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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Errrrm… No. Don’t get your philosophy from LessWrong.

    Here’s the part of the LessWrong page that cites Simulacra and Simulation:

    Like “agent”, “simulation” is a generic term referring to a deep and inevitable idea: that what we think of as the real can be run virtually on machines, “produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”

    This last quote does indeed come from Simulacra (you can find it in the third paragraph here), but it appears to have been quoted solely because when paired with the definition of simulation put forward by the article:

    A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

    it appears that Baudrillard supports the idea that a computer can just simulate any goddamn thing we want it to.

    If you are familiar with the actual arguments Baudrillard makes, or simply read the context around that quote, it is obvious that this is misappropriating the text.


  • The reason the article compares to commercial flights is your everyday reader knows planes’ emissions are large. It’s a reference point so people can weight the ecological tradeoff.

    “I can emit this much by either (1) operating the global airline network, or (2) running cloud/LLMs.” It’s a good way to visualize the cost of cloud systems without just citing tons-of-CO2/yr.

    Downplaying that by insisting we look at the transportation industry as a whole doesn’t strike you as… a little silly? We know transport is expensive; It is moving tons of mass over hundreds of miles. The fact computer systems even get close is an indication of the sheer scale of energy being poured into them.



  • Wow, what a dishearteningly predictable attack.

    I have studied computer architecture and hardware security at the graduate level—though I am far from an expert. That said, any student in the classroom could have laid out the theoretical weaknesses in a “data memory-dependent prefetcher”.

    My gut says (based on my own experience having a conversation like this) the engineers knew there was a “information leak” but management did not take it seriously. It’s hard to convince someone without a cryptographic background why you need to {redesign/add a workaround/use a lower performance design} because of “leaks”. If you can’t demonstrate an attack they will assume the issue isn’t exploitable.