pareto parrot

Same here, we had two rooms that had 20+ Apple II computers, each student could use their own machine all to themselves. And our district was not rich, it must have cost more than 150k in today dollars.

There is a wonderful offshoot of Logo for Agent Based Modeling https://www.netlogo.org/ where one can conduct all sorts of simulations involving many thousands of agents.

Are you running Sprite in qemu or on hardware?

I ran a small Mosix cluster a couple times just for funsies. I had forgotten about Sprite as the other SSI cluster operating system. It is really too bad that this line of research trailed off.

Both!

The Sprite kernel released by UCB doesn't run on any qemu target, but I've made ports to the PC and to sun4m, which qemu can run. I've gotten the sun3 (m68k) and sun4 (sparc) ports to run in phabric's fork/continuation of TME, NME [0], but the Lance emulation has a bug that'll cause some longer Ethernet frames to have a few bytes lopped off the end (kernel panics on RPC calls!) and the m68k MMU is missing an edge case that makes init segfault right after exec(). Need to upstream those sometime...

I've been running my cluster mostly off a mini PC with an N95 Atom CPU (root server + couple hosts to login to, Sprite's local filesystem path is buggy and shouldn't be trusted), with virtio network and storage drivers ported to Sprite. Sips electricity, and plenty fast storage for everything else. Migration works great between a real 486 PC compatible and my Zen5 desktop, along with some real SPARCstations mixed in there, and a SPARC laptop for fun.

I wanna release it some day, it'd be super easy to deploy new clusters with a single qcow2 and maybe a libvirt XML domain, but the code is currently a mess and still missing stuff, like a working `addhost` command (the provided one is just a csh script which checked files in/out of an RCS repo in /etc, with hardcoded paths to host mounts at Berkeley...)

[0] https://github.com/phabrics/nme

Wall Street will just move to Mars.

"I believe I did, Bob" lives rent free, every time someone tells another person to fuck themselves using technology.

Thank You!

lmao, thank you, i think

Please consider making more comics. You have it.

Math department administrators fire Terence Tao.

Based on current reward models, the frontier AI labs will burn down mathematics as an impressive display of capabilities and in doing so, will make it impossible for people that get paid to do mathematics to stay employed.

If your job is literally to publish papers, and OpenAI and Anthropic decide that making an infinite-paper-printing machine is the best thing to show how effective their tech is, then as a demo, they destroy that industry.

I wouldn't expect them to destroy that industry, imagine global squadrons of academics and mathematicians focusing their attention on LLM's, training algorithms, scaling laws, ... they're gonna try and beat the incumbent frontier AI labs, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth

The apocalypse being triggered by frontier labs picking a fight with mathematicians was unexpected.

Which is why if humanity had empathy, it would be working on how to make smarter ants, so that they can learn more advanced geometry.

I love that as a goal!

Perhaps indeed a better understanding of what intelligence really is would allow this sort of Uplift (as in Brin's books).

A fellow Brin aficionado!

It's quite possible ants understand a geometry more advanced than our own.

Sounds like a great use of AI.

What do you think we're doing?!

Ant Intelligence will be next big thing in machine learning after this bubble bursts

Useful to his boss.

The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.

A New Kind of Science is a much better monitor stand.