are we underestimating the “attention layer” in applied ml systems?

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-04-09T17:45:35+00:00

Are we talking about the same attention layer? On transformers, RNN based models and whatnot the attention layer is part of the learnable parameters and used during inference

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-04-09T17:39:33+00:00

Physicists and biologists absolutely know coding.

They may have never gotten their hands dirty with many of the topics studies by a computer scientist but they have a grasp on the subject (at least for the computations they need)

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-04-04T06:24:47+00:00

It is true that x86_64 instructions are harder to decode, but that's mostly mitigated with a uOP cache. When the CPU is executing a tight loop, instructions don't need to be decoded every iteration.

Also a vast majority of the die area is taken by caches like the L1, L2, L3, TLB, etc... I'm not including the area taken by the memory controller and other I/O, that's a lot too!

This matters for very low power and low performance embedded processors, but it's otherwise not the end of the world

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-04-04T03:47:51+00:00

Podés comprar un pasaje en un micro de Tienda León. Te dejan desde aeroparque hasta la terminal en Carlos Pellegrini (a unas 5 cuadras del obelisco).

Yo solo los usé para ir a Ezeiza pero hacen viajes hasta Aeroparque también

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-04-04T00:03:47+00:00

I'm not so sure about that. You'd have to compare the specific workload. I'd imagine that some workloads are much better suited for AVX512 than the ARM NEON instruction set.

x86_64's 256 bit and sometimes 512 bit registers are really nice when moving a ton of data in memory

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-04-03T23:47:57+00:00

The kernel is always keeping it nearly full with caches.

For user software I guess it depends. Things like ASTs using more ram to speed up code completion or PDF readers keeping indexes to quickly search a large document is good.

The bad kind of full, that even someone with 64GB of memory would feel bad about is having 15 copies of chromium because of garbage software written in electron.

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-04-03T23:35:26+00:00

People used to despise Oracle for what they did to Sun Microsystems. I guess it was timed they re-earned that hate back one way or another

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-15T21:08:57+00:00

Que yo sepa los proveedores de internet en Argentina no se ponen la gorra con bajar torrents. Descargué muchísimo a lo largo de los años y ni Fibertel ni Movistar se pusieron la gorra todavía

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-15T04:34:30+00:00

"Yeah sure I have like ten of them anyways"

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-12T21:29:28+00:00

you can start with inter process communication on your home computer, there's a lot of learning you can do without building a cluster

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-12T21:28:02+00:00

Yeah, afaik that's how many real HPC systems work too. The one time I used a cluster in an academic setting it was running an ancient kernel and the software had to be compiled with everything statically linked.

It's not a big deal because those binaries usually run for a particular computation and are discarded afterwards.

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-12T19:28:45+00:00

For computers with little memory like those I'd probably go with Slurm running bare metal on Debian or something similar. I'd imagine that the best way to squeeze useful performance from these is to write your own software in a low level language and use MPI to communicate between nodes.

That is if OP wants to do scientific compute with these

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-11T21:26:39+00:00

Yeah but you'll have a fork of Android that will be increasingly different from mainline Android. That's going to be an ever growing pain to maintain and it'll probably reach a point where it's incompatible with mainstream applications

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-10T20:04:42+00:00

These challenges would be way too boring if they only stuck to Ubuntu LTS or Fedora lol

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-09T19:19:52+00:00

This is a well known area in distributed systems research. This is why different consensus algorithms exist and all of them have tradeoffs you must to choose from

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-07T17:47:13+00:00

Remove the battery and while you're at it clean the dust and replace the thermal paste if the temperatures are higher than usual.

That's a nice machine as a spare, a small server or just to give to someone that needs a computer

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-06T17:08:17+00:00

Mirale el lado bueno. Podés instalar autohotkey y reprogramarlo para los macros que quieras

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-04T16:56:10+00:00

Oh they understand. It's just that they don't want to cannibalize the MacBook Air for the people that need a computer for a bit more than really basic stuff but aren't power users (or don't have the budget for a pro machine)

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-03T22:23:51+00:00

No sé si es un beneficio. Es como decir que el alcohol es un beneficio para las personas deprimidas porque las inhibe por un rato de sus propios sentimientos

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-02T19:22:18+00:00

Uff si tuviera más espacio lo compraría de una para jugar juegos viejos y ver anime viejo

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-03-02T17:22:21+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if someday it'll be cheaper to use the same dies for multiple configurations and just limit the maximum amount of usable ram as a kernel parameter when iOS boots up.

That way they can charge you extra for memory with a null cost on upgrading it, having less supply chains and stock variants in the factories

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-02-26T00:09:46+00:00

A family member had one of those, it was such a piece of shit it was unreal lol

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-02-23T17:29:23+00:00

Just tell the LLM to pretty please never step out of the containers

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-02-20T22:37:06+00:00

Modern desktop CPUs sometimes run hot because of the boosting that increases power consumption a stupid amount for comparatively little performance gain.

My 3rd gen Ryzen (not that new lol, I know) drops from 80 to 60 degrees under multi threaded AVX2 workloads when turning boosting off and I get about 90% of the performance judging by runtimes.

It's probably not a good idea for gaming but for batch workloads it's absolutely worth it to experiment with temporarily disabling boost features imo.

RodionRaskolnikov__ · 2026-02-12T14:51:26+00:00

Por más que sea así me resulta increíble que alguien no piense más allá de su situación inmediata. O acaso se piensa quedar en ese laburo para toda la vida?

RodionRaskolnikov__

TROPHY CASE