to do with whether it is a bubble or not

2. definition of bubble is that the market cap must precipitously reduce, which it hasn't.


> the labour market has not much to do with whether it is a bubble or not

How can the very market we're talking about not indicate whether there is a bubble in that market or not? Do you think we should be looking at the price of soybeans instead?

> definition of bubble is that the market cap must precipitously reduce, which it hasn't.

Incorrect. It has, just not by very much. Which isn't surprising as we already established that there wasn't a crash.


What is your definition of bubble then? If not by market cap?


Why read comments in isolation? We already went over this:

- Rapid price appreciation

- Speculation

- A disconnect from fundamentals

- Widespread media attention

- An eventual correction

If market cap, how do you explain housing bubbles? Market cap is not applicable to housing.


of course market cap of housing went down! individual houses fell down in price.

that didn't happen for tech stocks. you are making your own definitions of bubble - the sufficient thing to happen is for the market cap to go down precipetously which it didnt.


> of course market cap of housing went down! individual houses fell down in price.

Traditionally, market cap only refers to companies. I accept your pet definition that includes any kind of market, but then we can apply it to the software development market just the same. Individual software developers have fallen in price. There was not a significant drop, but a slow decline.

> that didn't happen for tech stocks.

Nor gold. But what does that have to do with the software development market? Are you under the impression that stock certificates write code?


I think it'd be truer to say that you can't be sure it's a bubble until after it pops.


That is like telling others who experience natural disasters to wait until it happens and then ask themselves "How much damage will it bring" and then someone else tells them that it costed them everything.

Anyone who has lived through the dotcom bubble knows that this AI mania is a obvious bubble and the whole point is you have to prepare before it eventually pops, not after someone tells you that it is too late when it pops.


You don't prepare by making predictions about when it will pop, you prepare by hedging etc.

Just as those who live in earthquake-prone areas build earthquake-resistant buildings.


> you prepare by hedging etc.

Has to be done before the eventual collapse of the bubble and still proves my whole point:

>> the whole point is you have to prepare before it eventually pops.


Knowing whether it is or isn't a bubble isn't relevant to the decision to prepare. You prepare for both possibilities!


Except not all (market) bubbles pop. Sometimes they slowly deflate, and sometimes they stabilize ("soft landing").


Maybe, but they'd been operating under that name for 7 years before Elon came along and decided he needed a name for his model.


The swastika was in use for thousands of years before Hitler and his crowd changed its meaning forever.


I would imagine they do not want their researchers unnecessarily wasting time fighting for resources - within reason. And at Google, "within reason" can be pretty big.


I mean looking antigravity, jules & gemini cli, they have have no problem with their developers fighting for resources


That doesn't mean they won't try anyway; political ideology often trumps rational planning.


It's not even noon and I've already thought about ancient Rome today!


Seriously, when I am in Italy, I think of ancient Rome most of the time. The country is just chock-full of Roman structures and you won't be walking for a long time before bumping into one.


When holidaying in Italy I had the luck to pick the day trip one day. Really glad I found Paestum (an ancient Greek city): it is every bit as captivating as Pompeii imo.


Went to Italy for the first time a few years ago and picked paestum randomly when we needed a break from Naples. Went back last year and will probably go again.


So is Ostia, Rome's ancient harbor.


I’m currently reading “Carthage must be destroyed”. If you want to look at the event from a not-solely Roman perspective I recommend this


Carthago delenda est! That's how us noob Latin language students learn the gerundive, with "delenda" being a verbal adjective, meaning "to be deleted (destroyed)". As a bonus it's also useful as a paradigm for remembering how the passive periphrastic conjugation works. It helps that it also implies violence and destruction, making it easier to remember.


Maybe? The price difference on newer hardware can buy a lot of electricity, and if you aren't running stuff at 100% all the time the calculation changes again. Idle power draw on a brand new server isn't significantly different from one that's 5 years old.


P/B frames (which is usually most of them) reference other frames to compress motion effectively. So losing a packet doesn't mean a dropped frame, it means corruption that lasts until the next I-frame/slice. This can be seconds. If you've ever seen corrupt video that seems to "smear" wrong colors, etc. across the screen for a bunch of frames, that's what we're talking about here.


Again - the viewer rarely cares when that happens

Minor annoyance, maybe, rage quit the application? Not a chance.


If you’re never sending an I-frame then it’s permanently corrupt. Sending an I-frame is the equivalent of eventual consistency.


Your users must be very different from the ones I'm familiar with.


If the area affected literally doesn't change for minutes afterwards it will not get refreshed and fixed.


The bar is at not rage quitting the application? A good experience is not even thought about?


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