Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | rbanffy's commentslogin

I believe the point is that, since the electoral races are already decided in terms of party, the only decision is whom to nominate. This decision is made in the primaries, by a very small number of voters.

FAANG won’t send auditors to check whether your are in compliance with what license you paid for. Per core/socket licensing is one of the reasons POWER can do SMT/8.

To best destroy the idea of an objective truth, you need to control it first.

While I have no sympathy for Thiel, outing someone against their will is just wrong.

Journalism has to be responsible.

This article is a clusterfuck, no pun intended.


So it's 2007. LGBT groups are trying to protect people from getting fired for being gay and legalize gay marriage.

There's a conservative christian billionaire who is actively funding political groups blocking this.

You, a journalist, working at a tabloid, finds out he's secretly gay. Sound like a story?

There's context to all of these things.


Yes it's a story. But the thing I'm most interested in is... Why? Why does he do that?

Because people mostly behave based on their virtues and principles not on greedy self interest

We all have different ones


An optimistic answer. I like it!

But, like, Peter Thiel genuinely thinks life ought to be harder for gay people? He's a good Christian and thinks gay people will go to hell? I still don't really get it.


No. He supported conservative and christian groups because that's who he is. He founded https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanford_Review funded by conservative luminary William Kristol. He went on to get a philosophy degree and a JD. He was a clerk and worked for Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the most prominent law firms in the country that defends corporate interests.

He's always worked on the law/capital/property side. The man can't code and has never claimed to be able to.

He's a deeply libertarian conservative christian who happens to get titillated by men.

But that last part is just what he is, it's not really who he is.

Being gay doesn't constrain you to a particular set of beliefs.

There's plenty people active on the right that are all kinds of diverse; hispanic, gay, asian. Look at that recent shooter, a trans person with a history of far right activism with neonazi tattoos who said they were "to the right of hitler" but also, transgendered.

It's really all over the map. Shit's complicated.


Thank you for the explanation. I find the "conservative christian who happens to get titillated by men" hard to grok, but it looks like you're correct.

> any factor of 10 being a new science / new product category,

I often remind people two orders of quantitative change is a qualitative change.

> The thing that I’m really very skeptical of is the 2 month turnaround. To get leading edge geometry turned around on arbitrary 2 month schedules is .. ambitious. Hopeful. We could use other words as well.

The real product they have is automation. They figured out a way to compile a large model into a circuit. That's, in itself, pretty impressive. If they can do this, they can also compile models to an HDL and deploy them to large FPGA simulators for quick validation. If we see models maturing at a "good enough" state, even a longer turnaround between model release and silicon makes sense.

While I also see lots of these systems running standalone, I think they'll really shine combined with more flexible inference engines, running the unchanging parts of the model while the coupled inference engine deals with whatever is too new to have been baked into silicon.

I'm concerned with the environmental impact. Chip manufacture is not very clean and these chips will need to be swapped out and replaced at a cadence higher than we currently do with GPUs.


Having dabbled in VLSI in the early-2010s, half the battle is getting a manufacturing slot with TSMC. It’s a dark art with secret handshakes. This demonstrator chip is an enormous accomplishment.

Yeah and a team I’m not familiar with — I didn’t check bios but they don’t lead with ‘our team made this or that gpu for this or that bigco’.

The design ip at 6nm is still tough; I feel like this team must have at least one real genius and some incredibly good support at tsmc. Or they’ve been waiting a year for a slot :)


From the article:

"Ljubisa Bajic desiged video encoders for Teralogic and Oak Technology before moving over to AMD and rising through the engineering ranks to be the architect and senior manager of the company’s hybrid CPU-GPU chip designs for PCs and servers. Bajic did a one-year stint at Nvidia as s senior architect, bounced back to AMD as a director of integrated circuit design for two years, and then started Tenstorrent."

His wife (COO) worked at Altera, ATI, AMD and Testorrent.

"Drago Ignjatovic, who was a senior design engineer working on AMD APUs and GPUs and took over for Ljubisa Bajic as director of ASIC design when the latter left to start Tenstorrent. Nine months later, Ignjatovic joined Tenstorrent as its vice president of hardware engineering, and he started Taalas with the Bajices as the startup’s chief technology officer."

Not a youngster gang...


There might be a foodchain of lower order uses when they become "obsolete".

I think there will be a lot of space for sensorial models in robotics, as the laws of physics don't change much, and a light switch or automobile controls have remained stable and consistent over the last decades.

This makes me think about how large would an FPGA-based system to be able to do this? Obviously there is no single-chip FPGA that can do this kind of job, but I wonder how many we would need.

Also, what if Cerebras decided to make a wafer-sized FPGA array and turned large language models into lots and lots of logical gates?


> I wonder if that applies? What's the big deal if a few parameter have a few bit flips?

We get into the sci-fi territory where a machine achieves sentience because it has all the right manufacturing defects.

Reminds me of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe


Also see Adrian Thompson's Xilinx 6200 FPGA, programmed by a genetic algorithm that worked but exploited nuances unique to that specific physical chip, meaning the software couldn't be copied to another chip. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152877

I love that story.

2000s movie line territory:

> There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols.


A real shame BMW discontinued the i3. It was, and still is, the most stylish BMW. I wonder why they select their designers for lack of creativity.

...and it was a great car, particularly in its last iteration plus range extender.

Exactly. It dared to look different. Now BMW seems to have regressed into their comfy midlife-crisis look.

Isn’t Illumos and OpenIndiana doing the same?

I still remember someone at Sun commented they treated warnings as errors. This is how software should be developed.


The feature is only on SPARC, not x86. Oracle killed in-house SPARC development in 2017, and they abandoned OpenSPARC after they acquired Sun, so it's effectively a dead architecture. The software won't work without the hardware to run it on.

Fujsitsu also does SPARC, and contrary to HP-UX, people still do buy Solaris.

EDIT:

https://www.oracle.com/servers/sparc/

https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/un...

Finally, it is up to Intel and AMD to come up with hardware memory tagging, so far they have messed up all attempts, with MPX being the last short lived one.


It's good info, and I wouldn't rush a migration off of SPARC systems if I was already using them, but slow death is still death. It was already worrying that workstations were killed off by Sun before the Oracle acquisition; it seems quite clear that no one has been serious about spreading adoption of the architecture for more than two decades now.

Even Fujitsu has been moving away from SPARC. What was the last SPARC Fujitsu designed?

What matters is that they are still selling them.

Kind of. Atos still sell GCOS/GECOS mainframes, but they are Xeon boxes running emulators. Same with Unisys and MCP (which was written in an ALGOL and had bounds checked IIRC).

I would imagine variables that are passed to functions would be considered ABI-visible. If the compiler is smart enough, it can keep the pointer wide when it’s passed to a function that’s also being compiled and act accordingly on the other side, but that worries me because this new meaning of “pointer” is propagating to parts of the code that might not necessarily agree with it.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: