kiwih (u/kiwih) - Readit News

kiwih commented on Efabless – Shutdown Notice efabless.com/notice... · Posted by u/KenoFischer

kiwih · 6 months ago

I am devastated by this news. I was lucky enough to work with Mohamed and Andy for several projects (including taping out the world's first ChatGPT-authored silicon [0]), and I've never met people more passionate about making chip design and silicon tape-out accessible to all. This is a real loss for the academic and maker communities.

[0] https://cyber.nyu.edu/2024/07/22/chipchat-nyu-tandon-team-fa...

kiwih commented on Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus

tastyfreeze · 6 months ago

So the government takes physical assets? Didn't we fight a war over property rights?

My neighbor is way wealthier than me. So its ok if I take his car. He has enough he can just buy another one.

kiwih · 6 months ago

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think a more reasonable interpretation might be "the government knows about expensive cars (i.e. that they are registered, have numberplates etc), and so charges some annual tax on the owners of those cars."

kiwih commented on Trump's firing of the U.S. government archivist is far worse than it might seem fastcompany.com/91277620/... · Posted by u/rendx

kiwih · 7 months ago

Not always one for pithy remarks, but the quote from George Orwell seems prescient here: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

I'm not American, but FTA it sounds like having a politically biased NARA director could have some interesting consequences for the formal parts of all y'all future electoral matters.

kiwih commented on I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language nemanjatrifunovic.substac... · Posted by u/whobre

progmetaldev · 7 months ago

Can anyone speak on how it is to move from an older assembly, to a modern CPU? I asked to take an assembly class in local/public college, and was told they wouldn't hold the class because not enough students were interested. This was in 1998, and I truly couldn't believe my ears.

I feel like learning modern assembly would be more useful, but maybe 6502 assembly is far easier to pick up? The first language I learned was Atari BASIC around 1991, and it was enough to get me to keep on moving to better languages and more powerful CPUs, but I wonder where I would have ended up if I learned assembly either before or after Atari BASIC. I try to keep up with technology, and have read quite a bit on different assembly dialects. I still haven't learned an assembly that I can program in, and I suppose it's because there are so many other high-level languages now and I feel like I need to keep up to what is used in "industry" rather than what is more obscure (but might help in debugging).

kiwih · 7 months ago

I noted in a different comment in this thread that we teach all first-year compsci and software engineering students at my university MIPS assembly. They may then specialise into other areas, security, operating systems, embedded, etc., and in those specialties may need assembly for more modern CPUs.

We have found that when needed, students pick up the newer/more advanced assembly languages (e.g. ARM, x86) fairly well, so we believe the early and universal introduction to MIPS does provide benefits.

kiwih commented on I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language nemanjatrifunovic.substac... · Posted by u/whobre

kiwih · 7 months ago

At my institution we teach MIPS, or rather, we teach MIPSY, which is our own version of MIPS which includes a bunch of helper pseudo-instructions.

It's taught to all computer science and software engineering students. Most students would take it in their first year, second semester.

We cover everything from the basics to hand-compiling code with functions, stacks, arrays, pointers etc.

We have our own emulator and even web platform for students to step forward (and backward!) their code: https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs1521/mipsy/

kiwih commented on Open source AI is the path forward about.fb.com/news/2024/07... · Posted by u/atgctg

xena · a year ago

Where do you get access to those as a member of the general public?

kiwih · a year ago

In Australia at least, anyone who is enrolled at or works at a university can use the taxpayer-subsidised "Gadi" HPC which is part of the National Computing Infrastructure (https://nci.org.au/our-systems/hpc-systems). I also do mean anyone, I have an undergraduate student using it right now (for free) to fine-tune several LLMs.
It also says commercial orgs can get access via negotiation, I expect a random member of the public would be able to go that route as well. I expect that there would be some hurdles to cross, it isn't really common for random members of the public to be doing the kinds of research Gadi was created to benefit. I expect it is the same way in this case in Canada. I suppose the argument is if there weren't any gatekeeping at all, you might end up with all kinds of unsuitable stuff on the cluster, e.g. crypto miners and such.
Possibly another way for a true random person to get access would be to get some kind of 0-hour academic affiliation via someone willing to back you up, or one could enrol in a random AI course or something and then talk to the lecturer in charge.
In reality, the (also taxpayer-subsidised) university pays some fee for access, but it doesn't come from any of our budgets.

kiwih commented on Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD paulbupejr.com/developing... · Posted by u/00702

hervature · a year ago

> also be doable in 3 years

I would like to add more color to this. 3 year PhD is very possible for a motivated individual at, what I'll call, the low end of R1 universities. That doesn't mean you cannot do good research (the OP is a counterexample) but that there is a fundamental difference between the program that the OP went to and top-tier universities. Think Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.

