i once got excited to explain to my father what i did at a research lab after grad school. he listened patiently for about 30 minutes then he said “oh, so you build software for big business?”
Yes. Microvms are stripped down to the basic hardware needed (AWS' Firecracker for example), so they 'boot' really fast, in the tenths of seconds for my containers, but you do have the extra resource overhead of running a second kernel and the performance reduction of the VM context switches. That said, it's minor enough that I feel the security tradeoff is well worth it.
“
If the idea of LLMs improving themselves strikes you as having a certain singularity-robocalypse quality to it, Kinniment wouldn’t disagree with you. But she does add a caveat: “You could get acceleration that is quite intense and does make things meaningfully more difficult to control without it necessarily resulting in this massively explosive growth,” she says. It’s quite possible, she adds, that various factors could slow things down in practice. “Even if it were the case that we had very, very clever AIs, this pace of progress could still end up bottlenecked on things like hardware and robotics.”
“
“
The second of these scenarios featured a piece of software called the SRI-ARC Online System being developed at Stanford. This was a fancy piece of software with lots of functionality (it was the software system that Douglas Engelbart demoed in the “Mother of All Demos”), but one of the many things it could do was make use of what was essentially a file hosting service run on the host at UC Santa Barbara. From a terminal at the Washington Hilton, conference attendees could copy a file created at Stanford onto the host at UCSB simply by running a copy command and answering a few of the computer’s questions:
“
ii reminds me of typing .. at a / prompt on an AFS connected system and realizing there was more to see above my local system.
Not GP, but exactly what he says: don't fall for the HN narrative that the only way to be successful in life is to found a startup and become a billionaire at 25. Carefully and diligently working your way up the career ladder and consistently spending less than you earn has a vastly higher expected value than the startup life, but since it can be described in a few sentences and is not very exciting you will not find many influencers pushing it.
I’ve tried to learn Mandarin and failed because of lack of memory and practice. mostly i’m shocked at how ambiguous it appears to an english-trained mind - you have to fill in a lot of fine article/pronoun detail from custom and common understanding. which is why i think a lot of automatic translations are poor.
