Been checking it out now and then but Bluesky now seems to have reached enough users and maturity to be a Twitter replacement. Come over and let's all leave X behind us. Check out the Bluesky starter packs to set up quickly

What happens if your CPU gets something wrong? If it wakes up one day and decides 2 2=5? Well, most of us will never have to worry about that. But if you work at a company the size of Google, you do, which is why this paper on "mercurial cores" is so fascinating. What the authors report--and supposedly this is common knowledge at the hyperscalers--is that a couple cores per several thousand machines are "mercurial." Due to subtle manufacturing defects or old age, they give wrong answers for certain instructions. These can cause all sorts of impossible-to-diagnose issues. Some rare problems at Google that were traced back to bad CPUs include: - Mutexes not working, causing application crashes - Silent data corruption - Garbage collectors targeting live memory, causing application crashes - Kernel state corruption causing kernel panics What makes CPUs go bad? It's very hard to tell. The authors posit that issues are becoming more frequent as CPUs get more complex, but there aren't solid numbers behind that. There are certainly strong relationships between frequency, temperature, voltage, and bad CPU behavior--most mercurial CPUs only cause problems under very specific conditions, but those conditions vary from CPU to CPU. Age is another source of problems, as older CPUs are more likely to exhibit problems. Bad CPUs are an especially serious problem because they're very hard to detect. If cosmic rays flip bits in storage or on the network, that can be detected through error coding. But there's no analogy for a CPU that allows cheap online verification of its correctness. Instead, the best detection techniques involve monitoring for symptoms. If a core exhibits exceptionally high rates of process crashes or kernel panics relative to its fellows, that's a strong indication something is wrong with it. For the most critical applications, the authors propose triple modular redundancy--redoing each of its computations on three cores and majority-voting a reliable result. More than anything, this paper is a call to action--letting everyone know that CPUs can fail. So now, if you ever find a bug you can't diagnose, you can blame the CPU! 🙂

This will be the first Presidential election since 1976 to not have a Biden, Bush, or Clinton on the ticket.

Solar eclipse from plane

The most radicalizing thing about the modern world is that a lot of people with money and power have decided that they’d rather render the planet uninhabitable for future generations than make less money

We are proud to host JUPITER, the first European Exascale system by @EuroHPC_JU! The contract is awarded to a consortium of @Evidenlive and @ParTec_AG. JUPITER will consist of a Booster (NVIDIA technology) and a Cluster (SiPearl Rhea). #HPC #exa_jupiter fz-juelich.de/en/news/archiv…

Our planet is burning. Millions are under heat warnings as world shatters temperature record after temperature record. This is only the beginning. The longer we delay. The worse it will be. No time to wait. Dump fossil fuels. #ActOnClimate

My money is on OpenAI trying to be more cost-effective by discreetly using degraded models for most queries

This is huge. Recent academic paper shows that GPT-4 lost significant capability in code skills over a few months. I love GPT-4 but it would be nice to have OpenAI address this. They've been insisting that users are "imagining it," basically.

Norway just found more high grade phosphorus rock than the rest of the world put together!!!???? 70 billion tonnes of proven reserves! 1.25X more than Morocco 20X more than China. euractiv.com/section/energy-…

RIP CPU-based AI supercomputers? NVIDIA just announced DGX GH200, an AI supercomputer that combines whooping 256 Grace CPUs & Hopper GPUs in the same package with 144 Terabytes of shared memory! Here's the breakdown

Eight years ago, Google mislabeled Black people in photos as “gorillas.” Google apologized, promised to fix it, and turned off Photos’ ability to label *anything* a gorilla. Despite AI advancement, Google still can’t “see” most primates. Same for Apple. nytimes.com/2023/05/22/techn…

A good tweet which highlights two things: the risk of putting global financial stability at the mercy of volatile markets, and how myopic people can be when confronted by it

The most powerful debugging tool: walking away from your computer.

When Germans pick the finger-food for the party

Percentage of the population that can hold a conversation in Icelandic

Berit's "Filter" book came out today! 🥳

LLMs are weird