It is normally pretty easy to distinguish these programs because they focus a lot on the course requirements and that the thesis counts as a course. From the OP's institution, you can see that the course load is at least 15 courses and I would not be surprised if some students do 20 [1]. These programs are more or less an advanced undergraduate with a real independent research project that spans multiple years. Conversely, top-tier universities typically operate under the "publish 3 things and you have satisfied the thesis requirements". This cannot be explicitly written and this is normally difficult to ascertain online. For example, Harvard has similar requirements [2] but you can still find it for some departments [3]. The Catch-22 with this is that someone who can publish 3 things in 3 years can publish 6 things (or more) in 5 years which will greatly increase their academic job prospects. Thus, at top-tier universities, even the best students stay for 5 years at a minimum to start working the job market. You need to be at Dantzig's level to finish at a top-tier in 3 years [4]. To summarize, if you want to finish a PhD in 3 years, look for course-heavy programs and don't expect to get hired into academia.

Edit: I see the OP commented somewhere else that they published 3 papers. The OP is obviously a standout but I think most people have to be realistic that very few areas of research allow for publications in your first year PhD. For example, if you are doing research in LLMs, you are looking at a couple of years just to be brought up to speed.

[1] - https://catalog.louisville.edu/graduate/programs-study/docto...

[2] - https://seas.harvard.edu/office-academic-programs/graduate-p...

[3] - https://www.math.harvard.edu/graduate/graduate-program-timel...

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig

kiwih · a year ago

In my experience in computer engineering in the academic systems of the USA, New Zealand, and Australia, a very large proportion of students will write their first paper in their first year. It is field dependent, but when I was a postdoc at a top US R1, 100% of the students I interacted with had their first paper in their first year. These even included students working on LLMs :-)

Also, top non-US universities often graduate their engineering students within 3-4 years of commencing, with 3-4 papers being a very common international expectation as well.

If you want to finish a PhD in 3 years and are interested in academia, in addition to following the path the OP has laid out you may also look to good international universities and then get your next 3-4 papers as a postdoc.

kiwih commented on "Rabbit Test" Unwins the Hugo samtasticbooks.com/2024/0... · Posted by u/primax

kylebenzle · 2 years ago

Ever since the same author won the award three years in a row the Hugo awards have been an utter joke.

kiwih · 2 years ago

I quite enjoyed the broken earth trilogy, and took no issue from each entry winning. Which book would you have preferred win from those years?

kiwih commented on Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track theguardian.com/lifeandst... · Posted by u/austinallegro

crote · 2 years ago

As a younger person who in theory is interested in model railways, the sad truth is that the drawbacks simply outweigh the benefits.

Model trains are physically large, so building a layout in my apartment is pretty much impossible. They are extremely expensive, and if you want to get something which can do more than literally run around in a circle you're looking at a $X000 setup cost. The "sexy" part (digitally controlling the trains) seems to be pretty much stuck with poorly-designed protocols from the 80s.

I like trains. I like DIY electronics. I like 3D printing. But given the barrier to entry, I'll just stick with OpenTTD or some kind of Euro Train Simulator game.

My friends are into Warhammer and DIY racing drones. If those hobbies have no trouble attracting younger people, the problem here really isn't young people's interest.

kiwih · 2 years ago

I've recently been designing a custom implementation of a DCC controller for a new model railroad I'm setting up - what don't you like about the protocol?

I find the protocol fascinating in that the data signal is combined with the power, so you just run everything over the two tracks.

Further, a transmitter is just a simple H-bridge that costs pennies...