Quando scriviamo codice lo facciamo per la CPU, ovviamente. Ma non dovrebbe essere sempre così. Bisogna poter ottimizzare il codice anche per la GPU, quando serve. E quando serve? E perché? E come si fa?

Money quote: "Over the past decade, GPUs have become incredibly important because of their pervasive use in deep learning. Today, it is essential for every software engineer to possess a basic understanding of how they work. My goal with this article is to give you that background."

https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/gpu-computing

Lettura per la domenica

Secondo Paul Graham (quello dietro Y Combinator) ChatGPT e gli altri chatbot ammazzeranno la capacità di scrivere, riducendo il mondo a poche persone che sanno ancora scrivere e il resto che non sa più scrivere. E questo sarà un problema perché, secondo Graham scrivere è fondamentale per pensare.

Money quote 1: "The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write."

https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html

Secondo Dan Shipper, che ha una rivista online fenomenale, Every, le cose non stanno così, perché non c'è solo la scrittura come modo di pensare. Ad esempio, ci sono quelli che pensano parlando. Molto interessante.

Money quote 2: "To test PG's prediction, we can look at people who already operate the way he imagines everyone will in an AI-powered allocation economy: managers. Managers are not the ones doing all of the work—instead, they’re directing other people to do it for them, just like people in the future might direct an AI.

On some accounts of the world, managers are simply there to take credit for what other people do. (And certainly, some managers are like this.) But as any good manager will tell you, even though you may not be doing all of the work yourself, it requires a great deal of thinking.

As a manager, you need to clearly communicate the problem you want to solve and the vision you have for solving it. You have to decide who should work on it and how. You need to know what to delegate and what to do yourself—and how to tell the difference."

https://every.to/chain-of-thought/writing-as-a-way-of-thinking

Bonus. Shipper usa ChatGPT in modalità conversazionale per dare contesto ai libri che legge. Mah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU2AYrBHq-w

Si avvicina la cifra tonda. Mostly Weekly è arrivata a 299 numeri. Come sempre, quasi tutte le domeniche

antoniodini.com/weekly/299/

Piccoli incidenti nei mari del Nord: pescatori norvegesi a caccia di halibut hanno preso nelle loro reti un sottomarino nucleare statunitense.

Money quote: "The USS Virginia, a US naval ship, was sailing near the surface when its propeller snagged a part of the fishing net. The fishermen were unaware of it until they were contacted by the US Coast Guard. They were on the way to a new spot hoping to catch more halibut, all the while blissfully ignorant to the fact that their net was now being dragged away by the setting for several excellent ’90s military thrillers."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/fishermen-hunting-for-halibut-caught-a-us-nuclear-sub/

C'è un problema nel mercato più strategico del mondo: quello dei programmatori bravi. Li stanno tritando.

Money quote: "Let’s talk about tech interviews – specifically, the ones that go overboard with unrealistic coding assignments. If you’re a developer who’s been asked to debug legacy PHP or build a mini-app from scratch in just a few hours, you know what I’m talking about. It’s becoming a trend, and it’s not helping anyone.

These high-stress, solo coding assignments don’t reflect the actual job. Instead, they put developers in situations they’d never face in the workplace, where collaboration and support are standard. When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? Yet companies claim this somehow measures “problem-solving” skills."

https://blackentropy.bearblog.dev/please-stop-the-absurd-coding-challenges/

Non sapevo neanche che esistessero. Invece, le "rane di legno" sono meravigliose.

Money quote: "This is the winter world in which the wood frog must survive. Remember, frogs are cold blooded, so their body temperature is about the same as the surrounding air. How do these delicate little creatures endure the intense, protracted, iron-cold subarctic winter?

This mystery has intrigued scientists for a long time. Biologists have studied wood frog hibernation and what they’ve learned is truly astonishing.

Most frogs survive northern winters by hibernating deep under water, in ponds, lakes and streams—they are cold and dormant but their body temperature never falls below freezing.

Wood frogs have a different strategy. They hibernate by nestling down into the leafy litter on the forest floor. The leaves, duff and overlying snow give some insulation from extreme cold, but the frogs are not protected from subfreezing temperatures as they would be if they chose the underwater strategy."

https://www.nps.gov/gaar/learn/nature/wood-frog-page-2.htm

C'è un mistero nel mondo delle AI: gli LLM giocano a scacchi (non dovrebbero) ma lo fanno male. Tutti tranne alcuni. Perché?

Money quote: "Did the language models build up some kind of internal representation of board state? And how to construct that state from lists of moves in chess’s extremely confusing notation? And how valuable different pieces and positions are? And how to force checkmate in an end-game? And they did this all “by accident”, as part of their goal of predicting general text?"

https://dynomight.substack.com/p/chess

Sotto Kansas City ci sono enormi caverne artificiali, scavate per avere i materuali da usare nelle costruzioni di buona parte degli Stati Uniti. Da decenni in quegli enormi ambienti Ford mette le sue automobili.

