Lerc (u/Lerc) - Readit News

Lerc commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

jeffbee · 6 days ago

The water is "used" in the sense that it evaporates. At a global average rate of 1 liter per kilowatt-hour of energy, Google claims.

Lerc · 6 days ago

What does that mean for environmental impact? Hydroelectric power uses water in the sense that the "used" water is at a lower altitude. What happens once that is done, is what matters.

Depending on what global average means, it seems like that's quite a lot of cycling of evaporation unless they are releasing steam at 800C

Looking up overall water usage, the US uses 27.4Billion gallons a day residential and 18.2 Billion gallons industrial. It surprised me that industrial was lower, but I guess the US manufactures less these days.

If the 1kwh per litre were accurate then judging by this calc https://www.google.com/search?q=(27.4billion+gallons+*365)*+... 37 857 903.3 terawatt hours

0.1% of The residential water use of the US would be enough to cool the entire Electicity output of the world (about 30,000TWh)

(of course, with these things it's easy to slip an order of magnitude(or several) so best check my numbers)

Lerc commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

BoppreH · 6 days ago

I see frequent mentions of AI wasting water. Is this one such setup, perhaps with the CDU using the facility's water supply for evaporative cooling?

Lerc · 6 days ago

I have encountered a lot of references to AI using water, but with scant details. Is it using water in the same way a car uses a road? The road remains largely unchanged?

The implication is clear that it is a waste, but I feel like if they had the data so support that, it wouldn't be left for the reader to infer.

I can see two models where you could say water is consumed. Either talking about drinkable water rendered undrinkable, or turning water into something else where it is not practically recaptured. Tuning it into steam, sequestering it in some sludge etc.

Are these things happening? If it is happening, is it bad? Why?

I'd love to see answers on this, because I have seen the figures used like a kudgel without specifying what the numbers actually refer to. It's frustrating as hell.

Lerc commented on Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics twitter.com/SebastienBube... · Posted by u/marcuschong

timClicks · 7 days ago

It's been a while since I've played in the area, but is PCA still the go to method for dimensionality reduction?

Lerc · 6 days ago

From 2019 but a decent overview by Leland McInnes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iol3Lk6kyU

There's a newer thing called PacMap which is an interesting thing that handles difference cases better. Not as robustly tested as UMAP but that could be said of any new thing. I'm a little wary that it might be overfitted to common test cases. To my mind it feels like PacMap seems like a partial solution of a better way of doing it.

The three stage process of PacMap is either asking to be developed into either a continuous system or finding a analytical reason/way to conduct a phase change.

Lerc commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve

userbinator · 7 days ago

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

Lerc · 7 days ago

Perhaps the better solution would be to have the fast machine but have a pseudo VM for just the software you are developing that uses up all of those extra resources with live analysis. The software runs like it is on a slower machine, but you could potentially gather plenty of info that would enable you to speed up the program for everyone.

Lerc commented on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website lina.sh/blog/telefonica-s... · Posted by u/shaunpud

layer8 · 7 days ago

Note that the CUII blocking process is now based on court orders instead of arbitrary corporate decisions: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up

Lerc · 7 days ago

How can they tell the difference between the CUII giving up and the CUII just saying that they have given up once they successfully found a way to conceal the blocks from the people checking?

Lerc commented on Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/ndsipa_pomu

mandevil · 10 days ago

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/806/

Lerc · 10 days ago

I had an experience like this in a real-life non technical situation.

Walking down the street I receive a text to say my glasses were ready to be picked up. I had not purchased any glasses, and the store that I was to collect them from was not in the city I live in. By coincidence I was approximately 30 meters from a branch of the same store in my town. I popped in to tell them that someone had entered a phone number incorrectly and someone might need to told by other means that their glasses were ready.

The response? "Certainly sir, can I have your name, and address". Explaining how this information was not relevant was not fruitful. I was reluctant to provide this information because about the only thing they could have done with it was to add it to the account that matched the phone number. I wasn't in the mood to engage in identity theft for a free pair of glassees, but the conversation was going in circles. Eventually another staff member observed the rising tension and offered to take care of this difficult situation. She took my phone number, and the address of the branch that had sent the text, said thank you for the notification and she would sort it out with the other branch. I was out of the store within 30 seconds of her taking over.

Lerc commented on AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions github.com/ghostty-org/gh... · Posted by u/freetonik

Lerc · 10 days ago

I think this seems totally reasonable, the additional context provided is, I think, important to the requirement.

Some of the AI policy statements I have seen come across more as ideology statements. This is much better, saying the reasons for the requirement and offering a path forward. I'd like to see more of this and less "No droids allowed"

Lerc commented on Show HN: Luminal – Open-source, search-based GPU compiler github.com/luminal-ai/lum... · Posted by u/jafioti

jafioti · 11 days ago

yep! currently we're emitting cuda / metal but once the search is better, i want to directly emit ptx / low-level asm on other hardwares.

Lerc · 11 days ago

I don't suppose you have an eye towards verilog in the long term?

I'm curious as to the breadth of possibilities that could be searched. I would imagine something like this could invent flash attention if it cast its net wide enough, but that is a pretty broad net. [Edit: I scrolled back and saw flash attention was explicitly mentioned, cool stuff]

Lerc commented on Launch HN: Reality Defender (YC W22) – API for Deepfake and GenAI Detection realitydefender.com/platf... · Posted by u/bpcrd

asail77 · 13 days ago

Give it a try for yourself. It's free!

We have been working on this problem since 2020 and have created an trained an ensemble of AI detection models working together to tell you what is real and what is fake!

Lerc · 12 days ago

I tried, It required making an account to use.

In this day and age, everybody realises that forcing people to make an account does not count as free. It is paying with personal information.

Lerc commented on Who Invented Backpropagation? people.idsia.ch/~juergen/... · Posted by u/nothrowaways

_fizz_buzz_ · 13 days ago

Funny enough. For me it was the other way around. I always knew how to compute the chain rule. But really only understood what the chain rule means when I read up on what back propagation was.

Lerc · 13 days ago

That's essentially it. Learning what the chain rule does, and learning what it can be used for, and how to apply it.

Neither are really inventions, they are discoveries, if anything the chain rule leans slightly more to invention than backdrop.

I understand the need for attribution as a means to track the means and validity of discovery, but I intensely dislike it when people act like it is a deed of ownership of an idea.