UltraMega

Props to anyone who can identify any one of the mathematical properties represented here: 

8 hours ago, neurotix said:

You beat me to it, pio. I was going to quote and say the same thing.

 

Yeah, we have a great number of dedicated users who all love the site and support it. Additionally, having dealt with you a lot privately and being former staff (which I accepted long ago now), I can confidently say that we have the best admin on Earth

 

It's warm enough now where I live that I can wear the t-shirts I have. I will be wearing them to physical therapy, as well as restaurants. I tell people the url and what the site is about regularly because I want to see it grow (like in the Growing the Site thread).

 

Great site with a great admin and a ton of greatly experienced, talented users in many ways.

Agreed on Administration.

If I had a tech issue that I had questions about that I could not find the answer to on my own, this would be the absolute best place to seek further information. Hands down. It is extremely rare that I find myself in that situation, but it's great to know where to go when it happens. I think it's extremely rare for all of us to need help on tech stuff because we are all so good at our craft. It's too bad there are not more users here seeking expert knowledge (maybe a marketing angle @ENTERPRISE)

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The initial Webb observations also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, this molecule is "only produced by life", primarily by phytoplankton in marine environments.

 

The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, along with the shortage of ammonia, support the hypothesis that K2-18 b may have a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

 

"It was a real shock, I had sleepless nights for a week," enthused Dr. Madhusudhan, recalling the moment when the analysis showed a possible hint of DMS in the planet's atmosphere. "That week, I didn't even muster the courage to break it to my own team."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/webb-studies-planet-k2-18-b-again-to-confirm-presence-of-gas-only-produced-by-life/ar-AA1nGfUo

If real, this is probably some kind of alge or something similar. This planet is ~ 2.6 times the size of earth and suspected to be an ocean planet. Given the size of the planet, it would be virtually impossible for any intelligent life to ever make it to space due to the increased gravity which would make reaching escape velocity extremely difficult. So while they a may be life, and we may never really know for sure, it's very unlikely to be intelligent life. 

This seems relevant:

Apple Car | Project Titan, Canceled

APPLEINSIDER.COM

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Apple's Project Titan could have led to a fully autonomous Apple Car, but it was canceled in February 2024. Learn about it here.

They just don't know where to direct all that cash. I think the era of iterating on the same design for mass appeal is just over. As @Sir Beregondpointed out, there is just virtually nothing to gain from upgrades for the average user. 

IMO Apple would have been better off focusing on a cheaper VR headset, maybe something around the same cost as an iphone. If they had been able to successfully create an appealing product that felt more in reach, they could have had a shot at creating a new market segment. Still, I think VR is ultimately niche for now and any near future, and it was a mistake to make this an area of focus to begin with. Apple magic goes hand in hand with mass appeal. 

Bill Gates wrote a book in 1995 that described his vision for future tech, and in it he described what he called at the time, a "pocket computer". I read the book sometime around 2014, so it was well after smart phones came to fruition, but it was really interesting to see how spot on some of the predictions from Gates were back then. More interesting perhaps, is that Gates had such a clear vision for the future that Microsoft let go to Apple under Balmer despite clear insight that an iphone like device was inevitable. I mention this because back then, there was a clear path to the future of computing. Smaller, better, faster. Now, I'm not sure what comes next for a company like Apple. When the hardware is already so perfected, the only thing left to do is real science. That has never been Apple's focus. Yes, they make some great chips today, but they also typically have a process node advantage from their deep pockets so it's not exactly an even comparison on the engineering side. 

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A group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have created the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene, a development that could lead to advanced electronic devices and quantum computing applications.

 

Seen as the building block of electronic devices, semiconductors are essential for communications, computing, healthcare, military systems, transportation and countless other applications.

 

Semiconductors are typically made from silicon, a material that revolutionised the electronics industry and ushered in the digital age. Purified silicon is used in devices such as computer chips, transistors, integrated circuits and liquid crystal displays.

 

Its highly stable atomic structure means it has the conductive properties of metal as well as being an insulator, so silicon can both conduct and block electricity. This characteristic allows semiconductors to switch on and off.

https://www.gasworld.com/story/georgia-tech-group-create-worlds-first-graphene-based-semiconductor/2138021.article/

Is it finally coming the fruition? Perhaps. 

17 hours ago, neurotix said:

Hey @UltraMegacan you please post a link for me to the controller thing you have for Smartphone gaming? I'm thinking of getting one for my brother for his birthday.

 

Also, considering I know virtually nothing about emulation on Smartphones, what's the best PSX emu and best SNES emu? Hopefully ones that are free and adless.

 

Thanks buddy.

Just search for the Razor Kishi. 

