#hacker-news
Individual AI’s Environmental Impacts #
While this article misses the recurring environmental impacts from different companies racing to train increasingly better LLMs, it provides a good analysis of the impacts of individual ChatGPT questions. I’ve always noted that promoting individual behavior changes has little impact on preventing environmental damage, and found this quote to be especially good for proving that point:
Getting worried about whether you should use LLMs is as much of a distraction to the real issues involved with climate change as worrying about whether you should stop the YouTube video you’re watching 12 seconds early for the sake of the Earth.
While watching 12 seconds of a YouTube video and asking a ChatGPT question are obviously not able to be directly compared, it’s pretty clear that neither are especially important to worry about in terms of their impact. However, I do agree that the promotion of LLMs will cause further model training which causes more environmental impacts, but hopefully the necessity for training entirely new models will diminish quickly as the relative increase of model performance plateaus.
# 2025-01-18 - #ai, #hacker-newsNokia on the iPhone Launch #
An interesting internal presentation from Nokia comparing the iPhone to the existing phone landscape. They repeatedly note the importance of the “coolness” factor to the iPhone’s future success, which has completely held true even in Apple’s current strategy. Nokia also foresaw the importance of the partnership between Apple and Cingular (now AT&T) to promoting the growth of the iPhone through integrated services. Overall, most of Nokia’s predictions were spot-on and show a deep understanding of the iPhone’s strengths, even though Nokia was unable to survive in the market itself.
# 2025-01-16 - #apple, #hacker-newsNintendo Switch 2 #
There have been a lot of Switch 2 leaks over the past year and they seem to have held up pretty well. Most of the improvements seem pretty solid except the new colorway, which I dislike because it takes away from the fun, vibrant aesthetic that Nintendo has been known for. Also, I find the new logo to be pretty awful due to the ‘2’ being way too big, especially since they could have just kept the old Switch logo. Hopefully the magnetic Joy-Cons fare a lot better than the older ones, as stick drift has been a recurring issue over the lifespan of the first Switch console.
# 2025-01-16 - #gaming, #hacker-newsNew Glenn Launch #
After several scrubbed launches (the most recent one being a few days ago), Blue Origin has finally launched the New Glenn rocket. The video of the launch is accessible on YouTube, with the link leading to the launch at T-20. While I’m not knowledgable about the specific logistics around launches, New Glenn going into orbit on its first flight seems to be unique according to this Hacker News comment.
# 2025-01-16 - #space, #hacker-newsSolving the Yield Problem #
This was a fun read, especially after already having a bit of background knowledge on chip manufacturing. Cerebras and Groq both utilize custom chips to power their ridiculously fast AI inference, but I hadn’t previously considered the widely differing order of magnitudes these chips have compared to traditional GPUs. As an example, Cerebras cites their WSE-3 as having 900,000 cores compared to individual H100s which have only 144.
Cerebras’ method for reducing the impact of defects feels quite straightforward—reducing core sizes and having a surplus of cores means that individual core defects are able to be had at an extremely small scale while having almost no impact on the overall chip. Additionally, Cerebras uses a special routing architecture to ensure that cores are able to route around disabled cores, meaning that disabling cores creates no interference. Through these methods, Cerebras notes the WSE-3 as having a high 93% core utilization, compared to H100s with a 92% utilization.
# 2025-01-15 - #chips, #hacker-news