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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • Oh yeah, its more than that. Low weight helps acceleration, braking (so safety), handling, range, wear on every component, and most of all, cost. The same sized tires will need less pressure, wear much less, and grip harder. If the car is lighter, you don’t need as stiff a chassis, nor as much braking to lock the wheels, less battery, motor, which means you can take even more weight off the car… You get where I’m going.

    Racecars are fast because they are light, not because they have big engines and expensive bodies. Little 1500lb cars can lap a $3 million 1500hp (and quite heavy, because of all the stuff in it) Bugatti around a track.

    Heavy cars can handle OK, but the cost is big.














  • Sure, a lot of American film makes war movies all “RAH RAH RAH USA USA USA,”

    Here are the 3 “original” movies in my local theatre, to get more of what I mean:

    Levon Cade left behind a decorated military career in the black ops to live a simple life working construction. But when his boss’s daughter, who is like family to him, is taken by human traffickers, his search to bring her home uncovers a world of corruption far greater than he ever could have imagined.

    harlie Heller (Malek) is a brilliant, but deeply introverted decoder for the CIA working out of a basement office at headquarters in Langley whose life is turned upside down when his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack. When his supervisors refuse to take action, he takes matters into his own hands, embarking on a dangerous trek across the globe to track down those responsible, his intelligence serving as the ultimate weapon for eluding his pursuers and achieving his revenge…

    Written and directed by Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland (Civil War, 28 Days Later), Warfare embeds audiences with a platoon of American Navy SEALs in the home of an Iraqi family, overwatching the movement of US forces through insurgent territory. A visceral, boots-on-the-ground story of modern warfare, told like never before: in real time and based on the memory of the people who lived it.

    The last one (Warfare) kinda stands out, but see the pattern? “Ex black ops protag” is super popular, and I posit that, on average, it’s a turn-off for leftists.


  • Heh, looking at the article and the cesspool of WSJ comments:

    • The elephant in the room (that the website dances around) is algorithmic attention. If people are glued to feeds on phones/at home, that’s less time to chat about (and go to) movies that don’t have the critical mass to pop into your feed. That sucks, as there’s nothing movie studios can do about our toxic information environment.

    • Going by the comments… Seems modern movie goers have a thin skin. Even the slightest hint of something woke is apparently unwatchable? But themes and conflicts that make you uncomfortable are what makes fiction interesting. This may cut both ways too (with, for instance, military-themed movies turning off more leftist moviegoers? I feel that way to some extent).

    • Wanting to watch at home is a major contributing factor, but I think its overstated compared to the above two. Like, our local Movie Tavern isn’t super luxurious, I have crazy technical family with OLED/surround setups, but going out is still a fun social excursion. Most peoples’ home setups… aren’t great.

    • Maybe this is more personal to me, but I am way more into TV series than movies these days. There’s just so much more time to worldbuild and assemble characters, and more room to run and play once established. But I would totally pay for a restaurant booth to, say, watch some TV episode I can pick with buds.


  • I mean, “modest” may be too strong a word, but a 2080 TI-ish workstation is not particularly exorbitant in the research space. Especially considering the insane dataset size (years of raw space telescope data) they’re processing here.

    Also that’s not always true. Some “AI” models, especially oldschool ones, function fine on old CPUs. There are also efforts (like bitnet) to get larger ones fast cheaply.



  • That’s even overkill. A 3090 is pretty standard in the sanely priced ML research space. It’s the same architecture as the A100, so very widely supported.

    5090 is actually a mixed bag because it’s too new, and support for it is hit and miss. And also because it’s ridiculously priced for a 32G card.

    And most CPUs with tons of RAM are fine, depending on the workload, but the constraint is usually “does my dataset fit in RAM” more than core speed (since just waiting 2X or 4X longer is not that big a deal).


  • The model was run (and I think trained?) on very modest hardware:

    The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech.

    That’s a double VRAM Nvidia RTX 2080 TI + a Skylake Intel CPU, an aging circa-2018 setup. With room for a batch size of 4096, nonetheless! Though they did run into some preprocessing bottleneck in CPU/RAM.

    The primary concern is the clustering step. Given the sheer magnitude of data present in the catalog, without question the task will need to be spatially divided in some way, and parallelized over potentially several machines