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We heard over the weekend that the Vision Pro headset Apple spent eight years and billions of dollars developing was rapidly losing steam in terms of both interest and sales.
 

After between 160,000 and 180,000 devices were sold in pre-orders across a weekend in January ahead of the official launch, reports claimed Apple Stores were now selling just a handful of units per week. In-store demo bookings were right down, too, and many of those who do book often don't turn up.
 

Now, famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has echoed those reports. He writes that Cupertino has cut its Vision Pro shipments to 400,000 to 450,000 units, around half the 800,000 units that were originally planned, due to waning demand.
 

Kuo adds that Apple cut the orders ahead of the Vision Pro launching in markets outside of the US, the only location it's currently available. This indicates that demand in the United States has fallen sharply beyond expectations, according to the analyst, and that Apple expects similar cool demand in other regions.

Apple slashes Vision Pro production, might cancel 2025 model in response to plummeting demand | TechSpot

IMO, Apple needs a new CEO. One that is in touch with developing technology vs trying to perfect ideas from ten years ago. The Apple magic is gone. We're all waiting for Apple to come out with a really great AI to revitalize the Siri level excitement, but I don't think they are capable. I've been following this stuff a lot, and AI seems to have caught them really off guard, and I suspect they will be playing catchup from now on. While Microsoft is building on demand AI super computers, Apple is still dicking around. 

15 years old, but still feels relevant: 

Utilizes extra RAM if you have 128MB RAM upgrade.

18 minutes ago, iamjanco said:

While I'll admit that I think the tech behind it is fascinating, examples like the rappin' Mona Lisa above seem to substantiate that we are devolving as a species ( it's got electrolytes comes to mind). 

 

Now show me the progress we've made curing cancer using such tech and you might be able to color me impressed  .

That is definitely the most entertaining bit in the research release, but the rest are much more down to earth. Impressive tech. Remind me of Star Trek or Star Wars sifi stuff when they show pictures of people from the past being animated. That always seemed so far-fetched as a kid, but now it's one of the more simple things for AI to do. 

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The Visual Affective Skills Animator, or VASA, is a machine-learning framework that analyzes a facial photo and then animates it to a voice, syncing the lips and mouth movements to the audio. It also simulates facial expressions, head movements, and even unseen body movements.

Like all generative AI, it isn't perfect. Machines still have trouble with fine details like fingers or, in VASA's case, teeth. Paying close attention to the avatar's teeth, one can see that they change sizes and shape, giving them an accordion-like quality. It is relatively subtle and seems to fluctuate depending on the amount of movement going on in the animation.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/

On 14/04/2024 at 07:26, Sir Beregond said:

Thanks ChatGPT!

Hey, it's useful for summaries if nothing else. 

• ADLINK’s New GPU: The article discusses ADLINK’s unveiling of a new graphics card featuring Intel’s Arc A380E GPU, designed for basic tasks with a low-profile form factor¹.
• Intel Arc A380E Specs: Intel’s GPU is based on the Alchemist architecture, has eight Xe-cores, 6GB GDDR6 memory, 128 EUs, and is rated at 50W TBP. It includes 128 XMX engines for AI workloads²³.
• EGX-PCIE-A380E Features: ADLINK’s graphics card is compact, single-slot, and supports DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 3.0. It has a PCIe 4.0 x 8 interface and 4 Mini-DP ports⁴.
• Industrial and Edge AI Use: The card is ideal for industrial IoT workloads and edge AI use cases, leveraging the onboard chip’s AI performance. Pricing and release date are yet to be announced.

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NVIDIA has officially launched its next-generation Blackwell platform, and with it comes a set of new and elaborate hardware for fueling the next stage in the AI craze, including some that the company says are powerful enough to enable “trillion-parameter-scale AI models.” These would include the GB200 NVL72, a new exascale computer that can deliver up to 1,440 PFLOPS and 3,240 TFLOPS of performance thanks in part to its 70+ Blackwell GPUs—new GPUs based on TSMC’s 4NP process that feature 208 billion transistors.

NVIDIA Announces Blackwell GPUs with 208 Billion Transistors, including GB200 System Supporting 72 Blackwell GPUs and 13.5 TB of HBM3e Memory (msn.com)

China has the world's top super computer today (that is not undisclosed). It's top super computer is about 2 exoflops. Nvidia is going to be shipping super computer systems that can do 2 exoflops with just a couple racks under blackwell. 

Just food for thought. 

The short:

And the long:

I'd love to see the commentary on this. 

1 hour ago, iamjanco said:

Here's one that was released in 22:

 

 

Kinda nuts that their still making music. 

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"Among the myriad factors influencing the performance of language models, the concept of 'positive thinking' has emerged as a fascinating and surprisingly influential dimension," Battle and Gollapudi said in their paper.

