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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • I’d be interested in setting up the highest quality models to run locally, and I don’t have the budget for a GPU with anywhere near enough VRAM, but my main server PC has a 7900x and I could afford to upgrade its RAM - is it possible, and if so how difficult, to get this stuff running on CPU? Inference speed isn’t a sticking point as long as it’s not unusably slow, but I do have access to an OpenAI subscription so there just wouldn’t be much point with lower quality models except as a toy.




  • Kessler syndrome isn’t really that much of a risk specifically with Starlink (for now at least), as SpaceX seems to be doing things right despite Musk. They’re in such low orbits that even with a catastrophic loss of control, they’ll deorbit very quickly. The real risk comes as more companies and countries try to get a piece of the megaconstellation pie. Starlink in its own seems to be fairly safe and sustainable on its own, but that may quickly change when communication for collision avoidance maneuvers needs to be international.

    Despite Musk’s well-earned reputation for being a shithead, SpaceX has this far been doing the right thing far more often than most other space companies, and while it’s certainly possible that will change, the Starlink constellation will entirely disappear very quickly without constant replenishment, so it’s not as if we’d have no chance to act if they begin to show signs of concerning behavior. What’s far more worrying to me in terms of Kessler syndrome is the recent escalation around space warfare, as tensions between Russia, China, and the US continue to boil and nobody seems willing to really commit to making space a neutral zone. Even with space historically being an area of strong international cooperation despite politics (just look at the ISS), that unfortunately seems to be rapidly changing.


  • Well they said .NET Framework, and I also wouldn’t be surprised if they more or less wrapped that up - .NET Framework specifically means the old implementation of the CLR, and it’s been pretty much superseded by an implementation just called .NET, formerly known as .NET Core (definitely not confusing at all, thanks Microsoft). .NET Framework was only written for Windows, hence the need for Mono/Xamarin on other platforms. In contrast, .NET is cross-platform by default.




  • This is a use-after-free, which should be impossible in safe Rust due to the borrow checker. The only way for this to happen would be incorrect unsafe code (still possible, but dramatically reduced code surface to worry about) or a compiler bug. To allocate heap space in safe Rust, you have to use types provided by the language like Box, Rc, Vec, etc. To free that space (in Rust terminology, dropping it by using drop() or letting it go out of scope) you must be the owner of it and there may be current borrows (i.e. no references may exist). Once the variable is droped, the variable is dead so accessing it is a compiler error, and the compiler/std handles freeing the memory.

    There’s some extra semantics to some of that but that’s pretty much it. These kind of memory bugs are basically Rust’s raison d’etre - it’s been carefully designed to make most memory bugs impossible without using unsafe. If you’d like more information I’d be happy to provide!





  • I was very intrigued by a follow-up to the recent numberphile video about divergent series. It was a return to the idea that the sum of the integers greater than zero can be assigned the value -1/12. There were some places this could be used, but as far as I know it was viewed as shaky math by a lot of experts.

    As far as I recall the story goes something like this: now, using a new technique Terrence Tao found, a team was seemingly able to “fix” previous infinities in quantum field theory - there’s a certain way to make at least some divergent series work out to being a real number, and the presenter proposed that this can be explained as the universe “protecting us” from the infinities inherent in the math.

    It made me think about other places infinities show up in modern physics (namely, singularities in general relativity) and whether a technique something like this could “solve” them without a whole new framework like string theory is.