One summer in middle school our family computer failed. We bought a new motherboard from Microcenter but it didn’t come with a Windows license, so I proposed we just try Ubuntu for a while.
My mom had no trouble adjusting to it. It was all just computer to her in some ways.
Same, my mom ran Linux for years in the Vista days cuz her PC was too slow for Windows. She was fine. She even preferred Libreoffice over the Office ribbon interface.
Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. You're part of the problem this simplified Handbrake UI tries to solve. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.
I currently work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company.[0] Most everyone else there installs Ubuntu on laptops (we don't have the license to sell things with Windows), and I started to initially, but an error always appeared on boot. Consider unpacking it and turning it on for the first time, and an error immediately appears: would you wonder if what you just bought is already broken? I eventually settled on Linux Mint with the OEM install option.
For one of my relatives, it also never happened. I installed Linux on their laptop that was having issues and explained how to browse the web and use some apps.
They always answered me "it works well".
But what I found during my next visit is a paper with a telephone number of computer helpers, and the laptop was running a fresh copy of Windows, presumably installed by these helpers.
after my father got an old work notebook without windows preinstalled, i suggested trying ubuntu, his first contact with linux. installation went without problems and a few days later i asked him wheter everything was ok. he answered that everything was great, except for that "edgy desktop background of a skull" (he mentioned something about that being a typical linux hacker thing).
it was the "intrepid ibex" version and the "skull" was actually a stylized ibex.
Try looking at this another way: people who are tech savvy may be more likely to have parents who are also tech savvy when compared to the average person.
If we don’t buy that theory: There are also a lot of people who visit and comment on this site, meaning there are tons of people who have parents who have not successfully switched over to Linux. The ones who have had success are the ones speaking up, which is currently in the single digits - nothing outlandish about that.
This is no different than somebody talking about a 35mm film camera and a bunch of people jumping in with their experience with 35mm film cameras. Are you as critical/skeptical of those conversations as well? You shouldn’t be and I would be surprised if so! So the logic is basically the same.
For the record my parents do not run Linux. I could maybe vaguely see my mom getting a handle on it, but unlikely and definitely not unless she made some big commitment to do it. However, I do have a friend whose mom is a gamer using a Linux laptop. This stuff does happen!
Let it go. He made a frustrated remark in a support thread 14 years ago where the OP escalated into calling him deliberately rude. Even if he hadn't changed at all over the years he has been contributing to open source with a product used by nontechnical people for 2 decades and deserves some grace for that.
Who cares if they feel like they are the more valuable person in the relationship? Do you decide your framework based on mental games other people might play? Decide if extending an invite that is declined will cost you something (food, space, etc.) and whether you want the person there.
Is it stable? I've been using restic for a while, and I'm interested in rustic, but I have no idea how stable it is overall. Obviously it's still in beta so I won't use it in prod but curious what others experiences have been like.
Yeah, agreed on all counts. I know it's divisive, but the movement in Doom Eternal was incredible. Double dash creating some amazing levels that would have been unthinkable in Doom 2016.
This is almost true but not quite - I don't think much of the (dollar) spend on enterprise GPUs (H100, B200, etc.) would transfer if there was a 128 GB consumer card. The problem is both memory bandwidth (HBM) and networking (NVLink), which NVIDIA definitely uses to segment consumer vs enterprise hardware.
I think your argument is still true overall, though, since there are a lot of "gpu poors" (i.e. grad students) who write/invent in the CUDA ecosystem, and they often work in single card settings.
Fwiw Intel did try this with Arctic Sound / Ponte Vecchio, but it was late out the door and did not really perform (see https://chipsandcheese.com/p/intels-ponte-vecchio-chiplets-g...). It seems like they took on a lot of technical risk; hopefully some of that transfers over to a future project though Falcon Shores was cancelled. They really should should have released some of those chips even at a loss, but I don't know the cost of a tape out.
NVLink matters if you want to combine a whole bunch of GPUs, e.g. you need more VRAM than any individual GPU is available with. Many workloads exist that don't care about that or don't have working sets that large, particularly if the individual GPU actually has a lot of VRAM. If you need 128GB and you have GPUs with 40GB of VRAM then you need a fast interconnect. If you can get an individual GPU with 128GB, you don't.
There is also work being done to make this even less relevant because people are already interested in e.g. using four 16GB cards without a fast interconnect when you have a 64GB model. The simpler implementation of this is to put a quarter of the model on each card split in the order it's used and then have the performance equivalent of one card with 64GB of VRAM by only doing work on the card with that section of the data in its VRAM and then moving the (much smaller) output to the next card. A more sophisticated implementation does something similar but exploits parallelism by e.g. running four batches at once, each offset by a quarter, so that all the cards stay busy. Not all workloads can be split like this but for some of the important ones it works.
I think we might just disagree about how much of the GPU spend is on small vs large model (inference or training). I think it’s something like 99.9% of spending interest is on models that don’t fit into 128 GB (remember KV cache matters too). Happy to be proven wrong!
Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.
A few projects just in ML: DeepMind has plenty enough for Google alone but Jax and the TPU project are technically ambitious and very strategically important for Google; they hired Adam Paszke away from Meta. Besides Gemini they have Gemma and Veo and they have a reputation in the industry of having extremely high MFU averages. From Facebook there's PyTorch but that's a whole cluster of projects (compiler, abstractions for many accelerators, torchao, torchtitan). They're also famous for DINO and SAM models, as well as many others by FAIR (e.g. Mask R-CNN).
It's worth noting that many of those projects were the famous versions of papers, ones that were successful through scale rather than through innovation. I'll give a good example, here's essentially the same architecture as the 16x16 words ViT paper but a year earlier[0]. It's not even the first, they even mention two other works that used transformers on images. I'm all for scaling and it is important, but there's tons of papers like this that are greatly overshadowed because someone just scaled up and got a better benchmark. It's been getting out of hand...
>Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.
You mean small startups founded by experienced engineers?
I've always thought that the reason they don't care about gaming is because gaming has always been a race-to-the-bottom in margins business. Gamers care a lot about hardware in ways that make selling gaming PCs always very low margin (compared to enterprise or creative) (very few other customers know about RAM or SSD prices, famously Apple's bread-and-butter margin increaser).
My mom had no trouble adjusting to it. It was all just computer to her in some ways.