I was quite surprised the direction this article took. I wasn't expecting reheated whinging about the toolchain.
FPGAs do need a new future. They need a future where someone tapes out an FPGA! Xilinx produced Ultrascale+ over a decade ago and haven't done anything interesting since. Their Versal devices went off a tangent into SoCs, NOCs, AI engines - you know what they didn't do? Build a decent FPGA.
Altera did something ambitious back in 2014 when they proposed the hyper-register design, totally failed to execute on it and have been treading water because of the Intel cluster**. They're now an independent company but literally don't have anyone who knows how to tape out a chip.
I'm less familiar with the Lattice stuff, but since their most advanced product is still 16nm finfet I suspect they aren't doing anything newer than Xilinx or Altera.
We need a company that builds an FPGA. It doesn't matter what tooling you have because the fundamental performance gap between a custom FPGA solution and a CPU or GPU based solution is entirely eaten up by the fact the newest FPGA you can buy is a decade old and inexplicably still tens of thousands of dollars.
If FPGA technology had progressed at the same rate NVidia or Apple had pushed forward CPU/GPU performance, thered be some amazing opportunities to accelerate AI (on the path to then creating ASICs). But they haven't, so all the scaling laws have worked against them and the places they have a performance benefit have shrunk massively.
There's a few things. Let's start with the core of what they say is their value. They have forward deployed engineers - this a totally new, previously unknown innovation - who go to a company, understand their needs and build data processing tools to give them insights. Then, they generalize these tools so that they can essentially sell them as SAAS software, giving them SAAS-type economics.
What other people say is their secret sauce, is they do consulting work for the government (a forward deployed engineer is just a consultant) and they make incredible margins because their senior management and early investors have connections to the government which gets them exclusive access to incredibly juicy contracts. As these contracts paid off they leant heavily into the social media meme stock trend so their CEO spends time talking like a psychopath and doing various non-economic things like spending huge amounts of money running adverts about how they're going to use AI to unleash Americas workers (America's workers aren't able to buy Palantir software or services, but they can buy it's stock).
OK. The first part sounds a bit like an innovation.
I was kind of expecting someone to say it had EG really sophisticated ETL tools that can normalise loads of different data or can query across disparate data sources or something.
The first part sounds like a basic ERP implementation. Only instead of leaning on your in-house domain experts who have years of experience/relevant knowledge/know the relevant caveats, you pay consulting rates to train up new domain experts who don't understand/know the caveats and who will charge you consulting rates to gain access to the results of the training you overpaid for.
'But they cleaned the data up'. That data was also cleaned up during all the last major system updates. And during the implementation of those systems. And the implementation of the systems before that.
Ah I see, so the [token holder] hires a [builder] to build something, and uses that to then hire [intellectual] to scam the ['pragmatic user']?
To take this a little more seriously, this is computer programming, very famously you don't need massive gobs of VC capital to build something. The only reason for the [builder] needs [token holder] is to hire [intellectual] to scam [user].
Oh and of course, [token holder] [builder] and [intellectual] are the same guy with 3 different anime profile pics.
If you can afford Lambo you can come to place like Dubai and pay for it in AnyUSDcoin, gold nuggets or anime profile picture NFTs. Barrier for using crypto of any kind does not exist in countries without paranoid AML / KYC regulations.
Or tbh you can just buy it with crypto card issued in Hong Kong / Singapore even if you buying it in the US.
There's a difference between a good product and a good business. It's easy to see this is a great product but it's really difficult to see how it's a great business. All the traditional things we look for from great businesses seem to be absent here - they don't have network effects like facebook or uber, they don't have lock-in they way Apple has, and to a large extent they don't have the traditional economics of SAAS. They have a product that is interchangeable with 3 or 4 other companies, they have extremely high initial investment costs to train models, and it's not clear they can actually sell tokens for more than it costs to make them.
It's like the foundry business, an ever increasing cost of moving to the next node requires ever increasing scale which naturally kills off competition.
