Why is everything today has to be "good" or "bad". Where is the nuance? Where is seeing things as they are - an exciting endeavor built by thousands of people, one of them has flaws you don't like.
The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.
My theory is that tribalism is hard coded in our brain, strongly selected for by those bad times in the past, where the ability to turn off emotion and critical thoughts meant you, a generally social creature, could murder your fellow man, to keep your family/in group alive/fed.
I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.
People who themselves eschew nuance should not be surprised when they and everything they touch are polarized into "good" and "bad" buckets. I'm pretty neutral to most companies on earth, because their CEOs wisely don't make wild comments every other day on their personal politics.
This isn't a new thing, ideas and actions have always been judged by who says them. If anything, the difference is that in the past, his behavior would have gotten him thrown out both from his companies and out of polite society.
As a European my problem is that any additional success by Musks means more support for far right extremists that want to destroy the EU. Being against that is not moralizing or Tribalism.
I hoped to get across that I still find this to be a nuanced issue. I like the content, I just dislike the discourse around it, which makes it hard for me to get excited about the content.
I too would like it to just be about the content, but nothing exists in a vacuum.
This seems like less of a today thing and more of an ancient human tendency.
A lot of Buddhist practice is basically trying to train against immediately collapsing reality into self/other, right/wrong, craving/aversion.
Practicing this with Elon Musk is effectively ultra hard mode.
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Though I do think there’s a subtle irony here too — the original commenter may simply be describing their own emotional reaction/disillusionment, while your response risks collapsing them into "part of the problem."
Feels like everybody in the thread is pointing at the same tendency from different angles.
Well, Musk illegally wrecked half the federal government and killed tens of thousands of Africans in the process. Now he spends his days boosting and funding white nationalists and far-right politicians around the world. Why does everything have to be "good" or "bad"? Because some things are just pure evil and need to be called out as such, as well as thoroughly boycotted if the wheels of justice are too slow to turn.
This is not a nuanced case of "he did a few icky things, but also lots of good things." No. He is a fucked up, deeply racist megalomaniac who is doing his best to reshape the Western world in his fetid image. If he stopped with Tesla and SpaceX, maybe he would be penned differently in the history books, but alas.
If you replace "online" with "modern", then your comment could be an impassioned 1940s-era defense of Nazi Germany for their "merits" in face of their flaws.
The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.
AMD’s software experience is riddled with bugs rendering out of the box training with AMD is impossible. We were hopeful that AMD could emerge as a strong competitor to NVIDIA in training workloads, but, as of today, this is unfortunately not the case. The CUDA moat has yet to be crossed by AMD due to AMD’s weaker-than-expected software Quality Assurance (QA) culture and its challenging out of the box experience.
[snip]
> The only reason we have been able to get AMD performance within 75% of H100/H200 performance is because we have been supported by multiple teams at AMD in fixing numerous AMD software bugs. To get AMD to a usable state with somewhat reasonable performance, a giant ~60 command Dockerfile that builds dependencies from source, hand crafted by an AMD principal engineer, was specifically provided for us
[snip]
> AMD hipBLASLt/rocBLAS’s heuristic model picks the wrong algorithm for most shapes out of the box, which is why so much time-consuming tuning is required by the end user.
etc etc. The whole thing is worth reading.
I'm sure it has (and will continue to) improved since then. I hear good things about the Lemonade team (although I think that is mostly inference?)
That’s insane. There should be a big team of people at AMD whose whole job is just to dogfood their stuff for training like this. Speaking of which, Amazon is in the same boat, I’m constantly surprised that Amazon is not treating improving Inferentia/Trainium software as an uber-priority. (I work at Amazon)
> “Are we afraid of our competitors? No, we’re completely unafraid of our competitors,” said Taylor. “For the most part, because—in the case of Nvidia—they don’t appear to care that much about VR. And in the case of the dollars spent on R&D, they seem to be very happy doing stuff in the car industry, and long may that continue—good luck to them.
