in which karpathy goes “eh, fuckit”:

skipping past the implicit assumption of “well, just have a bunch of money to be able to keep throwing the autoplag at the wall until something sticks”, the admissions of not giving a single fuck about anything, and the straight and plain “well, it often just doesn’t work like we keep promising it does”, imagine being this fucking incurious and void of joy

I’m left wondering if this bastard is running through the stages of grief (at being thrown out), because this sure as fuck reads like despair to me

yep, a completely normal amount of non-specialist hardware that basically everyone has in their back shed. you just don’t turn it on all the time because the neighbours keep complaining about the fan noise. practically anyone could do this!

til if I wanted the program to go faster I should’ve just been asking it to switch its runtime

For another layer or assembly/machine languages, technically they could have reverse engineered the actual native ISA of the GPU core and written machine code for it, bypassing the compiler in the driver. This is also quite unlikely as it would practically mean writing their own driver for latest-gen Nvidia cards that vastly outperforms the official one

yeah, and it’d be a pretty fucking immense undertaking, as it’d be the driver and the application code and everything else (scheduling, etc etc). again, it’s not impossible, and there’s been significant headway across multiple parts of industry to make doing this kind of thing more achievable… but it’s also an extremely niche, extremely focused, hard-to-port thing, and I suspect that if they actually did do this it’d be something they’d be shouting about loudly in every possible PR outlet

a look at every other high-optimisation field, from the mechanical sympathy lot stemming from HFT etc all the way through to where that’s gotten to in modern usage of FPGAs in high-perf runtime envs also gives a good backgrounder in the kind of effort cost involved for this shit, and thus gives me some extra reasons to doubt claims kicking around (along with the fact that everyone seems to just be making shit up)

d’ya…d’ya think they’ll make it all the way along the path, to the realization?

for the love of god read the sidebar

pretty much my take as well. I haven’t seen any actual information from a primary source, just lots of hearsay and “what we think happened” analyst shit (e.g. that analyst group in the twitter screenshot has names but no citation/links)

and doubly yep on the “everyone could just be lying” bit

the wildest bit is that one could literally just … go do the thing. like you could grab the sdk and run through the tutorial and actually have babby’s first gpu program in not too long at all[0], with all the lovely little bits of knowledge that entails

but nah, easier to just make some nonsense up out of thirdhand conversations misheard out of a gamer discord talking about a news post of a journalist misunderstanding a PR statement, and then confidently spout that synthesis

[0] - I’m eliding “make the cuda toolchain run” for argument of simplicity. could just rent a box that has it, for instance

I want to say “plato’s cave of media awareness” but that’s perhaps too much a mouthful

is this the They I keep hearing about at parties? the ones behind takeout burgers getting smaller? the bastards!

yep, clueless. can’t tell a register apart from a soprano. and allocs? the memory’s right there in the machine, it has it already! why does it need an alloc!

fuckin’ dipshit

next time you want to do a stupid driveby, pick somewhere else

for anyone reading this comment hoping for an actual eli5, the “technical POV” here is nonsense bullshit. you don’t program GPUs with assembly.

the rest of the comment is the poster filling in bad comparisons with worse details

and one doesn’t program GPUs with assembly (in the sense as it’s used with CPUs)

aww, look at the little collaborators trying to pretend they both got duped instead of both having been active and enthusiastic enablers

I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.

yep. haven’t been posting about it here because not sure where here we’d put it (while a lot of it is well within the orbit of regular content and posters) and it’s not quite entirely anything I can do anything about but offer words of comfort and keeping watch on the nasty shit, but been speaking a lot with friends in places (signal generally, or some other spaces we actually control (i.e. not discord, etc))

I feel moderately confident that at least for a bit of the foreseeable future we’ll be okay this side of the world, but I also know enough history and context to know how vacuous that is by itself. these fuckers won’t stop.

I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake, none of this is these fuckers just finding some shit they disagree with under the seat cushions. I wish I could make them understand the depth and extent of planning and preparation that went into this, the sheer commitment behind it all. but too often such concerns would all be received as this toot put it

there’s so much more I could say but I guess I’ll leave it there for now

I saw (via Stross) a mention that passport issuance was already starting to hit weirdness too

e: this one

I heard someone say Private Reasoning was around the corner. Think they’re related?

you’d think that $200+ entertainment would be better

wow, the point must’ve picked up a speed booster when it got close to you. so hard to grasp it!

that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up

that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subject…