Training is taking an enormous problem and trying to break it into lots of pieces and managing the data dependency between those pieces. It's solving 1 really hard problem. Inference is the opposite, it's lots of small independent problems. All of this "we have X many widgets connected to Y many high bandwidth optical telescopes" is all a training problem that they need to solve. Inference is "I have 20 tokens and I want to throw them at these 5,000,000 matrix multiplies, oh and I don't care about latency".
I'm actually not that worried about this, because again I would classify this as a problem that already exists. There are already idiots in senior management who pass off bullshit and screw things up. There are natural mechanisms to cope with this, primarily in business reputation - if you're one of those idiots who does this people very quickly start just discounting what you're saying, they might not know how you're wrong, but they learn very quickly to discount what you're saying because they know you can't be trusted to self-check.
I'm not saying that this can't happen and it's not bad. Take a look at nudge theory - the UK government created an entire department and spent enormous amounts of time and money on what they thought was a free lunch - that they could just "nudge" people into doing the things they wanted. So rather than actually solving difficult problems the uk government embarked on decades of pseudo-intellectual self agrandizement. The entire basis of that decades long debacle was based on bullshit data and fake studies. We didn't need AI to fuck it up, we managed it perfectly well by ourselves.
Nudge theory isn't useless, it's just not anything like as powerful as money or regulation.
It was taken up by the UK government at that time because the government was, unusually, a coalition of two quite different parties, and thus found it hard to agree to actually use the normal levers of power.
In the UK, there are massive incentives for "tax efficient" purchasing of vehicles. ie, there was a point where everyone who could was driving around in a Porsche Taycan because the tax implications of buying it were comically positive. Of course, those benefits don't translate to the secondary market, so of course there's a glut of 3 year old electric vehicles. No one wants them. Oh, and you can't buy a petrol car because the car companies are under the hammer to sell EVs.
Just to be clear, the UK system is much simpler than the US system. There is just a bad law. That law could be repealed with a majority in parliament tomorrow, until it is repealed (spoiler it absolutely will not be repealed) the regulator can and will file these law suits. The best we can hope for is that the regulator (Home Office) just don't bother trying to enforce the law.
The core problem is the people writing the laws are know-nothing busy bodies who write crap laws and then cause massive problems, and we've demonstrated over the last 18 months that you can fire literally 70% of the UK Parliament, replace them all and still end up with the same rules written by the same know-nothing busy bodies.
Whitehall - the UK civil service - persists between governments in a fairly unique way. It's essentially a political entity that exists beyond democracy that has pinky-promised to be politically ambivalent.
To paraphrase an adage I've forgotten: you can skim as much shit as you like off the Thames, it'll still be a filthy river.
I don't like this line of reasoning because it's largely just crystalizing a loss. We have this in the UK - houses of multiple occupancy. It's a great idea where you take a home that in the 1980s would house a family and split it into 5 flats where each person can rent 10-20 square metres each. I would much rather someone did something to address the fact that the average family in the UK can afford roughly 1/5th the amount of housing they could in the 1980s. And of course, because of this arbitrage now a family that wants to live in that home is competing with the rental income of 5+ tenants in a HMO.
Surely, the correct solution is just to put in some simple rules to bring the cost of housing down. For example: planning restrictions are suspended until the average family home hits 3x average family income. Rather than just packing us like sardines into ever more expensive houses.
Voters don't actually want house prices to come down. Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners. Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war. Perhaps because rents are downstream of values, and so it's politically easier for owners to make the correct choices to advance their agenda than it is for renters, which have an extra logical leap required of them.
> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war.
Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.
In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.
You're forgetting the most important one. Having a bunch of your money tied up in an illiquid asset that is subject to all manner of government micromanagement gives you a huge incentive to see to it that the government doesn't get progressively more shitty toward you than it already is.
Yep, saying it's an age thing is missing that every homeowner is directly financially incentivized to ensure prices go up. I literally get physical printed mail (against my
will) every other week telling me about the health of my neighborhood where higher home sale prices means better. Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
> Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
No.
Being a homeowner doesn't grant one political influence. Being old grants one political influence.
It's the correlation of age and homeownership that means homeowners have the political influence the push through policy that drives up real estate prices.
