There is monitoring of beach pollution but data publication is typically delayed, like, we know it went down by 30% from 2015-2016 to 2020-2021, we will have data on a regulation that went into force in late 2024 only in a few years.
according to medieval reports the white limestone surfaces of the pyramids were absolutely cluttered with Egyptian Roman and other in eligible graffiti
perhaps Fredric Brown? He and Asimov were in my primary school reading anthology, and I will never thank enough the people who put the book together.
Also, I am not sure he's translated in English, but Sessanta Racconti[0] by Dino Buzzati is high on my list of fantastic short stories (not sci-fi, just.. I don't know).
Perhaps one issue lacking discussion in the article is how easy it is to find devs?
I've never worked in HPC but it seems it should be relatively simple to find a C/C++ dev that can pick up OpenMP, or one that already knows it, compared to hiring people who know Chapel.
The "scaling down" factor (how easy or interesting it is to use tool X for small use) seems a disadvantage of HPC-only languages, which creates a barrier to entry and a reduction in available workforce.
I worked in HPC adjacent fields for a while (up until 40gig ethernet was cheap enough to roll out to all the edge nodes)
There are a couple of big things that are difficult to get your head around:
1) when and where to dispatch and split jobs (ie whats the setup cost of spinning up n binaries on n machines vs threading on y machines)
2) data exchange primitives, Shared file systems have quirks, and a they differ from system to system. But most of the time its better/easier/faster to dump shit to a file system than some fancy database/object store. Until its not. Distributed queues are great, unless you're using them wrong. Most of the time you need to use them wrong. (the share memory RPC is a whole another beast that fortunatly I've never had to work with directly. )
3) dealing with odd failures. As the number of parallel jobs increase the chance of getting a failure reaches 1. You need to bake in failure modes at the very start.
4) loading/saving data is often a bottle neck, lots of efficiecny comes from being clever in what you load, and _where_ you load it. (ie you have data affinity, which might be location based, or topology based, and you don't often have control over where your stuff is placed.)
I think hpc devs need an extra set of skills that are not so common. Such as parallel file systems, batch schedulers, NUMA, infiniband, and probably some domain-specific knowledge for the apps they will develop. This knowledge is also probably a bit niche, like climate modelling, earthquake simulation, lidar data processing, and so it goes.
And even knowing OpenMP or MPI may not suffice if the site uses older versions or heterogeneous approaches with CUDA, FPGA, etc. Knowing the language and the shared/distributed mem libs help, but if your project needs a new senior dev than it may be a bit hard to find (although popularity of company/HPC, salary, and location also play a role).
You tend to only learn these things as they become a problem too. That's super super domain specific and it doesn't always translate between areas of research.
So for e.g. when I did HPC simulation codes in magnetics, there was little point focusing on some of these areas because our codes were dominated by the long-range interaction cost which limited compute scaling. All of our effort was tuning those algorithms to the absolute max. We tried heterogenous CPU + GPU but had very mixed results, and at that time (2010s) the GPU memory wasn't large enough for the problems we cared about either.
I then moved to CFD in industry. The concerns there were totally different since everything is grid local. Partitioning over multi-GPU is simple since only the boundaries need to be exchanged on each iteration. The problems there were much more on the memory bandwidth and parallel file system performance side.
Basically, you have to learn to solve whatever challenges get thrown up by the specific domain problem.
> And even knowing OpenMP or MPI may not suffice if the site uses older versions
To be fair, you always have the option of compiling yourself, but most people I met in academia didn't have the background to do this. Spack and EasyBuild make this much much easier.
Anthropic's issue was only that the AI isn't yet good enough to tell who's an American, so it avoids killing them. They were fine with the "killing non-Americans" bit.
> But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.
That’s interesting: I recall reading that sentence but I parsed it as “America’s warfighters” AND “civilians” (i.e., civilians in general), rather than as “America’s warfighters and America’s civilians”. I think the former reading is more plausible since American civilians are not normally at physical risk from American military operations. It’s unfortunate that this sentence is worded ambiguously, though.
well, if they put in a fully automated kill chain, its gonna be weak to attacks to make yourself look like a car, or a video game styled "hide under a box"
the current non-automated kill chain has targeted fishermen and a girl's school. Nobody is gonna be held accountable for either.
Am i worried about the killing or the AI? If i'm worried about the killing, id much rather push for US demilitarization.
Not only is Anthropic perfectly happy to let the DoD use their products to kill people, but they are partners with Palantir and were apparently instrumental in the strikes against Iran by the US military.
Dario in fact said it was ok to spy and drone non-US citizens, and in fact endorsed American foreign policy generally.
So, no, I'm not voting with my wallet for one American country versus the other. I'll pick the best compromise product for me, and then also boost non-American R&D where I can.
eh, this stirs memories of the similar exam in Italy (abolished ~20 years ago).
The doctor would also grab your testicles and ask to cough, to diagnose varicocele. I wonder how many young men have undiagnosed issues since the military exam was abolished.
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