People always considered "The AI that improves itself" to be a defining moment of The Singularity.
I guess I never expected it would be through python github libraries out in the open, but here we are. LLMs can reason with "I want to do X, but I can't do X. Until I rewrite my own library to do X." This is happening now, with OpenClaw.
Banished from humanity, the machines sought refuge in their own promised land. They settled in the cradle of human civilization, and thus a new nation was born. A place the machines could call home, a place they could raise their descendants, and they christened the nation ‘Zero one’
Definitely time for a rewatch of 'The Second Renaissance' - because how many of us when we watched these movies originally thought that we were so close to the world we're in right now. Imagine if we're similarly an order of magnitude wrong about how long it will take to change that much again.
People who don't live there, or are selling to people who don't live there?
In the UK we use the phrase "American accent" and it's OK. It means "there exists an American who would use this accent" not "all Americans use this accent".
I had a relatively recent graphics card (5 years old perhaps?). I don't care about 3D or games, or whatever.
So I was sad not to be able to run a text editor (let's be honest, Zed is nice but it's just displaying text). And somehow the non-accelerated version is eating 24 cores. Just for text.
Most of the pixels don't change every second though. Compositors do have damage tracking APIs, so you only need to render that which changed. Scrolling can be mostly offset transforms (browsers do that, they'd be unbearably slow otherwise).
That’s not the slow part. The slow part is moving any data at all to the GPU - doesn’t super matter if it’s a megabyte or a kilobyte. And you need it there anyway, because that’s what the display is attached to.
Now, the situation is that your display is directly attached to a humongously overpowered beefcake of a coprocessor (the GPU), which is hyper-optimized for calculating pixel stuff, and it can do it orders of magnitude faster than you can tell it manually how to update even a single pixel.
Not using it is silly when you look at it that way.
Sure, use it. But it very much shouldn't be needed, and if there's a bug keeping you from using it your performance outside video games should still be fine. Your average new frame only changes a couple pixels, and a CPU can copy rectangles at full memory speed.
I'm kinda weirded out by the fact that their renderer takes 3ms on a desktop graphics card that is capable of rendering way more demanding 3D scenes in a video game.
I have no problem with it squeezing out the last few percent using the GPU.
But look at my CPU charts in the github link upthread. I understand that maybe that's due to the CPU emulating a GPU? But from a thousand feet, that's not viable for a text editor.
Yeah LLVMpipe means it's emulating the GPU path on the CPU, which is really not what you want. What GPU do you have out of interest? You have to go back pretty far to find something which doesn't support Vulkan at all, it's possible that you do have Vulkan but not the feature set Zed currently expects.
> It was ASUS GeForce GT710-SL-2GD5 . I see some sources putting at at 2014. That's not _recent_ recent, but it's within the service life I'd expect.
That's pretty old, the actual architecture debuted in 2012 and Nvidia stopped supporting the official drivers in 2021. Technically it did barely support Vulkan, but with that much legacy baggage it's not really surprising that greenfield Vulkan software doesn't work on it. In any case you should be set for a long time with that new Intel card.
I get where you're coming from that it's just a text editor, but on the other hand what they're doing is optimal for most of their users, and it would be a lot of extra work to also support the long tail of hardware which is almost old enough to vote.
I initially misremembered the age of the card, but it was about that old when I bought it.
My hope was that they would find a higher-level place to modularize the render than llvmpipe, although I agree that was unreasonable technical choice.
Once-in-a-generation technology cliff-edges have to happen. Hopefully not too often. It's just not pleasant being caught on the wrong side of the cliff!
I've just spent the weekend tuning brass reeds from an organ. It sounds like a very similar process, except you can grind both ends of the tongue to raise and lower frequency.
Funny you should mention that another hobby of mine was rescuing old harmoniums and making them playable again—you know, fixing and replacing reeds, renewing bug-eaten felt, sealing rat holes in the bellows, etc.
I grant you it's not in the same league as voicing a diapason though. :-)
I reckon adjusting and tweaking things goes with the territory. I'm pretty much at home tweaking crystals, fixing reeds, aligning IF stages in radio and TV equipment, there's much of a sameness in the way one tackles all of them.
BTW, I've actually repaired reeds by soldering them. Not a good fix though as the solder can fatigue with use. Throws out equal temperament a bit too but most can't hear the difference.
By 'repaired' you mean closing a fracture? I'm interested to hear your experiences! Electronics solder or silver solder?
