Its a fun radio, the Si4844-A10 is another one and it can tune AM as well. I built one for my house that was connected to an STM32 that was connected to the Internet and would let me stream AM radio to my phone. That way I could listen to sports when I was on the road with the "home" announcers :-).
Yeah, so was 8051 and it sucked too :-). I appreciated having this rant all in one place. Ranting against bad architecture is always cathartic and absolutely useless since the people who built and now champion the bad architecture are invested so one's rant simply irritates them. And like the parent comment here, I too find RISC-V "useful" in that it has sufficient tooling to make most everything foundational 'out of the box' rather than me having to build it.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that RISC-V shows just how ISA agnostic people are, as long as you have cross compilation with the gcc suite and an open source way to program and debug things. Before RISC-V, working on a bespoke ISA and computer architecture was never going to "go" anywhere except perhaps into a paper or conference talk. Now there is evidence of a non-zero chance of it going mainstream. :-)
> Perhaps the most interesting thing is that RISC-V shows just how ISA agnostic people are
Of course! Most people in the computing world work way higher up the ladder of abstraction. I suspect a small minority of working software engineers know what an ISA even is.
I did some contract work in web development for a time. It is staggering how few people understand how the javascript they write gets executed on the machine. People don't understand pointers, or virtual machines, or in many cases how JS bundlers work, despite using them daily.
In some ways, this is a sign that our abstraction layers have been a great success! People can program for the virtual javascript machine, without needing to understand how the actual machine works, or how it emulates javascript. Is this the future we wanted? I'm not sure. But it's here.
Definitely. I’m a weird software guy that got a hardware degree in college so that I could understand all the low level stuff. I remember there was a joint project with the hardware (ECE) and software (CS) students to build a simple computer with bit slice and microcode and program it to do something (I forget what). I remember the software students being bewildered that there was no division instruction in these systems (because who needs that when you have shifts and add/subtract). Nowadays, with so much stuff running in browsers, the average software engineer has no clue what the hardware is doing.
> Perhaps the most interesting thing is that RISC-V shows just how ISA agnostic people are
To the extent that Raspberry Pi shipped a microcontroller that can literally be either RISC-V or ARM (indeed, one of each at the same time I think?)
RISC-V, it seems to me, lives in that cognitive space occupied by things like: open source, open weights, C, HTML, ethernet, Greggs sausage rolls and VHS.
Far from optimal, obviously flawed, and could change human society for the better. Ubiquity is inevitable.
What’s far from optimal about open source? Open source seems like a window into another universe, which is just lightly better than ours: people just working on problems and sharing solutions, because humans are basically good social creatures that enjoy solving problems. To the extent to which there are issues like the difficulty of funding open source projects: our society is wrong, not open source.
Nobody wants to cross compile a full linux OS though just for their project. I assume most are using debian multiarch (as they do for arm), and that does mandate a common RISC-V ISA subset. So presumably this will drive further standardization
Which sort of affirms the mantra, "If you can't prove causation, try to prove correlation." This because you can market correlation to unsophisticated readers and imply causation.
> Which sort of affirms the mantra, "If you can't prove causation, try to prove correlation."
There’s already tons of correlation published for semaglutide lowering rates of dementia. This study is an effort at helping find the mechanism beyond the generally also known correlation that losing weight lowers rates of dementia.
Great writeup, and it was great to see them step in an pay the developers of SQLite to help them fix the bug. I get tired of corporations asking open source authors to fix problems that affect the corporation for free. And while I'm sure it was frustrating for folks to have these outages, I find such puzzles pretty fun to get to the bottom of.
I suspect you're being snarky :-) but this is a really interesting question, and one that has had a lot of research done. I'm not current (I stopped following folks doing this research closely around 2019) but what we 'didn't' know about how brains work was still huge. Signaling levels, enzymes, the connectome, quantum effects, it is a really deep question.
That said, once we do get a working idea of how it works, and can perhaps synthesize a brain artificially with proteins, it will inform us on the next steps for silicon realization of that.
I think the point is that tremendous complexity can arise from relatively simple mechanisms. That is what life is, at many levels. I’m not at all convinced that the current LLM approach will yield something we can broadly call consciousness but saying that it’s a simple concept and therefore won’t support consciousness is a specious argument imo.