Where's the scope for an L7 promo in "Fixed a bunch of tiny issues that were making it hard to use Tranium/Inferentia with PyTorch"?
Amazon's compensation strategy, in which you primarily get a raise years in the future for tricking your management chain into promoting you is definitely bearing its rotten fruit.
Anecdotal but over several years with an AMD GPU in my desktop I've tried multiple times to do real AI work and given up every time with the AMD stack.
Im running fine on my AMD 7800xt 16gb... Yes memory is a bit limited, but apart from the i have found that it works great using Vulcan in LM studio for example.
ROCm works great too, the only issue i have had is that my machine froze a couple of times as it used 100% of the graphics and the OS had nothing left. Since moving to vulcan i stopped getting these errors apart from a little UI slowdown when i had 4 models loaded at the same time taking turns.
Im also on a i7 6700 with 32gb DDR4 so im sure that is causing more slowdowns then the graphics card.
Yet another reason to doubt claims that ”software is solved”.
Anthropic did retire an interview take-home assignment involving optimising inference on exotic hardware, because Claude could one shot a solution, but that was clearly a whiteboard hypothetical instead of a real system with warts, issues and nuance.
i'm doing inference on a free mi300x instance from AMD right now. not sure if the software stack is just old or what, but here's what i've observed: stuck on an old version of vllm pre-Transformers 5 support. it lacks MoE support for qwen3 models. oss-120b is faaaar slower than it should be.
int8 quantization seems like it's almost supported, but not quite. speeds drop to a fraction of full precision speed and the server seems like it intermittently hangs. int4 quantization not supported. fp8 quantization not supported.
again, maybe AMD is just being lazy with what they've provided, but it's not a great look.
right now the fastest smart model i can run is full precision qwen3-32b. with 120 parallel requests (short context) i'm getting PP @ 4500 tokens/sec and TG @ 1300 tokens/sec
From the papers I've read and the labs that I have worked in personally, I would say that most scientists developing Deep learning solutions use CUDA for GPU acceleration
Yeah, historically it’s been software that’s limited AMD here. Not surprised to hear that may still be the issue. NVidia’s biggest edge was really CUDA.
I don’t know what’s a chicken and what’s an egg here. But ROCm support is often missing or experimental even in very basic foundational libraries. They need someone else to double down on using their chips and just break the software support out of the limbo.
This is what I've heard on the "street". Building a CUDA-compatible stack for AMD's hardware requires highly-paid SWEs. It's a very niche field, and talent is hard to come by.
But AMD does not want to pay these specialized SWEs the market rate. Their existing SWEs would be up in arms saying, basically, "what are we, chopped liver??", or so the thinking goes.
So AMD is stuck with a shitty software stack which cannot compete with CUDA.
If I were making such decisions, I would just cull the number of existing SWEs down by 50%, and double the pay for remaining ones. And then go out and hire some top talent to build a good software stack.
Political polarization create tribalism, where people align their view with their tribe, and justify an increasingly more escalatory means to fight the "other side".
Other potential macro-contributing factors may include: breakdown in local community, removal of community forums for discussion, attention economy and tabloid journalism gravitating toward emotional reaction (TikTok) rather than intellectual dialogue (balanced journalism), social media echo chambers, removal of accessible popular education, defunding of public media, unaffordable public access to medicine, credit culture, increasingly unaffordable costs of living and abnormally performative political dioramas. The net result are people, unable to reason about the world around them, drawn in to emotional us-and-them with a dialogue of echo-chamber reinforcement, who decide semi-rationally to "chuck it all in" the second things get out of control financially, psychologically or emotionally. In other words, the modern world has built a perfect breeding ground for recruitment to extremism. <s>Great time to start a cult.</s>
... and in a classic example, apparently the mere mention of concern regarding the rise in US political violence got this thread flagged. Where can you have a discussion anymore?
Especially since America is happier than most European countries [1]. And the ones that are happier are the Nordics and Ireland which are more suburban and less dense.
