Just came across this nice technical breakdown of what, exactly, R1 accomplished. Interesting news to me was that they had to bypass CUDA entirely and write optimizations in PDX. Good complementary reading if you're here from my DeepSeek post.
I've been meaning to write a bit about this for a while, but finally getting into Bluesky last week has given me the push I needed to get to it. Back in November, Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the original authors of the ActivityPub protocol behind software like Mastodon, wrote an excellently-researched piece called How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? A lot of the technical ins-and-outs of the essay go a little over my head, but I think it's a worthwhile read if you, like me, are enough of a nerd to want to understand what's happening technically under the hood of
Ran across this quote recently and went down a bit of a rabbit hole into Debussy and Saint-Saens' mutual hatred. I think it's important to remember that classical composers were all catty as hell and constantly beefing with each other. RIP Claude Debussy, you could have gotten in some great fights on Twitter. (Saint-Saens may have been sentimental but Danse Macabre still slaps).
While I've been traveling, little-known Chinese research lab Deepseek released an open-source model that can compete with the best closed-source products OpenAI and Anthropic have to offer. Everyone appears to be freaking out about it.
The reason for this is its astonishingly low training cost compared to performance (it reportedly cost $5 million dollars to train), the fact that it's open-source, and even if you choose to pay for its API, it's about 90% cheaper than its American competitors. The model is also available to try for free immediately. This is all possible because of how much cheaper the
I saw a talk at MAGfest today by Rym Decoster and Emily Compton which attempted to sketch a theory of current post-post-modern cultural output. It's very much a work in progress, but their concept of "metacontextualism" is the idea that after postmodern deconstruction and irony, we are starting to see a trend emerge towards building meaning through choice out of its ashes: being aware of the fractured contexts of a postmodern world, and that there's no single way of knowing or being, but choosing a forking path and going down it. They argue that art is how a society engages