So you can find things by “that spicy chicken recipe” instead of having to remember what it was actually called, or slog through a gazillion chicken recipes in your history when you realise that “spicy” was nowhere in the name. Basically stemming/thesaurus search on steroids.

It’s quite likely to be opt-in as I imagine ingesting the sites you’re looking at is a significant computational load. The translators are also opt-in, there’s enough stuff inbuilt to detect languages but not to translate, you have to download those models first. And they’re quite good btw.

Another thing I could see them offering is stuff like tl;dr bot. It’s probably not for everyone, but I definitely can see that it can be a useful feature for many people.

There’s already AI in firefox: The integrated translator. From what I’ve heard they’re looking into ingesting browsing history locally so that you can find stuff again easier.

They’ll probably still have an instance in the sense that mozilla folks with have @mozilla.social addresses. That’s the kind of thing their hosting staff can easily administer on the side, and moderation is already covered by HR.

Would have to buy new board and RAM, not really worth it performance-wise, at least not for me. Some day, yes, but that day hasn’t come and will definitely be after a GPU upgrade.

Memory chips have had an utterly fickle market ever since there’s been memory chips, companies in that business are still in that business because they learned how to deal with the swings. If micron can survive (and they will) then so will Samsung whose memory chip business has the whole conglomerate to fall back onto.

And it would be so easy to make a big splash in the market by having a phone where the camera doesn’t protrude out of the back.

The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

The reason why those economic limits exist is because we’re reaching the limit of what’s physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn’t fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there’s going to be a wall. Of note currently we’re talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.

Long story short: Node shrinks aren’t the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven’t been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn’t have engineered FinFETs) but it’s really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don’t really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you’re building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.

About the only AI company currently alive that I’m sure will survive is CivitAI. Huggingface probably, too. Both are, in the end, in the datacenter business. Huggingface has exposure to VC BS in their client base, they might be in trouble if a significant number suddenly go belly-up but if they have any sense they’ll simply not overextend. And, well, they, too, can switch to cat pictures.

Yep that’s what nvidia marketing seems to be calling their denoiser nowadays. Gods spare us marketing departments.

Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They’re cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that’s, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.

And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won’t do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.

The trick to nixos, in this instance, is to use a python venv. Python dependencies are fickle and nasty in the first place, triply so when talking about fast-churning AI code, I tried specifying everything with nix, I succeeded, and then you have random comfyui plugins assuming they can get a writeable location by constructing a path from comfyui’s main.py. It’s not worth it: Let python be the only dependency you feed in, let pip and general python jank do the rest.

5500 here. I can’t use any recent rocm version because the GFX override I use is for a card that apparently has a couple more instructions and the newer kernels instantly crash with an illegal operation exception.

I found a build someone made buried in a docker image and it indeed does work, without override, for the 5500 but it’s using all generic code for the kernels and is like 4x slower than the ancient version.

What’s ultimately the worst thing about this isn’t that AMD isn’t supporting all cards for rocm – it’s that the support is all or nothing. There’s no “we won’t be spending time on this but it passes automated tests so ship it” kind of thing. “oh the new kernels broke that old card tough luck you don’t get new kernels”.

So in the meantime I’m living with the occasional (every couple of days?) freeze when using rocm because I can’t reasonably upgrade. Not just the driver crashes, the kernel tries to restart it, the whole card needs a reset before doing anything but display a vga console.

but they say that you should use the right pinky to reach every key towards the upper right end of the keyboard, which gets old fast given how frequently you need to access them.

I don’t do that either. I hit the rightmost stuff with the ring finger, some keys are on the middle finger. The return to home position thing is still important, though, the one place to measure all distances from. Also I learned touch-typing with dvorak which may or may not have had an influence.

Cursive is fundamentally less legible and harder work for most students to learn.

It’s way easier to read for dyslexics as q d b p all look actually different, not just flipped/rotated (which makes them the same thing, try it with a pair of scissors). I don’t know what they’re teaching in (I presume?) the US, but this is quite legible. There may be instances where it’s an undue burden, teachers here are trained to spot that and accommodate, just as they do with dyslexia where you’ll get two grades for spelling: One raw, and one with all the dyslexia-typical mistakes (but only those) calculated out.

Pencils, as said, are a good thing: Makes sure that you’re not using too much force. Re-sharpening the thing from scratch every other word gets annoying fast. If there’s coordination issues then that may be a problem but ultimately it’s probably better to bite the bullet and focus on training to not break the lead than it is to hand the pupil a ball point pen because then they’re bound to cramp up.

And just because you got me curious I tried to figure out what part of my body I’m writing with – and TBH aside form “right arm” I can’t really make it out because it’s all so interconnected and all over the place. I think up/down (the page) is mostly shoulder, and so is continuous left to right, while per-letter left-right and off/onto the page is a combination of underarm rotation and fingers. Never got taught explicitly how to do it, but I remember the primary school teacher occasionally telling kids how to not do it. There’s probably multiple ways to do it well.

