Thinkpad 701C with a Framework brain transplant ( work in progress )

War is Hell

War isn't hell
War is war and Hell is hell, and of the two, war is a lot worse.
How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Sinners, I believe.
Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell.
But war is chock full of them. Little kids, criples, old ladies.
In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

That's a spicy meatball!

On the other Foot:
Microsoft Opens Source to China

Reader NZheretic points out that less than a year ago, Jim Allchin swore under oath that disclosing the Windows operating system source code could damage national security.

Transcript of Internet Caucus Panel Discussion
Re: Administration's new encryption policy. Date: September 28, 1999.
Weldon statement.

Rep. Curt Weldon : Thank you. Let me see if I can liven things up here in the last couple of minutes of the luncheon. First of all, I apologize for being late. And I thank Bob and the members of the caucus for inviting me here.
...
But the point is that when John Hamre briefed me, and gave me the three key points of this change, there are a lot of unanswered questions. He assured me that in discussions that he had had with people like Bill Gates and Gerstner from IBM that there would be, kind of a, I don't know whether it's a, unstated ability to get access to systems if we needed it., Now, I want to know if that is part of the policy, or is that just something that we are being assured of, that needs to be spoke. Because, if there is some kind of a tacit understanding, I would like to know what it is.
Because that is going to be subjected to future administrations, if it is not written down in a clear policy way. I want to know more about this end use certificate. In fact, sitting on the Cox Committee as I did, I saw the fallacy of our end use certificate that we were supposedly getting for HPCs going into China, which didn't work. So, I would like to know what the policies are. So, I guess what I would say is, I am happy that there seems to be a coming together. In fact, when I first got involved with NSA and DOD and CIS, and why can't you sit down with industry, and work this out. In fact, I called Gerstner, and I said, can't you IBM people, and can't you software people get together and find the middle ground, instead of us having to do legislation.

.

Compared with all the AI slop that is being trust upon us, It all looks so dated.

Well said.

I would also add: if I have something to say about an an issue, I (try to) directly address the issue, not the person. Even when I find them aggravating. What little power we do have relates to discussion and sharing ideas about the issues at hand, and what charities we do — or don't — thoughtfully engage with.

While many are locked to one side or the other in our highly polarized political climate, some people can be moved by reasoned discussion. I even try to be one of those people. Mostly. :)

... scrolls past giant banner ads, to find the (already checked) "Ads Disabled Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!"

To your point, it's ccertainly perfect for this story.

But you know, they have to do something to increase revenue, since they've been entirely unable to update the site's code... you know, like supporting Unicode, which was introduced in 1991. Not to mention a bunch of useful HTML and trivial convenience features like markdown. Or making the firehose useful, or coming up with a modern user-moderation system.

I don't visit https://soylentnews.org any longer — not my cup of tea, community-wise — but it's worth noting they fixed the slashdot codebase years ago.

I still chuckle when Slashdot fronts me with an ad telling me I should put my code on their archive; they can't even manage this place worth a damn, and they want me to trust them with my code? That's a solid LOL. Also, No.

But we've dropped really low if we even skip OP or can't remember it a couple PgDn's further, haven't we.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Now, would you like a slightly smaller burger with your slightly smaller portion of fries?

BTW, that'll be 5% more with the new pricing.

Raising a question is asking a question

Sure. But that's not the phrase. The phrase is "raises the question."

FTFS:

Voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit.

Well, actually, voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when corporate price gouging and housing price gouging hit and never backed off.

Also, because they have no other lever to "encourage" the corrupt political system to do something about it. Not that they will, of course. Have to keep those sweet corporate bribe flows running smoothly.

Buttons are fast.
Buttons are positive.
Buttons are easy to learn.

Voice is slow.
Voice is subject to noise.
Voice is subject to music, in particular music that isn't coming from the car's systems.
Voice is subject to multi-voice conflicts / conversation.
Voice is subject to misinterpretation.
Voice can give passengers access to driver-only decisions.
Voice can give bystanders access to driver-only decisions.

However, buttons cost more — and that's the motivation for the claim.

In addition, touchscreens and menus are actively dangerous because they remove the driver's visual attention from the road.

In other UI news, Apple, not satisfied with having put the charging port on the bottom of the "magic" mouse, has put the power button on the bottom of the latest Mac Mini.

I swear, I want to take a rolled up newspaper and just beat on some of these incompetent decision makers until the paper turns to dust.

I don't know why it's the wrong time. Any time for this move is okay. Just do it.

If Bezos were telling the truth — and clearly, he's not — he would see to it that the paper had no "opinion" section. You know, so it could make an honest attempt at reporting the news instead of trying to influence people by publishing the opinions and reasoning of various movers and shakers.

But he's not doing that. He's taking one action: keeping the stated and clear opinion of the paper's editorial crew (which has been openly stated outside the paper's environs as favoring Kamala Harris by the editorial crew) from being printed in the paper.

It's a completely transparent implementation of a pro-Trump move.

And as far as tradition goes, opinion sections have been, and remain, ubiquitous across almost every newspaper out there.

Bezos is a chump making a douche move.

This will leave the market free to be exploited for profit by those reputable companies who can be bothered to produce high quality software through the choice of secure development tools, defensive programming and testing

Well, that leaves out Apple and Microsoft, based on software release behaviors to date.

...as little as 3-4 bit precision (which is such a low bit precision that it makes more sense to think of it as a lookup table of exponentially growing values than as actual floating point math).

Even with FP8, you just need to generate (once) a 64k-entry table of results, and then there's no CPU/FPU FP math at all to do the 2-element "multiplication." 8BOpA as MS8 bits, 8BOpB as LS8 bits, results in a direct 16B index to the answer from the 64k table.

The significant cost of FP8 versus FP3 or FP4 is in the storage of the data; FP4 is twice as efficient, storage-wise, although it sacrifices considerable accuracy. FP3 is counter-indicated as alignment will be cross byte/word/etc. (in a traditional computer memory architecture) or else there will be wasted bits and hence inefficient storage.

64K tables are nothing in today's memory contexts, and certainly irrelevant compared to the memory impacts of all the weights (or even a layer of weights in a layered computation model) in any usable LLM.