Money quote: "“In Kansas, in the Midwest, you get rain, you get hail, you get winter, you get ice, you get everything. And I think [Ford] really wanted to store the vehicles that they were producing and assembling in the area that wouldn’t come into harm’s way,” said Tompkins. “And so what better location than under a large roof? Since then, Ford has relocated its plant and they are now really adjacent to our underground, so we continue to have a really tight relationship with them.”"

https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/since-the-60s-ford-has-stored-cars-underground-in-a-kansas-city-cave/

Cose assurde che si possono fare con il resto del corpo mentre scatti la foto per il passaporto.

Money quote: "“Passport Photos” looks at one of the most mundane and unexciting types of photography. Heavily restricted and regulated, the official passport photo requirements include that the subject needs to face the camera straight on, needs a clear background without shadow, no glare on glasses and most importantly; no smile."

https://maxsiedentopf.com/passport-photos/

Intanto la mia newsletter, Mostly Weekly, compie 300 numeri. Nel suo piccolo, un'emozione.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/300/

Lettura per la domenica

Perché ci serve l'aritmetica? E perché così poche persone sanno usarla? Parte come un articolo normale e diventa una specie di viaggio surreale, fantastico, strampalato, a suo modo artistico.

Money quote: "I think the problem is the idea that arithmetic is about “calculating”. No! Arithmetic is a world-modeling technology. Arguably, it’s the best world-modeling technology: It’s simple, it’s intuitive, and it applies to everything. It allows you to trespass into scientific domains where you don’t belong. It even has an amazing error-catching mechanism built in."

https://dynomight.substack.com/p/arithmetic

Una soluzione ingegnosa e molto funzionale a un notevole problema: una donna con amniesia retrograda dovuta a una operazione viene aiutata dai figli con una momBoard fatta con un pannello eInk aggiornabile da remoto che le permette di vedere le cose che le serve sapere (ma che non ricorda).

Money quote: "Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations."

https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2024/11-12-momboard

Una analisi del Wall Street Journal di qualche mese fa che sembra scritta stamani.

Money quote: "When it comes to bigger-picture concerns about safety, opinions vary as to which approach is more likely to stave off worst-case AI scenarios like the malign, all-powerful intelligence of Skynet in the “Terminator” movies. Advocates of closed systems say they have the resources and control to help prevent misuse of the technology, and that open-source tools can be abused by bad actors. Open-source backers say their systems are subject to public scrutiny, allowing them to detect problems more easily, and deal with unintentional harms from their systems, which would be difficult to detect in closed systems.

Long before we get to the point of battling sentient AI overlords, though, those making systems of more modest power will have to prove their enormous investments are worthwhile."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-chatgpt-nvidia-apple-facebook-383943d1

https://archive.is/k2crT

È più vicino di quanto la gente non pensi: la de-estinzione del mammut Wooly (quello peloso) si sta avvicinando alla realtà. E non abbiamo idea di cosa succederà dopo.

Money quote: "De-extinction science has advanced dramatically in the past two decades. The technology has progressed to the point that it's more of an ethical question whether we should revive lost species. While some companies want to bring back extinct animals to enrich biodiversity, replenish vital ecological roles, and bolster ecosystem resilience, scientists are not convinced that bringing back creatures that died out centuries or millennia ago would offer as much benefit as preserving the ones that are still hanging on. This article takes a look at the current technologies and the possible consequences that de-extinction may have on the climate and other animals."

https://www.livescience.com/animals/extinct-species/closer-than-people-think-woolly-mammoth-de-extinction-is-nearing-reality-and-we-have-no-idea-what-happens-next

La casa come un luogo che custodisce i ricordi dell'infanzia, offrendo protezione dalle incertezze del mondo esterno. Perderla è un grande trauma. Rimuoverla vuol dire sognarsela in quella parte della notte dalla quale niente apparentemente traspare. La casa non è solo un luogo in cui abitiamo; è un luogo che ci abita, plasmando il nostro senso di chi siamo e di chi vogliamo essere.

Money quote: "At bedtime, my husband and I play thunderstorm music even in the draught of summer, exaggerating the coziness of being tucked in safe and dry. “Everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate,” Bachelard notes, and this feels especially true inside a house. Heavy dark draperies closing out winter snow so bright it makes you squint; a hearth against damp November chill; dim coolness on a glaring August day; a thick-carpet quiet as soon as the front door shuts out the chaos of traffic.