I completely agree, tremendous complexity can arise from simple mechanisms. Gleick's Chaos is a really good introduction to that. I was talking about the article though, and the mechanisms currently used for training and inference in LLMs. Those mechanisms are mathematically precise (unlike Chaotic attractors) and as the author points out, achieve the same function as compressors do in a strict bit pattern minimization role. Sometimes tensor math is pretty complex, like the FFT and DCTs on JPEG compression, but with the same inputs you get the same results. And while a JPEG will never decompress to a different image than the one that was compressed in the first place, LLMs do not 'infer' token streams that haven't been trained in their training process. The big difference here is that if you imagine a JPEG compressor that compresses 100 different images into one 'chunk', you can see how to provoke it to produce any one of the images it previously compressed. And with a bit of creativity you can have it express different images in different parts of the resulting composite. FWIW I looked at patenting something like this for digital cameras to give them more "shots" space for a given amount of SD storage.[1]
Given the way that models work in 'inference' mode (vs 'training' mode) you can't forward bias the result into the correct result when there are multiple forward results that have identical weights. It's the root cause of hallucinations, and you've lost information in the training phase that you can't then use to discriminate between the 'right' answer and an equally valid 'wrong' answer.
[1] FWIW I could never recover enough state to insure that the image it regenerated was all of the same image you took. So you might get the street but one of the houses might be a house that was in a different picture you took. That kind of bug. Mostly arising out of the same kind of problem you have with using hashes to find documents, when you get a hash collision two documents have the same hash, so you don't know which one to return.
I do not understand this intuition that "true consciousness has to be random". The things that make me me are highly deterministic!
> LLMs do not 'infer' token streams that haven't been trained in their training process
While we're at it, this is simply untrue (in-context learning) unless you generalize "token streams" so radically that it could be readily analogized to humans as well.
> The things that make me me are highly deterministic!
Are they though? :-) There are some interesting papers in the tissue regeneration space which are working on building tissue (and organs) from stem cells for medical purposes (transplants, injury treatment, Etc.) and one of the things that comes out from that is that a set of stem cells make unique tissue every time in that it's compatible but the fine structure is always randomly different!
While the growth of brain matter is a minefield of ethical issues, at some point I suspect we're going to have to figure out how to do that to treat things like TBI and neurodegenerative diseases. In terms of understanding how randomness plays a part in your existence though cellular biology papers are a pretty good source.
Yes they are :-) At some point it's a question of definition. If I am anything, it's a pattern of behaviors; I am not defined by thermal noise. Thermal noise may be a reason my brain grew as it did, but having grown that way, I disagree that a version of me that grew the same way due to less random reasons would thus "not be me."
edit: And of course, any pattern that you can recognize about yourself, as "you", has to be deterministic by definition of pattern.
This self replicating proteins can do a lot of stuff that a program running inside a computer cannot do. Like producing secretions, generate electricity, generate light, generate force etc etc....
They're also way more robust distributed systems. Imagine a compute substrate that was continuously mutating, dying, regenerating, cancering, being polluted by various environmental and self-generated contaminants (e.g. alcohol, adrenaline) yet all the while still able to function as a coherent whole. I think this is sort of the pipe dream of the Internet as a system that is robust under strategic nuclear attack. But us meatbags actually do it.
This is, in general, a good statement of a durable problem one can 'solve' profitably. Basically take a problem that is hard to do 1:1, systemize it such that you can easily tune the solution to "all" variants of that problem, and then sell that as a service taking a percentage which is still going to be less than the cost of the customer doing a one-off solution.
From the article -- In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.”
Because I spent my career working in tech in the Bay Area there are some things that I just think of as 'normal' that other people, without that exposure, are surprised by. During the last 40 years start ups and tech companies have minted tens of thousands of millionaires across a wide distribution of 'net worth just over a million dollars' to 'net worth of tens of millions'. The largest chunk of that cohort leave tech directly and go do 'fun' work. The smallest chunk of that cohort are still working for someone else trying to get a bigger score. What I realized was the most people aren't sociopathic wannabe billionaires. They don't get headlines, they don't show up "out of place", they are just the people who are living their lives doing things that matter to them.
So when the author is on about 'sharing the dream of doing what you want' I was like, "Yup, same as it ever was." The author also does not appear to have the benefit of having been in the area when semiconductor manufacturing became 'foundries' and all the process engineers and other workers in all of the small fabs in the SF Bay Area were now displaced. That was a class of workers who lost faith in their careers. But what was true then, and is true today, in the US we take kids out of High School and spend four years teaching them how to think and generally how to think about some topic in college and then they go out and get jobs. For someone who has been through college, getting a new Bachelor's degree in an entirely new subject takes two and a half years tops. You don't need the general ed, if its another STEM topic you don't need to redo the math, its just "lets take the classes that are specific to the <foo> major."
And before everyone jumps on this and says "But Chuck, now I've got a mortgage and responsibilities and I can't be taking a couple of years off just to go to school." Yeah I get it. That's especially true if you don't have a support network. So it sucks and is depressing and you don't want to even get out of bed because you feel like years of your life were just wasted and now you need to start over. The alternative though just gets you deeper and deeper into a hole.
In my opinion it carries much truth. Somewhere in Google's archives there is a message I sent to the OC that said, "The department of philosophy does not ship solutions to real problems, that is why there has never been a successful company that insisted the world adapt to its philosophy." Google was, even then, blind to what they were missing.