Oh, and apparently I was wrong: My state did get rid of cursive, then results tanked, now they’ve re-introduced it, but only from year two on, and the ministry is waiting on data to come in. My guess is that they’ll re-introduce cursive from year one. Somehow all the previous generations didn’t have an issue using two different fonts at the same time: It’s not like our books were written in cursive. I doubt Gen Alpha will have. They may be cringe, but they’re not stupid.

I’ve used cheap mechanical pencils before but not expensive ones. How much better are more expensive mechanical pencils?

I’m not talking exclusive, here, koh-i-noor clutch pencils start at… wait no those are plastic ones and a ten set (30 Euro). Metal ones 4.50 Euros or such. Cheapest Staedler I’m seeing is 9 for metal, 5 for plastic. The real difference is the leads: No scratching, just pure smoothness, from either company. 2mm diameter x 12cm length, it’s a standard. Bought a handful for sketching purposes, you can actually use 6B leads in clutch pencils those would instantly break with modern mechanical pencils, and you can shape the tip, expose lots of lead to have lots of surface area, etc. I then went ahead and also used them for less artistic purposes. What you do have to get accustomed to is the lead falling straight down and out when you press the button if you don’t catch it with the table. Oh and bonus: Those 2mm leads also should fit your compass, just break off a piece and sharpen it.

I’d say they’re more like better wood pencils than mechanical ones with thin leads, where you have the choice between constantly breaking leads or using 0.9mm leads which are less likely to break, but you’ll be stuck with producing thick lines as sharpening them really is silly.

Forcing children with disabilities to do it

If we are making children do things we should be teaching them the correct way to do it, not half assing it.

…which includes cursive. Also for disabled folks, as far as possible: At that point you’re teaching fine motor mechanics first and foremost, secondly writing. How quickly they write is of no great consequence (or we’d be teaching shorthand), how well their motor skills develop is. The usual approach here is that you get a set cursive with a couple of options and alternative glyph shapes for the first four years, then you can develop from there as you wish. Some kids arguably should get more hand-holding in the “develop for yourself” part.

That you didn’t learn it the right way is a thing you can blame on your teachers, but not cursive. Like, I mentioned pencils and fountain pens, ball-point pens are outlawed in schools here: It’s so that kids don’t use pressure, which makes them not tense up and cramp, which makes developing proper technique way easier. Though if the coordination issues are sub-clinical they generally should be sorted out before primary school starts, that’s a job for the kindergarten, making sure that everyone has a proper baseline in physical, social, and language skills.

The trouble with fountain pens is that they don’t really expect you to not write for a month or two. The ones with built-in tank would be less annoying there as you can easily uncrust everything by pulling in some ink through the feather (is that what the tip is called in English? I have no idea), but their great downside is that when they make a mess, they make a real mess. Ink rollers you can put in a pocket without worrying and they don’t really dry out. Mostly though you don’t have to ram them into the paper to write.

Also, clutch pencils. Those mechanical ones that take leads that are as thick as usual wood-encased ones, and that you sharpen. If you ever have like 10 bucks burning a hole in your pocket get yourself some koh-i-noor clutch pencils and collection of leads (usual is HB but I’d suggest trying out 2B for writing), suitable sharpener (pencils come with an emergency one but it’s not too nice), as well as two tombow erasers: The ordinary one, and the dust catch one. Life’s too precious to waste nerves on shoddy leads and erasers. Also a Faber-Castel kneadable eraser: Even if you don’t draw it’s occasionally useful to be able to have a fine eraser tip. koh-i-noor leads are reportedly good enough for both artists and engineers and, truth be told, what could be a more perfect combination of endorsements. And, as said, like 10 bucks total.

Oh ball point pens. Last I heard one of the thing they do preserve in primary school over here is the good ole progression from pencil to fountain pen and sticking for that for the whole four years. Pencil because if you use too much force you break the thing without breaking it, it’s just annoying, and that’s the point, once they switch to fountain pens they’re not going to bend them. Also, cursive from the start. There’s important lessons about connecting up letters in there: Writing single letters properly is harder than cursive because on top of moving your pen over the paper, you have to lift it. Much easier if you already have proper on-paper movement down.

I am quite partial to ink rollers nowadays but still can’t stand ordinary ball points. They feel wrong.

Software is still jank. Well maybe except zfs and sqlite, but the rest is jank. Also seL4.

So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years,

That should literally never be the case. How do you even find your home position like that.

The quick and simple way to learn proper touch tying is simple: Use a typing tutor program. It really is all about writing random stuff without looking at your keyboard, that’s all there is to it, depending on layout what you write may make more or less sense. Do that until you can actually type blindly, if you need a refresher for symbols then do that, it’s worth the time investment, just for the love of everything don’t look at your keyboard and don’t ever rest your index anywhere but where you feel that they’re in the right position. Not some feel-good “feel” but those nubs on the keys (f and j on qwerty). feel them.