Non-homeowners have political incentives all the same. If only just to oppose those very homeowners' policies. What they lack is the political influence to make it happen.
Meanwhile to the original article, 80s TV like Golden Girls (shared housing) and Boosom Buddies (boarding houses) are quaint historic notes, the reality is that our use of housing stock has made the problem of where to live worse: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
When you dig down into the data, the article is highlighting a real problem. We have destroyed a lot of historical co-habitation that kept the system working and healthy. We did this with zoning (getting rid of high density to prop up home values) banning types of housing (dense single room, affordable) and making other types impossible (owning a home and renting a room or two, people dont do this because of tenants rights issues).
> Voters don't actually want house prices to come down.
>> You have this wrong.
But you don't refute this, if anything you make the case that, since the majority are homeowners, they would of course want ever-increasing home values. And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
If non voting renters showed up, this could easily swing the other way. Renters are (generally) unmotivated to change their destiny at the voting booth.
> And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
This is far far far more complicated than it looks. Because what is inflation vs increase in value after adjustment. There are plenty of places where housing has gone down in value (see Detroit, see Camden NJ). There are plenty of places where gentrification has changed whole regions (see the SF Bay Area).
There has also been a massive change in what we build (smaller homes, vs McMansions).
When you dig into the WHY of this, the destruction of old stock is a huge part of it (see Detroit). Massive changes to what and how we build (back to home owners and zoning) limiting growth in areas. Over regulation (see slow rebuilding in southern CA after fires, and the whole housing shortage here). NOTE: the ADU law that was an attempt to let home owners fix this themselves has been somewhat of a flop... however it is gaining momentum.
The fixes to housing in the US require voters to pass something where only a bit more than half of it would be "good" for them and in a hard to explain way. It is easy to get them to vote such a policy down when the 40 percent that might impact them makes for a clear cut argument for a NO.
> Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners
I assure you, a lot of people in the UK want house prices to fall too. There are too many renters who don't want to be renting, and the proportion is increasing. They wish they could buy instead, but can't either because of price, inability to save enough for a down-payment as fast as prices rise (while large rent rises impede their saving or even drain it, and incomes rise more slowly than prices), or inability to obtain a mortgage despite a history of consistently paying more than a mortgage in rent. For the latter category, who can afford a mortgage but can't get one, and are already paying more in rent, their main problem isn't income or price, it's the tighter restrictions on mortgage availability since the 2008 financial crises. But they would still like lower prices.
Somehow? Homeowners are obviously the more powerful group, and real estate ownership in the bigger picture is tied to even more powerful entities (big companies, banks, billionaires).
How many in the top 10% of the wealth distribution do you think are renters?
How many in the bottom 20% do you think are homeowners?
In the 1970s, it was usual for working class newlyweds would have to live with their parents until they were able to find housing. That's why second-rate comedians of the time like Les Dawson had so many mother-in-law jokes: there was an awful lot of resentment between young men and their mothers-in-law to exploit. There's nothing new about multiple families crowding into houses designed for just one family in this country - that's why there are so many pubs.
The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.
In the UK specifically the radical reform (read destruction) of council housing by the Thatcher government had a large impact on the housing market in the 1980s.
In 1970 you could basically buy any non-city plot of land and build a shack on it without anyone bothering you. Think of the back to the land hippies in California just chopping down trees and starting their little communes -- they'd be utterly fucked if they did that now, some Karen would rat them out instantly to planning and zoning committee.
In the late 60s/70s DIY builders were almost completely displaced by developers who lobbied for regulations that stomped out "a guy and his pickup truck" by and large almost anywhere with desirable land. Then the owners of those houses reinforced same to prop up their property values.
I live in one of the last remaining counties that didn't do that, and last year I built a house for $60k. Pretty easy if you're in a place with essentially no codes or zoning. My (fairly) newlywed and I built the house with basically no experience either.
And in turn none of the discussion you've replied to is relevant by your standard, because the OG article discusses the United States.
Funny someone else is allowed to discuss UK in regards to an American article, but I'm not allowed to discuss America on a UK thread about an American article.