The game is about rolling sausages over grills to cook them on both sides. However, that's completely unrelated to why it's so acclaimed.
This game introduces a very small set of controls and mechanics (you basically only have the arrow keys, and initially can just move around), and combines it with minimally small, yet surprisingly hard puzzles. Every puzzles is distilled to its smallest form, and involves a genuinely satisfying eureka moment.
The game then explores every possible hidden way to use the minimal set of mechanics introduced, before introducing a new mechanic (e.g. early on you'll be able to suddenly 'stab' you sausages which allows you to move them around differently. So you become a master of the game as you progress.
The problem for new players is that it's deceptively difficult to solve even the simplest puzzles + it encourages you to explore and learn how things work instead of giving you hints. This makes inexperienced players abandon it way before it fully reveals itself (which takes many hours into the game).
What I suggest is if you are new and are frustrated, find a Youtuber that solved it so that you can look at what they did. This way you won't get stuck to the point of leaving it, while still allowing you to fully enjoy it.
242 Elo points clear of the next best model and 93% win rate against random models (96% against nano banana) while Gemini 3.1 (second best) sits at 67%. That’s quite the leap.
LM Arena is a particularly bad comparison site too. Prompts that they use are usually incredibly generic like "A digital render of a sleek, futuristic motorcycle racing through a neon-lit cityscape."
I actually built GenAI Showdown a while back because I was deeply unsatisfied with LM Arena and other purported comparison tables which either (A) relied solely on visual fidelity (which is a far less interesting benchmark than adherence, IMHO) and/or (B) relied on extremely simplistic and banal prompts.
You are missing the point above - the F35 has enabled complete air dominance over Iran, and ability to perform any operation with impunity over Iran's land.
Iran is leveraging its geography and asymmetrical warfare against civilian ship (as done by its proxies), but if the US has build tons of cheap attack drones, that wouldn't have changed anything about this equation. The US already has the ability to strike anywhere in Iran.
Eventually, defense capabilities against drones may catch up and change the equation, but this is all research at this point.
Your definition of "complete dominance" is different from most people's.
If you completely dominate your enemy, you prevent them from being able to affect the situation. Iran is maintaining a blockade over a major shipping lane that the USA does not want them to. The USA's inability to prevent this shows that they are not "completely dominating" Iran.
No, "air dominance" is a well recognized term, it means you can fly your planes basically anywhere you want, to take out whatever target you want, without risk from AA. They are using it exactly how anyone familiar with warfare terminology would understand it.
"Air supremacy" would be dominance of the air such that enemy cannot effectively interfere. "Air superiority" is the lesser level (enemy interference is not prohibitive).
Air supremacy (using your useful NATO definition) is not stopping Iran from flying drones and missiles. I don't know if that therefore contradicts the US/Israeli forces having Air Supremacy, or if Air Supremacy itself is an outdated term because it doesn't allow for the kind of drone bombardment we see now.
Either way, it's not "complete dominance" which is where we started from ;)
> P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.
It's meaningless now.
If the US, for some reason, decided to say, "For each drone or missile that you fire at one of your Arab neighbors or Israel, we launch an old-fashioned B52 raid on your industry or infrastructure. Come to the negotiating table." and actually carried out that threat, well, there would be nothing the Iranians would be able to do about it.
That's not the case because of the currently scattered nature of US leadership, but it is a possible contingency that the Iranian government has to take into account. There's a reason they're not actively targeting US warships in the region.
Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.
Can you use an example that doesn't prove the exact opposite?
Bombing absolutely worked in Vietnam so much that the south didn't actually lose the war until 2 years after the USA left. The war becoming a political nightmare is why the USA left not because the horrendously effective bombing stopped working.
Ukraine is really weird to put in here because Russia has fail to establish any effective air superiority so I can't make heads or tails why you put it in here.
As for the Blitz is was absolutely effective vs the British but USA factories and supply shipments were largely out of reach of the Axis.