In Malicroix, French writer Henri Bosco conjures a vicious windstorm and shows us his house “holding firmly to the soil of the island.” It “yielded nothing to the storm.” On that lonely and frightening night, it became his mother."

https://commonreader.wustl.edu/c/there-is-no-place-like-home-whatever-that-is/

Abbiamo tutti bisogno di uno scrittoio, di uno studio, di un *lugar de pensiamento*. Anche Machiavelli.

Money quote: "Venuta la sera, mi ritorno a casa ed entro nel mio scrittoio; e in sull'uscio mi spoglio quella veste cotidiana, piena di fango e di loto, e mi metto panni reali e curiali; e rivestito condecentemente, entro nelle antique corti delli antiqui huomini, dove, da loro ricevuto amorevolmente, mi pasco di quel cibo che solum è mio e ch’io nacqui per lui; dove io non mi vergogno parlare con loro e domandarli della ragione delle loro azioni; e quelli per loro humanità mi rispondono; e non sento per quattro hore di tempo alcuna noia, sdimentico ogni affanno, non temo la povertà, non mi sbigottisce la morte: tutto mi transferisco in loro. E perché Dante dice che non fa scienza sanza lo ritenere lo havere inteso, io ho notato quello di che per la loro conversazione ho fatto capitale, e composto uno opuscolo De principatibus; dove io mi profondo quanto io posso nelle cogitazioni di questo subietto, disputando che cosa è principato, di quale spezie sono, come e' si acquistono, come e' si mantengono, perché e' si perdono."

(questa è la versione originale disponibile su Wikisource, nell'articolo è tutto in inglese)

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/machiavelli-and-the-emergence-of-the-private-study/

Potremmo vivere in una simulazione. L'ipotesi originale.

Money quote: "There is, however, a related scenario that is more plausible and a serious line of reasoning that leads from the possibility of this scenario to a striking conclusion about the world we live in. I call this the simulation argument. Perhaps its most startling lesson is that there is a significant probability that you are living in computer simulation. I mean this literally: if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilisation. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation. What grounds could we have for taking this hypothesis seriously? Before getting to the gist of the simulation argument, let us consider some of its preliminaries. One of these is the assumption of “substrate independence”. This is the idea that conscious minds could in principle be implemented not only on carbon-based biological neurons (such as those inside your head) but also on some other computational substrate such as silicon-based processors."

https://simulation-argument.com/matrix/

Letture per la domenica.

Come si fa a cambiare idea di un chatbot? Quando l'articolo è uscito, questa estate, era un tema caldo. Ora ce lo siamo un po' dimenticato. Vale la pena invece di rileggerlo.

Money quote: "Today's AI may seem harmless, but these systems are being woven into society in ways that may be hard to untangle. It could be problematic for people if AI has somehow trained a bias against them, for example, a person whose name was associated with a negative event may be unfairly discriminated against by other chatbots. Chatbots are highly suggestible - if people add text on the internet and it gets memorized, it's memorialized in the language model."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/technology/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-manipulation.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/vGVfL

"Dune: Prophecy" arriva tardi - questa volta su Fumettologica si parla di serie, di film
e di libri. Ovviamente di fantascienza

https://fumettologica.it/2024/12/dune-prophecy-serie-tv-recensione/

Un progetto affascinante: fotografare tutti i quartieri di New York City, uno per uno. Sono 350, mica venti.

Money quote: "This weekly newsletter is a not-so-deep dive into every neighborhood in NYC in an effort to create some sort of photographic document of modern-day New York, or at least a record of what I find interesting* on any particular day. I know I will be leaving out a ton of things that could be considered crucial to the understanding of a particular neighborhood and including stuff that will leave some scratching their heads, but this isn’t meant to be a complete or even accurate representation of a place, just my reaction to it. With a mix of old and new pictures and field recordings, I hope this project will add something to the substantial body of work that has already been made about the city."

https://theneighborhoods.substack.com/

Anche a Madrid ci sono i capsule-hotel. Solo che servono per arginare la crisi economica e sociale in corso nel Paese

Money quote: "La recepcionista es Eva, una universitaria de 22 años que atiende tras un mostrador en un vestíbulo que hace también las veces de comedor y cocina para uso de los huéspedes. Conduce al visitante al interior, donde abre la puerta de una sala de unos 150 metros cuadrados que alberga 36 cápsulas, 24 individuales y 12 dobles. En total aquí caben 48 personas. Es media tarde, no se oye a nadie y es difícil aventurar si estas cajas de madera “Nordic style” contienen seres humanos. Cuando cae la noche, llegan los ocupantes. Algunos vuelven de pasear. Otros, de trabajar."

https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2024-12-03/ya-hay-gente-en-madrid-que-vive-en-capsulas-como-las-de-tokio-porque-no-pueden-pagar-un-alquiler.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/TmbC4