While I sympathize with the general negative outrage towards this change, I truly believe that people here fail to empathize with the mainstream users of Android phones.
I personally have seen every single older relative and non-tech friend, end up installing bloateare, spyware, and malware inadvertently - because they have no idea how anything in the tech domain works. And given the widespread popularity of Android (globally 70% vs iOS at 30% market share) and even moreso in lower income demographics, it also leads to rampant piracy of obviously non-essential apps like games and streaming (eg Spotify). In fact, even here on HN, almost everyone who has given their parents an iPhone has extolled the virtues of a secured AppStore/device and the peace of mind it brings.
While there may someday be a way to support both the average user and the HN power user, we are not there yet. It’s hard for me to outright reject Google/Android attempts to secure people’s devices.
The only time I've actually seen Android malware in the wild, it was because my mother installed a homescreen flashlight toggle widget from the Play Store that also displayed ads on the lockscreen. That was forbidden under Play Store rules, but there it was. I replaced it with something from F-Droid.
The Play Store still has a problem with shady apps years later. If Google wants to be more like Apple, they should start with better curation in their own store.
They can lock down the Play store completely, that's what 99% of people and the people most vulnerable to malware are using. The problem is extending that to F-Droid and other alternative services.
I’ve seen a fair bit of bloatware, spyware and what I’d count as malware on people’s Android phones. Every last piece of it has come with the OS or from the Play Store.
wdym? Nobody's paying me or rewarding me for using these tokens. I had some spare in my subscription limit (we're not on token pricing), so I decided to try an ambitious task that may reduce our CI times and improve our DX significantly. That's hardly "the entire token-maxxing AI hype train in a nutshell".
I’m curious when folks will tire of lighting money on fire. Companies are already starting to scale back a bit, but the AI companies are still nowhere near profitability.
Maybe I missed something, but this article felt more like an ad for their modern matchbox designs, versus any sort of gallery of older ones - save for a collage near the end.
That's why I said "regular police". My understanding is that generally no one (including the police) is allowed to carry a gun in public unless someone already illegally introduced them into play. That's the world I want to live in.
I initially thought the same, but apparently with the inaccuracies inherent to floating-point arithmetic and various other such accuracy leakage, it’s not true!
This has nothing to do with FP inaccuracies, and your link does confirm that:
“Although the use of multiple GPUs introduces some randomness (Nvidia, 2024), it can be eliminated by setting random seeds, so that AI models are deterministic given the same input. […] In order to support this line of reasoning, we ran Llama3-8b on our local GPUs without any optimizations, yielding deterministic results. This indicates that the models and GPUs themselves are not the only source of non-determinism.”
I believe you've misread - the Nvidia article and your quote support my point. Only by disabling the fp optimizations, are the authors are able to stop the inaccuracies.
First, the “optimizations” are not IEEE 754 compliant. So nondeterminism with floating-point operations is not an inherent property of using floating-point arithmetics, it’s a consequence of disregarding the standard by deliberately opting in to such nondeterminism.
Secondly, as I quoted the paper is explicitly making the point that there is a source of nondeterminism outside of the models and GPUs, hence ensuring that the floating-point arithmetics are deterministic doesn’t help.
Yes it’s LTS but the point is that the LTS system has overlapping support so you can wait on an older LTS for a bit before upgrading to a newer one. And it’s somewhat prudent to do so if you value stability highly, because often a few new issues will be discovered and patched after LTS goes live for a bit.
