I am ready for it

A token is the word for the base unit of text that an LLM works with. It’s always been that way. The LLM does not directly work with characters; they are collected together into chunks less than a word and this stream of tokens is what the LLM is processing. This is also why the LLMs have such trouble with spelling questions like “how many Rs in raspberry?” — they do not see the individual letters in the first place so they do not know.

No, the LLMs do not all tokenize the same way. Different tokenizers are (or at least were once) one of the major ways they differed from each other. A simple tokenizer might split words up into one token per syllable but I think they’ve gotten much more complicated than that, now.

My understanding is very basic and out-of-date.

My cat disappeared for several weeks one time and came back well-fed with somebody else’s collar on him.

Doesn’t the Apple TV remote also have a trackpad as it’s main control?

Indeed, the plan for SpaceX is to literally launch computers into orbit to have orbiting data centers.

No, I cannot explain why this seems like a good idea to anybody. Beyond, “Elon Musk likes juicing his stock by announcing useless sci-fi plans that won’t come true”

That guy picked me up as a rideshare driver once. He was late.

it is the only thing giving them an advantage over the USA

That’s really not true at all anymore. China is an absolute manufacturing powerhouse. Almost all of the industry that used to be the USA’s strength in the ‘50s is China’s strength now.

They haven’t been the cheapest labor anymore for a while now and they don’t need to be.

Don’t get me wrong, the USA has other, newer strengths now — tech and design, among others. But they do appear to be throwing them away and ceding to others — especially China — as hard and fast as they can.

On the other hand, humanoid shape for robots seems like an extreme waste of technical complexity and cost, so in my opinion this particular article is mostly showing up how China is also beating the USA at being faddish and dumb following tech fashion.

If you want to get advantage from a speculative fund making a bet on a popped bubble, then you need to be already invested now, before the bubble bursts. (And also, you/your fund need to be right that it’s really about to pop now, and not later)

Once the race is over it’s too late to bet on the ponies.

I mean… it’s not slop. It’s a good, old-fashioned well-supported rant about how Apple has abandoned good user interface design.

<old man shakes fist at cloud> I do wish that anal-retentive, careful, thoughtful geeks would come back into power in place of flashy shallow thinkers.

But I can’t say I expect shaking fists at clouds is likely to accomplish much.

“Users don’t like MacOS’s liquid glass, especially not me, but they released it anyway and this is bad.”

Check out the excellent tutorial # Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists especially chapters five and six. It has a lot more words, it’s entertaining, engaging, and informative.

But if you are doing something advanced, down at the hardware level

This part is wrong. Otherwise yes correct.

The “unsafe” code in rust is allowed to access memory locations in ways that skip the compiler’s check and guarantee that that memory location has valid data. They programmer is on their own to ensure that.

Which as you say is just the normal state of affairs for all C code.

This is needed not because of hardware access but just because sometimes the proof that the access is safe is beyond what the compiler is able to represent.

Try to find a big rig truck wash near your location on Google maps. I cannot. Only 57 million car washes and no way to filter them out.

Edit: lo and behold: “big rig truck wash” is the magic phrase it turns out. “Truck wash”, “Semi truck wash”, “semi truck wash -car” don’t work but “big rig truck wash” does.

Fuck you Google, you waste my time.