It would seem relatively easy to eliminate this sort of infinite loop by ensuring that all loops are finite, function call depth limited and so on. It isn't a case where you hit the halting problem; the halting problem applies to general programs, not programs deliberately constructed out of parts with finite and calculable limits to runtime - no building the Ackermann function for example, as it contains a recursive loop. With the resources available to Apple, they really have no excuse.
Amusingly, some of this is technically already happening. The shaders pass through downstream compilers that complain if they see what they determine to be a no-op infinite loop. To prove to the compilers that the loop terminates, most WebGPU implementations inject a u64 counter (technically a vec2) that counts down from u64:MAX and terminates the loop once it reaches 0. But that's such a large amount to count that the WindowServer is long gone. Fun discussion on this PR for wgpu, a Rust implementation of WebGPU: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/6572
Well this is easy to detect and kind of intentionally so, but the broader issue is quite a bit harder. Replace "infinite loop" with some very difficult program that simply takes 30+ seconds to finish and you're back to the same problem.
It doesn't even need to be computationally difficult, you can also slam the memory bus with "far away" fetches that are randomly distributed, ensuring each fetch doesn't share a cache line with any surrounding fetches. There are popular UX effects with basically this workload, even, that's a naive implementation of a large radius gaussian blur basically...
If only it did. AI is designed to do what you tell it to, and that mostly works. But in the general case, AI does what it does, with no real guarantee of anything.
He's right, of course, for those people who already have a mathematical gift, but the problem with that is that Tao has never experienced not being a mathematical genius, and is no more capable of understanding what it's like to not be a genius as an ordinary person is capable of understanding what it's like to be one.
LLMs seem to have been fine-tuned to use metaphors, presumably because they read like vivid creative writing. The over-use of metaphor in LLM-produced text is exhausting.
I found the use of throughout the text without explanation somewhat off-putting. Clearly some sort of technical usage is being suggested, but it doesn't seem to add anything to the text.
This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.
There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business.
Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.
There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.
Yeah, I feel DIY is definitely on an upswing. There's surprisingly decent info, tools and parts for cheap to be found. And materials are getting simpler to work with.
There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment.
I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says.
I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.
250 MB is exactly the sort of bloat you'd expect from this sort of daft web-browser-wrapper application, and Apple get it there. 1.2 GB, on the other hand, is 5x as much, and completely insane even when you start off with daft as your starting point.
Apple weather is fully native from what I understand. I suspect the 250MB comes from the video backgrounds they play. Arguably that would be a reasonable thing to sacrifice on low memory systems, you'd barely notice.
- ~34-40 MB of memory as general heap memory that was otherwise unaccounted for (this seems to mostly be stack memory and threading-related stuff, and the actual application logic)
Nice find and summary. Of I'm not surprised to see the ~75MB for the high graphical fidelity of the app.
I am however surprised that 10MB is Swift language runtime - with ABI compat this is supposed to be shared, and that the weather daemon is >6MB (surely this is just a simple API client?!).
Oh yea, something worth mentioning is that my analysis did not consider what memory was shared or not. That might influence the actual numbers. I believe the amount of memory used by the weatherd daemon also includes code and not just the heap memory, so the libraries that weatherd loads would be included in that.
I think this depends on perspective. Compared to an Electron app, it's significantly better. Compared to a hand-optimised app implemented in a low level language it's not great.
I've not done a lot of Swift/iOS/macOS, but I have a passing familiarity. These numbers are basically what I'd expect for a normal app. In other words I think the relative optimisation comes from the fundamentally better technology choice rather than from being particularly careful about performance.
Yea this is what I meant. I guess a more accurate phrasing would be "feels reasonably optimized." Qualitatively in terms of (lack of) graphical stutters and whatnot the macOS one feels very smooth.
I wonder if the same is also true of other high-spatial-complexity activities like rock climbing and professional dancing? (Exercise level would of course be a counfounding varable to be eliminated in these cases.)
This is a really weak argument. High-quality government websites exist, most notably the British gov.uk system. All this is beside the point - the current age verification proposals are wrong, and attempt to solve the wrong problem in ways that look very much as if they are primarily intended for surveillance rather than child protection.
'Child safe' internet access by default with a very low bar to let adults enable their devices to access the public internet is the solution. The UK's mobile providers already offer this by default - all you have to do is to call your network provider and ask for the restrictions to be turned off, and you have full internet access. Any legislation to create 'child safe' filtering should mandate that vendors provide ways for adults to turn the filtering off, easily, quickly and no questions asked - and that it should be viewed as the responsible moral default for adults to have full access to the world in order to be able to exercise their responsibilities as citizens, not some sort of option for degenerates. Whether you do this device side or network side is a technical detail.
The other sane way to do this - and what we should have done from the start, instead of providing kids with full access to the adult world by default - would be to have created 'child safe' devices to provide children with filtered access. Parents could then be in charge of whether they want their children to have that access and at what age. However, that boat has sailed.
Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.
However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.
And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.
I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.
This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.
The founders didn't think we ought to have a standing army, either, and a militia of ordinary citizens was their answer. So I guess first we will need to bring back militias made from ordinary citizens, first, and then we can debate how that changes the applicability of the amendment. Not to mention the definition of well-regulated, which I think (hope) most people interested in this issue understand.