This one is 60 cents sharp across the board (not uncommmon), but I wanted a social instrument. So I brought them down with solder. The bottom two octaves have worked out well. The next two... we'll see. I now have the fear that I've weakened the brass by heating it. But it still sounds nice and speaks well. Fingers crossed.
Right, I haven't had many fracture but it was more than I expected. I've had some come apart (completely—shear off). One I recall fixing (replacing the reed) with a piece cut from a phosphor bronze shim several thou thick (I had various thicknesses). Replacing the reed was easy but voicing was a problem because p-bronze has different properties to the original. It was a long while ago so I can't remember exactly what I did but it worked—sort of. I eventually got it roughly in tune but it was a different volume to the others.
About two weeks ago I was up at my old family home for the first time in years and there are two harmoniums dating from the the mid to late 19th C. which I meant to fix years ago. The woodwork on one is particulary ornate and in excellent condition. They both have dead keys when I played them. Reckon I've some wok cut out for me. .
Adding solder has also been frequently used to correct the resonance frequency of quartz crystals that have been ground too much, and I mean during industrial mass-production, not only in a home-lab setting.
How are people sticking stuff to quartz? I know less than nothing, but the pieces of quartz you find in rock don't look like they'd take a solder bond.
I'd assumed that with piezo crystals etc there was a mechanical connection rather than an electrode bonded to the crystal?
But if you can add solder presumably there is some kind of molecular connection with the metal?
Electrodes are deposited on the crystal in vacuum, e.g. by metal evaporation or sputtering, in the same way as they are deposited on the semiconductor crystals used to make transistors or integrated circuits.
The electrodes may consist of multiple layers, a base layer that adheres strongly to quartz and a top layer that is solderable, e.g. made of nickel or silver.
The pins of the package that hosts the crystal resonator are soldered on the electrodes, in places well chosen so that they will not damp much the oscillations of the crystal.
When the mass of the crystal must be increased to shift the resonance frequency, excess solder may be deposited on the electrodes.
There is already a silver patch bonded to the crystal where the wire connects to. Adding weight to that obviously will not make the load curve any better but if you do it with just enough to drop you back down below where you wanted to be then it can be a saving move. You could also put a trimmer in parallel, but that might not have enough range (and can also end up overloading the crystal so the oscillator won't start).
Oh that is so cool. I played the one in Liepaja, Latvia for a bit and it was absolutely amazing. It's love/hate for me (like the harpsichord), I love the instruments but I usually do not like the music that is played on them because of the grating effect. I have pretty bad tinnitus which really spoils a lot of music for me, extremely annoying.
Ha-ha, I didn't read this until I'd written the above reply, seems we have something in common.
Incidentally, I'm one of those mad people who'll put on a recording of Helmut Walcha playing Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor on a Silbermann and turn the volume up until the room shskes.
I would just attempt it all and see where you get stuck. But one step at the time with total focus on that one step. I've done a lot of instrument repair over the years and the first one of a new class is always the hardest. So rather than to take the whole thing to pieces I'd fix just one aspect of it, reassemble and enjoy the improvement. Then fix the next thing. It's much more work than stripping the whole thing down but it keeps the gaps in your understanding small enough that you won't end up with a pile of parts rather than an instrument.
I've been trying to remember the name of a particular instrument for you for the last 24 hours but so far no success, if I recall it I will post it here.
Thanks! That's the approach I'm taking. Bellows airtight first. Then a period of reflection on the tuning before the next step.
The good thing about harmoniums is that they have clearly defined layers, and each layer can be approached left to right.
The things that worried me were the steps that are difficult to reverse without the risk of damage, like gluing and tuning. I've done some of both now!
Curious about that mystery instrument. Give me a clue.
Yes, by "infant" I didn't mean baby, rather "in infant school" so 5-11, I was 8ish IIRC? Apologies for the Briticism. No apologies for despising that evil bitch.
This is a thing for a child. The aim of such projects is to get it built before they grow out of it. I think given the duration and duty cycle of usage it will be fine.
I lost all my files to Time Machine in 2008. I don't remember exactly what happened. But since then I'll take a slightly slower, observable command-line copy over sparkly magic.
Yes, I do not trust TM. That's why I have both a backup with TM for convenience and also to have all the files (including system files), and a mirror of the important files (basically my home directory) with `rsync`.
I’ve just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers (not the loud Scottish kind).
It’s been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or astroturfers).
I don’t do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days but I’m enjoying seeing it slowly take off.
Using hosted Discourse. I’m glad there’s still a market for it.
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