Readit NewsA discovery that AGI is impossible in principle to implement in an electronic computer would require a major fundamental discovery in physics that answers the question “what is the brain doing in order to implement general intelligence?”
We don’t even have a workable definition, never mind a machine.
Couldn’t be more true…
When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave me 8-10h battery life and the only issue I ever had was that 1.5 years ago the battery was reaching end of life and capacity started dropping very fast.
That was just a 70$ repair I could easily do myself.
My youngest daughter just inherited my mother's x220 (?) (she has been running Linux) that I got for my mother in 2011 or 2012. That never received any work and still works fine except that I didn't change the battery so you have to run it of ac power.
My older daughter and my mother both just got some used thinkpads that are >3years old and don't have any issues either.
So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".
Every IT survey I’ve ever seen shows Macs as more reliable. On the other hand the repairs are often more expensive. So there’s a trade off.
For me, my M1 16” is a champ. The computer is almost too good. I’d like to upgrade but honestly there’s no reason to so I just can’t get myself to ditch a perfectly good computer.
[1]: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/technology/ai-will-sh...
“My view is you absolutely want to keep hiring kids out of college and teaching them the right ways to go build software and decompose problems and think about it, just as much as you ever have.” - Matt Garman
"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Maybe they differ in degree but not in sentiment.
What’s Next: Shame Notifications: "You were literally 100 meters from the gym and walked past it"
As much as I hate to admit it, that would probably work on me and I’d probably turn it on.
I done a couple of experiments now and I can get an LLM to make not horrible and mostly functional code with effort. (I’ve been trying to create algorithms from CS papers that don’t link to code) I’ve observed once you discover the magic words the LLM wants and give sufficient background in the history, it can do ok.
But, for me anyway, the process of uncovering the magic words is slower than just writing the code myself. Although that could be because I’m targeting toy examples that aren’t very large code bases and aren’t what is in the typical internet coding demo.
> If there were a hypothetical high-level CPU language that somehow encoded all the information the microarchitecture needs to measure to manage memory access,
I think this is fundamentally impossible because of dynamic behaviours. It's very tempting to assume that if you can be clever enough you can work this all out ahead of time, encode what you need in some static information and the whole computation just runs like clockwork on the hardware, no or little area spent on scheduling, stalling, buffering etc. Though I think history has shown over and over this just doesn't work (for more general computation at least, more feasible in restricted domains). There's always lots of fiddly details in real workloads that surprise you and if you've got an inflexible system you've got no give and you end up 'stopping the world' (or some significant part of it) to deal with it killing your performance.
Notably running transformer models feels like one of those restrictive domains you could do this well in but dig in and there's plenty enough dynamic behaviour in there that you can't escape the problems they cause.
I was thinking that too as it sounds awfully close to a variant of the halting problem.
But since I am not sure that it's actually equivalent, and there might be some heuristic that constrains the problem, in theory, to make it solvable "enough" I went with the softer "I don't know how to do it" rather than "it can't be done"
Russia has a similar system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_in_Russi...
I found that comment interesting because memory is mostly what I think about when I design hardware. Memory access is by far the slowest thing, so managing memory bandwidth is absolutely critical, and it uses a significant portion of the die area.
Also, a significant portion of the microarchitecture of a modern CPU is all about managing memory accesses.
If there were a hypothetical high-level CPU language that somehow encoded all the information the microarchitecture needs to measure to manage memory access, then it would likely tie in performance, assuming the CPU team did a good job measuring memory. Still, it wouldn't need all the extra stuff that did the measurement. So I see that as a win.
The main problem is, I have absolutely no idea how to do that, and unfortunately, I haven't met anyone else who knows either. Hence, tons of bookkeeping logic in CPUs persists.
But that's not where we are. I think it makes sense to treat both Apple and Google as de facto monopolies with respect to the smartphone market, and impose some regulation on what they have to allow and how much they can charge for it.
on the other hand, it wasn’t all that long ago that we had many smart phone markers and operating systems, all with different strategies. It’s possible that the market did decide…