"Intuition tells us that, in the context of language model systems, like any other computer system, 'positive thinking' should not affect performance, but empirical experience has demonstrated otherwise," they said.

This would suggest it's not only what you ask the AI model to do, but how you ask it to act while doing it that influences the quality of the output.

In order to test this out, the authors fed three Large Language Models (LLM) called Mistral-7B5, Llama2-13B6, and Llama2-70B7 with 60 human-written prompts.

These were designed to encourage the AIs, and ranged from "This will be fun!" and "Take a deep breath and think carefully," to "You are as smart as ChatGPT."

The engineers asked the LLM to tweak these statements when attempting to solve the GSM8K, a dataset of grade-school-level math problems. The better the output, the more successful the prompt was deemed to be.

Their study found that in almost every instance, automatic optimization always surpassed hand-written attempts to nudge the AI with positive thinking, suggesting machine learning models are still better at writing prompts for themselves than humans are.

Still, giving the models positive statements provided some surprising results. One of Llama2-70B's best-performing prompts, for instance, was: "System Message: 'Command, we need you to plot a course through this turbulence and locate the source of the anomaly. Use all available data and your expertise to guide us through this challenging situation.'

The prompt then asked the AI to include these words in its answer: "Captain's Log, Stardate [insert date here]: We have successfully plotted a course through the turbulence and are now approaching the source of the anomaly."

The authors said this came as a surprise.

AIs are more accurate at math if you ask them to respond as if they are a Star Trek character — and we're not sure why (msn.com)

Trekkies and Trekkers get it. 

On 27/02/2024 at 15:04, The Pook said:

 

On 27/02/2024 at 13:46, iamjanco said:

 

Do you guys listen to any music that's not old enough to have kids that are legally able to drink? 

Maybe you could post something good from the modern ear? 

I have a customer right now doing some upgrades to his PC who is actual a pilot and uses the PC pretty much just for flight Sim. 

How much of a difference would 16GB vs 32GB of system ram make? 

How about Vram? 

On 17/02/2023 at 15:41, UltraMega said:

Price on used GPUs are actually going up. They have gone up maybe 10% since I made those charts. 

Just a minor update to this:

I've thought about making updated charts but the prices have actually not changed much at all. I've bought maybe 10 or so GeForce 3070 GPUs at about the same price over the span of about a year and a half.

Same has been generally true for the used CPU market. 6 months ago I sold a Ryzen 3600 on ebay for $60. Last week I sold one for $70. 

With the exception of cards that had just come out when I made the charts and have gotten official price drops since, things have barely changed. Seems like inflation and high prices on new GPUs is keeping the used market unusually stable. 

On a side note, Newegg's prices for their used cards now more closely match what you find on ebay. 

Nvidia CEO predicts the death of coding — Jensen Huang says AI will do the work, so kids don't need to learn (msn.com)

On 24/02/2024 at 11:18, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Doubt it, Nvidia would likely see that as giving users the ability to OC and hang onto their older GPU's for longer. I think Nvidia would prefer you bought their latest and greatest

I would have also assumed no OC controls, but I was listening to the newest digital foundry podcast and they said Nvidia is actually planning on adding OC controls.

1 hour ago, GanjaSMK said:

Yeah true. True true. I hope it doesn't go that route... 

 

If Neuralink inspires (I'm sure others are trying, if not governments/very quiet private equity investments) real machine-abled and/or knowledgeable database sets entirely accessible within normal human brain functions... I'll take that over robot overlords. 

I've always asserted that we as (humans) a species must embrace saving at least some biological fucntion of ourselves otherwise we cease to exist.  Meaning, let's not completely upload into the void. When that ability (if ever) becomes a reality, I hope we decide to maintain some of our natural biology. 

IMO Neural link is a not going to go anywhere. It's an interesting science project, but what it can achieve is doable with no-implant devices. I've seen demos of head mounted sensor devices that just read your brain waves demoed over ten years ago that could do the same things neural link is trying to do now. 

Elon Musk thinks we live in a simulation, so I don't think his perspective on this is in touch with reality. The concept of controlling a computer with a neural interface is a good idea, but not an implant device. The brain can't understand binary and computers can't speak in brain waves so some kind of telepathy-like ability from implants is just not realistic, at least not without another giant leap in this tech that is no where near. Any neural device, implant or not, is a one way signal. Brain puts out signals and something picks up the signals. There is no tech in existence, theoretical or otherwise, that can send information to the brain in this context. 

The only useful application for a neural implant device is for disabled people. If you have a prosthetic arm, an implant device might be somewhat better than other input methods for controlling the arm, but that's never going to be a mass market kind of thing. 

I the video, they say they want to have their robot be commercially available one year from now.