I'm confused by this because I was involved in various distributed computing projects from about 1997 to about 2001 (as a person running compute notes for them) and from about 2001 to 2019 (as a person helping to administer a distributed computing related prize), and in the early part of that era we routinely talked about idle computer power as "wasted" because of the idea that the computer might as well be used to compute something rather than sitting idle. This may have been very credible in 1990s devices that consumed a roughly comparable amount of power regardless of what specific computation they were performing, but all modern devices have extremely variable power consumption depending on the load. You can easily feel this as devices have fans turn on or get hot when the CPU is loaded, and in many cases you can easily query the CPU with software to find out how its power consumption or clock rate or other factors get adjusted based on computational load.
This means that the idea that idle compute would have gone to waste is just no longer true on modern devices.
Now there is certainly compute that couldn't be sold to a paying cloud customer because it's too fragmented in some sense, but it still has some amount of energy cost, and, in a data center, corresponding cooling cost attributable to the marginal heat production. How can one actually say that there is literally no marginal cost at all? I just can't imagine a device that literally has the same power draw regardless of load factor!
If it's cloud compute that would be otherwise unused, the business is not paying for the electricity or wear. And they specifically put it in terms of marginal cost - Yeah there'd be an improvement from reselling this idle compute instead, but just using the cycles that would otherwise have been wasted doesn't change the status quo.
In the sense that the company paying to reserve a certain quantity of computer time isn't the owner or operator of the machines providing it, and has paid for that time by the hour, or something?
If I could manually set/select locations this might be perfect for me too.
I wonder why the scroll performance of every vibe coded app is the same kind of laggy. I assume they're defaulting to the same frameworks or implementations? Or the verification loops in training environments haven't prioritized frame rates/dropped frames yet.
“For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would”
Doing non-verbal thinking has nothing to do with not feeling pain, I don’t think it sounds like philosophical zombies at all.
Maybe, I wouldn’t know. I just find it fascinating that other people have such a radically different way of experiencing thought. No idea what it’s like.
I wanted to say something dismissive. It feels like a lot of doublespeak, which I think undermines trust in them.
But I do understand that it's a little hard to characterize the amount of compute they're selling while obfuscating the business model enough that it still works. Demand, costs, supply, capabilities, competition change wildly week to week.
Selling a standardized "token" via the API with gas-like pricing works a lot better for transparency. But I think there's a world where the ambiguous subscription pricing is net beneficial for users and providers. Allowing some degree of price discrimination should benefit everyone in aggregate, assuming there's real competition and not yet another duopoly..
M5Stack's twitter says 2 to 3 months [0] to restock because they're out of eink driver ic.
When I submitted the story maybe 8 hours[1] after the announcement, it was already out of stock. This person says it sold out in 1 second - https://x.com/henry19840301/status/2090652363434647738 - if that's possible.
Maybe "one second" was a poorly phrased colloquialism meaning "right away".
One can sign up for new product releases and if I paid attention to my marketing emails I could have clicked through. I'm guessing there are enough people who do combined with limited initial stock. We don't know.
Thanks for passing through the info for those of us not on Twitter!
I think the signal on X has been deteriorating for years. Many valuable communities that existed purely on Twitter have scattered across the internet after Elon's transformation, often to many disconnected small communities across X, Mastodon instances, BlueSky, and reddit.
The labs might not be open. But they would want access to data. More open platforms (the web at large, but bluesky in particular has made open access an explicit goal) tend to provide that, relative to x/threads/facebook/reddit/youtube.
Some labs will be able to buy access. Not every platform will offer it. There are many more labs than the big ones.
Not sure 'copying' is a clarifying explanation of what is happening though.
reply