Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • If you take into account the optimizations described in the paper, then the cost they announce is in line with the rest of the world’s research into sparse models.

    Of course, the training cost is not the whole picture, which the DS paper readily acknowledges. Before arriving at 1 successful model you have to train and throw away n unsuccessful attempts. Of course that’s also true of any other LLM provider, the training cost is used to compare technical trade-offs that alter training efficiency, not business models.




  • So for the first 20 years or 2/3 of the entire history of the company, they were unprofitable or barely profitable.

    We must have a wildly different definition of “barely profitable”. Half a billion in 2004 money is a lot of profit, a billion back to back in 2009 and 2010 is a lot of profit.

    I think you’re confusing Amazon with the next generation of loss-leader companies. Let’s talk Uber, let’s talk Twitter, if we want to point at “hugely unprofitable” companies. But Amazon is a beast of its own, they have a very coherent financial story. Even during their money-losing decade they posted insane results, frequently multiplying revenue while barely increasing operating costs.


  • Oh thanks for clarifying in even more excruciating details how a subtraction works that is really helpful.

    Why would you repeat the lie that they’re “usually unprofitable” when the information is publically available in a million places on the internet ? In 2023 Amazon made :

    • 575B$ in sales
    • If you remove costs of goods that’s 270B$ in gross profit
    • If you remove operating expenses (including R&D) that’s 30B$ in net income

    Amazon is factually not “usually unprofitable”, they have in fact made profit (as in money which actually goes into your pocket after discounting all expenses) every year for the last 15 years except in 2022 and some tiny losses in 2014 and 2012.



  • I’m not much of a reddit defender as i pretty much left this place same time as everybody else. However there’s always been a very clear trend in this kind of subreddits. Places like “noahgettheboat” or “iamapieceofshit” or “thatsinsane” systematically attract the worst kind of misanthropic low-lifes. People will see the most abject violence and laugh “haha he fucked around and found out” and of course this makes the most fascistic types feel at home.

    I don’t think they are representative of the overall slant of the community. Most places are progressive by default.


  • I have one kid. Don’t really want a second one. No fucking regrets he’s a swell dude, he’s smart as fuck and has a gentle heart that just warms my soul. Also thanks to modern schooling he’s got some amazing psychological skills like identifying his and others’ emotions, processing them before reacting, etc… Coming from a stupid family that’s shit i learned to do in my 30s and he was already working on it at 3. That’s stuff he won’t need to power through with weed and alcohol in his 20s i guess.

    Sure the world is considerably more shit now than it was when he was born, which is dumb because he’s only 6. But hey the world was shit before and every time period brings its own brand of anxiety and uncertainty. With kids you learn to take things day by day and not dwell so much on what you don’t control. You have to accept the universe on its own terms, that’s the whole point of psychological and philosophical integration after all.




  • There’s absolutely no doubt that lower-end models are going to keep improving and that inference will keep getting cheaper. It won’t be on a Raspberry but my money’s with you. In 6 years you’ll be able to buy some cheap-ish specialized hardware to run open models on and they’re gonna be at least as capable as today’s frontier models while burning a fraction of the energy.

    In fact i wouldn’t be surprised if frontier models were somehow overtaken by vastly cheaper models in the long run. The whole “trillion parameter count” paradigm feels very hacky and ripe for radical simplification. And wouldn’t it be hilarious ? All those suckers spending billions building a moat only to see it swept under their feet.



  • Yeah i don’t know much about TS but as an extreme metal fan happily married to a K-pop & K-drama fan, I agree with your point. But again, there’s a lot of signal in those various situations.

    The girl in the story has clearly signaled that pop-culture tastes are important for her in a potential partner, while you and I have clearly signaled that it isn’t. Both are very valid.


  • I was actually agreeing with you. She rejected him for liking anime just like he may have rejected him for liking Taytay & reality TV. As you said, dating is not a speedrun to making some random person like you - it’s a search for someone you like and who likes you back. Personal interests and hobbies are a great proxy to finding that person. But of course you have to be in a good place mentally, and not ready to ditch your dignity for validation from a random person you might not even like if you were frank with yourself.