The discussion was prompted by an article on sharehouses being banned in US cities, which prompted comparison to HMOs in the UK. One of those comparisons suggested that HMOs are a recent phenomenon and are a cause in the shortage of family homes in the UK. I replied to this by arguing that a shortage of family homes was also present in the 1970s, and that overcrowded housing for working families has been common throughout British history. You've replied to this with your personal experiences about building a home in the 1970s and dealing with building regulations.
The discussion about the effects of UK HMOs on wider housing availability is indeed a peripheral discussion of limited interest to most. Your comment, while of interest to me, was only tangentially related to my comment. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have written it - as I said, I found it interesting - I'm just pointing out that it doesn't flow well from what came before it.
Housing in UK/US seems to suffer from simultaneous under-and over- regulation. We over-regulate urban infill housing, and over-regulate the types of housing you can build. We under-regulate landowner profits by letting them keep land rents.
A holistic fix would address both causes of failure in the housing market.
>> houses of multiple occupancy. It's a great idea where you take a home that in the 1980s would house a family and split it into 5 flats where each person can rent 10-20 square metres each
This isn't correct. When a house is split into multiple flats, they're individual flats rented out under separate agreements and not a HMO.
A HMO is when that house is rented to a group of people who are unrelated to each other (i.e. not of the same 'household'). They are generally jointly and severally liable (under an AST). They each have a bedroom and share kitchen/bathroom/common areas. HMO's have stricter health & safety regulations. For example, doors must be the automatically closing fire doors that you get in public buildings.
In about 18 years in HMO's I've only had one occasion where the rooms were let separately (in that case they were all being let separately from the start). Most of the time you move in and join an existing lease where the leaving tenant is removed and you are added alongside the other tenants.
I think it probably depends on how the initial people moved in. If the estate agent is renting the rooms individually from the beginning it'll be separate agreements. If it's initially rented to a group of friends it's likely a joint AST and then re-assigned over the years as individuals change and the lease is renewed until you have a bunch of strangers jointly and severally liable (not a great idea).
Maybe this is a 'where you live' sort of thing then... I've never been based in London and when I was HMO-ing it was typically stuff on Spareroom which was always individual lets per room pretty much in the areas I lived at least (probably less competitive than London)
The UK has also had extremely high immigration rates since the 1980s. Whether that's good or bad policy isn't my place to say, but it certainly places extreme pressure on the housing market.
Assume positive intent. I flagged your comment because you made a false and scurrilous insinuation about my intentions. I'm not a UK citizen or resident and don't care about their immigration policy one way or another. But a high immigration rate will obviously increase housing demand: this is basic macroeconomics and trivially true.
The UK net immigration rate has been high relative to other countries worldwide, especially in recent years. It is an outlier on that basis. I'm not sure why you would limit the comparison to only high-income countries.
Someone did comment that it's actually smart to check if something is fixed on the unstable branch, or I suppose in your coworkers' branches. A good task for an LLM.
FPGAs do need a new future. They need a future where someone tapes out an FPGA! Xilinx produced Ultrascale+ over a decade ago and haven't done anything interesting since. Their Versal devices went off a tangent into SoCs, NOCs, AI engines - you know what they didn't do? Build a decent FPGA.
Altera did something ambitious back in 2014 when they proposed the hyper-register design, totally failed to execute on it and have been treading water because of the Intel cluster**. They're now an independent company but literally don't have anyone who knows how to tape out a chip.
I'm less familiar with the Lattice stuff, but since their most advanced product is still 16nm finfet I suspect they aren't doing anything newer than Xilinx or Altera.
We need a company that builds an FPGA. It doesn't matter what tooling you have because the fundamental performance gap between a custom FPGA solution and a CPU or GPU based solution is entirely eaten up by the fact the newest FPGA you can buy is a decade old and inexplicably still tens of thousands of dollars.
If FPGA technology had progressed at the same rate NVidia or Apple had pushed forward CPU/GPU performance, thered be some amazing opportunities to accelerate AI (on the path to then creating ASICs). But they haven't, so all the scaling laws have worked against them and the places they have a performance benefit have shrunk massively.
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