The "Elevator Problem" (and the "Street Light Problem") were both CS 200 exercises when I was in college. Along with a bunch of other 'game' type systems like 8 queens, Hanoi towers, maze solving, etc. Still, that is the most elegant web widget I've ever seen that illustrates the options. If you're reading this John I'd love to hear how you wrote them.
Its a fair question, California agriculture tends to use 11 trillion gallons (34e6 acre feet[1][2]) of water annually. (about 1,700 Googles worth). Generally from a market driven standpoint agricultural users are trying to get maximum $/acre out of their land. I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming. Presuming batteries were included in that allowance, 350,000 acres of California farmland as solar farms (panels + batteries for 24/7 power) would power the entire state 24/7 with no need for coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. 100% green energy.
> I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming.
If you were not already aware, you might consider reaching out to the Wetlands Water District legal and policy team (https://wwd.ca.gov/), as they helped champion AB 2661:
> “California law AB 2661, enacted in September, authorizes the water district to develop, construct and own solar generation, battery storage and transmission facilities as identified in the plan. The law also requires the district to adopt a community benefits plan with input from local communities, a requirement the district has endorsed. A community benefits plan typically involves payments from a project owner to the neighboring community,” pv magazine writes.
If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost of most processed foods).
This can be confounded heavily by the riding “agrivoltaics” trend of finding ways to use solar panels while continuing to farm the same land. The most common example are ranching (e.g. letting sheep enjoy the shade under panels) but some crops actually benefit from lower sun intensity.
However, that’s probably unnecessary: just converting the land used to produce ethanol to solar farms would produce an enormous amount of electricity with no impact on food production.
> Through spatial analyses, we determined that converting just 3.2% of land currently used for corn ethanol would increase the share of utility-scale solar energy in the US from 3.9 to 13%.
I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer.
Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity.
often energy storage has a lot of losses in the the conversion. but if you produce 10x of what you need for "free". Would that really matter? I'm sure we will get there at some point.
This is why we have to invest so much more into solar. Any kind of fossil fuel or even nuclear energy is constrained by scarcity.
You put in a natural gas power plant, now you are reliant on someone going out and digging for oil, shipping it back, you burning it, and repeat indefinitely.
I put Nuclear in this group because firstly it’s incredibly expensive to build and operate nuclear plants. And you are still consuming water and fuel, and producing waste. That’s a huge production chain just to keep it operating.
There is scarcity at every step to operate these plants. Scarcity of labor, scarcity of fuel that you’re going to burn, scarcity of water, scarcity of waste storage, scarcity of parts to maintain the plants. There is a limit to how cheap it can get.
With solar, you can buy a panel for cheap, leave it on the grass, and get power for 30 years with practically no maintenance. Even wind or hydro have moving parts to service. For solar, the most you ever have to do is the equivalent of cleaning a window.
There is practically no scarcity. Even if it’s just being able to buy a panel… well, the supply of panels only ever increases. They are increasingly recyclable. They are not consumable, complicated products that you burn up or which break apart in a couple years.
Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits.
It might also spur the development of 100% electric Farm vehicles (tractors, planters, combines etc) as the Farm could make it own electricity and not have to pay diesel costs for fueling that. At the extreme, if you have enough 'free power' on your farm you can use it for electrolysis of Ammonia to make nitrates. (fertilizer). That would be because you could make money offsetting the other costs of farming to make your cost of goods lower than your neighbors farm and increase your total $/acre.
So the short summary is "no" is isn't going to change how much food is available. Farmers pick crops all the time that aren't "food" for you, they are exports or added to some other product (corn syrup, cotton), because they are in demand. That balances out by regular market dynamics.
In my original comment I linked the nature study that looked at farmers doing both. The "but if we don't plant crops we'll starve!" argument is just silly for a number of reasons, one I pointed out which is if we used all land arable land just in California for solar panels + batteries we'd have 1,000 times as much power available as the entire world demand today. Who would even buy that power? Nobody. The thing that keeps this from happening is that as more solar power comes online its cost goes down and it becomes uneconomical to add more (farmer's won't put it in because they can make more money growing beans or something). So no, allowing farmers to put in solar instead of crops will never lead to a famine due to nobody growing food. People are too greedy :-). There is a large ConAgra farm in the central valley that lobbies a lot (they want more water for Almonds because $$) and a back of the envelope calculation shows they could convert half their acreage to solar, use that to desalinate water off the coast of Point Magu, and pump it to the other half of their acreage and not need any water delivered from the California watershed. It sounds crazy but its the new reality of what you can do with solar and batteries. China (as a government policy directive) has figured this out before anyone else btw.
The Silicon Labs folks did a write up on their radio with an Arduino here: https://community.silabs.com/s/share/a5U1M000000knsEUAQ/buil...
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