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It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest.

My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic.

[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf


To add to this: rough consensus is defined in BCP 25 / RFC 2418 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2418#section-3.3):

   IETF consensus does not require that all participants agree although
   this is, of course, preferred.  In general, the dominant view of the
   working group shall prevail.  (However, it must be noted that
   "dominance" is not to be determined on the basis of volume or
   persistence, but rather a more general sense of agreement.) Consensus
   can be determined by a show of hands, humming, or any other means on
   which the WG agrees (by rough consensus, of course).  Note that 51%
   of the working group does not qualify as "rough consensus" and 99% is
   better than rough.  It is up to the Chair to determine if rough
   consensus has been reached.
The goal has never been 100%, but it is not enough to merely have a majority opinion.


And to add to that, the blurb you link notes explicitly that for IETF purposes, "rough consensus" is reached when the Chair determines is has been reached.


Yes, but WG chairs are supposed to help. One way to help would have been to do a consensus call on the underlying controversy. Still, I think the chair is in the clear as far as the rules go.


The combative stance that he's taking really doesn't do him any favors in resolving the issue.

Lawyer: "I've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is blocked."

Regulators: "We've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is not blocked."

In what world is the correct response "Dear regulators, you're incompetent. Pound sand." instead of "Can you share the IP address you used so my client can address this in their geoblock?"


> In what world is the correct response

Any world in which US citizens in the US aren’t subject to UK laws in any case.


> In what world is the correct response "Dear regulators, you're incompetent. Pound sand." instead of "Can you share the IP address you used so my client can address this in their geoblock?"

That would imply that the client actually would like to be contacted every time Ofcom found a leak in the geoblock. Not a good idea imho.


It sounds like they would welcome that, e.g. in the update to the post

>They’re definitely not treating it like a public safety matter, where they know how to reach us and know that I generally respond within the hour.


They don't agree that it is a public safety matter, or at least they've clearly taken the position that they don't care about that kind of public safety.

He's just pointing out that Ofcom's behavior is inconsistent with Ofcom sincerely believing it's a public safety matter either.


I this is exactly how you should respond to outrageous demands.

The UK should pound sand.


I get that it's satisfying to tell them to go away because they're being unreasonable. But what's the legal strategy here? Piss off the regulators such that they really won't drop this case, and give them fodder to be able to paint the lawyer and his client as uncooperative?

Is the strategy really just "get new federal laws passed so UK can't shove these regulations down our throats"? Is that going to happen on a timeline that makes sense for this specific case?


He says on his site that he wants the US to pass a “shield law,” I guess the idea must be to pass a law that explicitly says we don’t extradite for this, pass along the fines, or whatever.

It seems like inside the US, this must be constitutionally protected speech anyway. I’m not 100% sure, but it would seem quite weird if the US could enter a treaty that requires us to enforce the laws of other countries in a way that is against our constitution. Of course the constitution doesn’t apply to the UK (something people just love to point out in these discussions), but it does apply to the US, which would be the one actually doing the enforcing, right?

Anyway, bumping something all the way up to the Supreme Court is a pain in the ass, so it may make sense to just pass a law to make it explicit.


The British legal system is pretty inefficient. I'd probably just say sorry we'll block harder. That'll probably delay things for years, by which time there may be a different government, or a US shield law.


China is much more smartphone-centric than the US. QR codes are universal, WeChat and AliPay are the most common form of payments (online or in person).


Not by $$$, which is the main focus of the article.

In the second table, LoL esports is explicitly highlighted as a success by mindshare, but not profitability. And below that:

> LoL Esports: loses hundreds of millions of dollars annually, exists solely as a marketing mechanism to get people to play the actual game


> "valid, but unspecified"

Annoyingly, it depends on the type, sometimes with unintuitive consequences.

Move a unique_ptr? Guaranteed that the moved-from object is now null (fine). Move a std::optional? It remains engaged, but the wrapped object is moved-from (weird).

Move a vector? Unspecified.


I envy your intuition about high-dimensional spaces, as I have none (other than "here lies dragons"). (I think your intuition is broadly correct, seeing as billions of collision tests feels quite inadequate given the size of the space.)

> Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

And how is orthogonality related to distance? Expansion of |a-b|^2 = |a|^2 + |b|^2 - 2<a,b> = 2 - 2<a,b> which is roughly 2 if the unit vectors are basically orthogonal?

> Since the outputs are normalized, that corresponds to a ridiculously tiny patch on the surface of the unit sphere. Since the outputs are normalized, that corresponds to a ridiculously tiny patch on the surface of the unit sphere.

I also have no intuition regarding the surface of the unit sphere in high-dimensional vector spaces. I believe it vanishes. I suppose this patch also vanishes in terms of area. But what's the relative rate of those terms going to zero?


> > Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

> What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

Imagine for simplicity that we consider only vectors pointing parallel/antiparallel to coordinate axes.

- In 1D, you have two possibilities: {+e_x, -e_x}. So if you pick two random vectors from this set, the probability of getting something orthogonal is 0.

- In 2D, you have four possibilities: {±e_x, ±e_y}. If we pick one random vector and get e.g. +e_x, then picking another one randomly from the set has a 50% chance of getting something orthogonal (±e_y are 2/4 possibilities). Same for other choices of the first vector.

- In 3D, you have six possibilities: {±e_x, ±e_y, ±e_z}. Repeat the same experiment, and you'll find a 66.7% chance of getting something orthogonal.

- In the limit of ND, you can see that the chance of getting something orthogonal is 1 - 1/N, which tends to 100% as N becomes large.

Now, this discretization is a simplification of course, but I think it gets the intuition right.


I think that's a good answer for practical purposes.

Theoretically, I can claim that N random vectors of zero-mean real numbers (say standard deviation of 1 per element) will "with probability 1" span an N-dimensional space. I can even grind on, subtracting the parallel parts of each vector pair, until I have N orthogonal vectors. ("Gram-Schmidt" from high school.) I believe I can "prove" that.

So then mapping using those vectors is "invertible." Nyeah. But back in numerical reality, I think the resulting inverse will become practically useless as N gets large.

That's without the nonlinear elements. Which are designed to make the system non-invertible. It's not shocking if someone proves mathematically that this doesn't quite technically work. I think it would only be interesting if they can find numerically useful inverses for an LLM that has interesting behavior.

All -- I haven't thought very clearly about this. If I've screwed something up, please correct me gently but firmly. Thanks.


for 768 dimensions, you'd still expect to hit (1-1/N) with a few billion samples though. Like that's a 1/N of 0.13%, which quite frankly isn't that rare at all?

Of course are vectors are not only points in one coordinate axes, but it still isn't that small compared to billions of samples.


Bear in mind that these are not base vectors at this stage (which would indeed give you 1/768). They are arbitrary linear combinations. There are exponentially many near orthogonal of these vectors for small epsilon. And epsilon is chosen pretty small in the paper.


> What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

For unit vectors the cosine of the angle between them is a1*b1+a2*b2+...+an*bn.

Each of the terms has mean 0 and when you sum many of them the sum concentrates closer and closer to 0 (intuitively the positive and negative terms will tend to cancel out, and in fact the standard deviation is 1/√n).


> > Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

> What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

Yep, the large number being the number of dimensions.

As you add another dimension to a random point on a unit sphere, you create another new way for this point to be far away from a starting neighbor. Increase the dimensions a lot and then all random neighbors are on the equator from the starting neighbor. The equator being a 'hyperplane' (just like a 2D plane in 3D) of dimension n-1, the normal of which is the starting neighbor, intersected with the unit sphere (thus becoming a n-2 dimensional 'variety', or shape, embedded in the original n dimensional space; like the earth's equator is 1 dimensional object).

The mathematical name for this is 'concentration of measure' [1]

It feels weird to think about it, but there's also a unit change in here. Paris is about 1/8 of the circle far away from the north pole (8 such angle segments of freedom). On a circle. But if that's the definition of location of Paris, on the 3D earth there would be an infinity of Paris. There is only one though. Now if we take into account longitude, we have Montreal, Vancouver, Tokyo, etc ; each 1/8 away (and now we have 64 solid angle segments of freedom)

[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/07/13/concentration_of_m...


> What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

"Concentration of measure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_measure


> Are you saying I am being unnecessarily cautious?

Yes.

If a game is marked with Linux, that means it has a native Linux port. However, Proton has gotten so good in recent years that some of the native Linux ports actually perform _worse_ than just downloading the Windows exe and running it with the compatibility layer.

The investment in Proton makes sense in retrospect, since SteamOS is based on Arch Linux, and most of these games you mention should run just fine on a Steam Deck.


Canada is the second-largest country in the world, so if you know that it's in the north and, um, not Russia, you stand a pretty good chance at picking it out. (Doubly so if you just know it's in the Americas.)

Now, if you asked the same about Pakistan or Nigeria (#5 and #6 in terms of population, but far smaller and with far shorter sea borders), I'd bet that far fewer people would be able to pinpoint those with the same accuracy (whether in the English-speaking world or not).


> if you know that it's in the north and, um, not Russia

You still need to know that it's the second-largest country in the world though


And if you look at the people behind those names, you'll find that most of them were either born in the Russian Empire or moved there at a young age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Andreas_Barclay_de_Tol... - moved to St Petersburg around the age of 3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Bagration - born in Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wittgenstein - born near Kyiv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Ivanovich_Ostermann-... - part of Russian nobility; the Ostermann name came from his great-uncles.


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