Add in the fact that the people of Iran are largely opposed to being governed by a Muslim theocracy (most of the population is not Muslim) I'm frankly struggling to see how you get any of your viewpoints.
That is a unique view of what happened in Vietnam.
But let's look at a more modern example that makes your case: Syria. The US starved that country, seizing the food and oil, funding/arming terror groups - not just the kurds but also Al Nusra and other islamic terror groups, invading portions of the country and placing military bases there to give air support to terror operations and maintain control of the oil wells, blowing up pipelines, for over a decade. Finally after years of starvation and hyperinflation, the government collapsed as the generals were bribed by Qatar (or the Qataris were just intermediaries, we don't know) to lay down their arms and let the Jolani regime take over. When you are convinced your nation doesn't have a future, suitcases of cash and exit visas to mansions in London do wonders.
So yeah, you can punish a nation so much that it is easy to take over.
But, can the world survive 10 years of the straight of Hormuz being closed? I doubt it. Syria was a small country and it held out for a decade. Sure, it had help from Russia and China, but so does Iran now. When the US was strangling Syria, we already controlled the oil and food producing regions of the country. But there is no such arrangement in Iran, and Syria was not able to close off a major shipping lane like Iran can.
So I am skeptical that the US can outlast Iran and inflict enough misery on them to overthrow the region before this Iran adventure is brought to a close by world oil prices and US domestic political unrest.
You're suggesting that bombing civilian infrastructure will cause the Iranians to surrender (or to concede negotiating points in order to stop the bombing).
My point is that this doesn't work - the British under The Blitz famously had "Blitz Spirit" that was all about enduring the bombing and showing the Germans that they couldn't be beaten like this. The Vietnamese did not try to stop the bombing by surrendering or negotiating, and neither have the Ukrainians; again, if anything, they are more unified and more resolute because of the Russians attacks on their infrastructure.
Can you give me a single example where prolonged bombing of civilian infrastructure has brought a country to the negotiating table? Or made them surrender?
Even if it doesn't cause them to "surrender" - I still don't know what the point of this whole "limited operation" is - it would effectively set back Iran's ability to operate a nuclear materials enrichment program, among other things.
I'd also like to point out that German raids on Britain, American raids on Vietnam, and Russian raids on Ukraine are not exactly comparable to the sort of bombing raids carried out by the Allies (particularly the US and UK) in Germany and Japan in scale.
If anything, the Iranians are trying the same strategy the Nazis did with the V1 and V2 with their drones and missiles: use them as a weapon of stochastic terror against the population of the region and on the occasional industrial target.
Again, as I replied above, Japan was nuked. There were 2 bombs. That is not "sustained bombing". Also, they were losing the conventional war and US troops had set foot on Japanese soil.
The Germans surrendered because millions of Russian troops invaded their capital city. The bombing had nothing to do with it (and I would argue, even hardened their resolve against surrendering).
> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive
Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is ‘optimize familiarity.
That’s why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small differences between them are where contention happen.
If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their way.
You're arguing for familiarity in tactful design, while I agree that for most users this is a good thing, repeatability of existing patterns does create that immediate familiarity.
HOWEVER, that familiarity is only a virtue because someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar. AI can only optimise toward the current snapshot of "familiar". It cannot produce the next one. If designers outsource all their thinking to a model even in tactful design we would never have groundbreaking design concepts like "pull to refresh" or the command palette.
> someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar
That’s not necessarily what happened though. Apple innovated not out of sheer daring but because they also had the best metaphysical paradigm for GUIs that people could also just intuitively grasp. There was a structural correctness to their approach, underlying all the things that we find visually appealing. In the beginning, Google dared and deviated hard from Apple’s design language to establish their own unique identity, but anyone who’s working in the mobile space would Have noticed that Android coalesced into roughly the same patterns over time because of that structural correctness.
When you aim for familiarity you also make the assumption that someone else's judgement and opinion was and is the correct one, when you question the assumed only then can you make meaningful improvements. See the iphone which was totally different to the "standard" phones of its time.
The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.
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