Yeah, I’m working in embedded ML, and it’s an insanely exciting time. We’re getting more and more microcontrollers and single-board computers with special AI accelerators, many of them RISC-V, by the day it seems. One of the next steps (in my opinion) is finding a good way to program them that doesn’t involve C/C++ (very fast but also so painful to do AI with) or Python (slow unless it’s wrapping underlying C code, and unsuitable for microcontrollers). In fact, that’s exactly what I’m working on right now as a side project.

What’s also cool is RISC-V promises to be the one instruction set architecture to rule them all. So instead of having PCs as x86, phones and microcontrollers as ARM, then all sorts of other custom architectures like DSPs (digital signal processors), NPUs, etc., we could just have RISC-V with a bunch of open standard extensions. Want vector instructions? Well, here’s a ratified open standard for vector instructions. Want SIMD instructions? Congrats, here’s another ratified open standard.

And all these standards mean it will make it so much easier for the compiler people to provide support for new chips. A day not too long from now, I imagine it will become almost trivial to compile programs that can accelerate tons of scientific, numerical, and AI workloads onto RISC-V vector instructions. Currently, we’re stuck using GPUs for everything that needs parallelization, even though they’re far from the easiest or most optimal devices for many of our computational needs.

As computing advances, we can just create and ratify new open standards. Tired of floating point numbers? You could create a proposal for a standard posit extension today if you wanted to, then fork LLVM or GCC or something to provide the software support as well. In fact, someone already has implemented an open-source RISC-V chip with posit arithmetic and made a fork of LLVM to support it. You could fire it up on an FPGA right now if you wanted.

If ownership didn’t exist, the data wouldn’t be valuable enough to collect. You couldn’t sell it, because nobody would buy it, because they couldn’t use it to sell anything, since they don’t own anything either.

But that wasn’t really the point I was trying to make. The real point I meant is that fake concepts can still be useful. Like the concept of ownership.

Ownership for me but not for thee!

Ownership is when one is allowed to keep all others from accessing or using a thing.

If that one is a person or corp., or the thing is physical or imaginary, it doesn’t change the nature of ownership itself.

A person or a corp could make different choices with their ownership rights. And ownership of physical or imaginary things have different enforcement challenges. But none of that changes the fundamental concept of ownership.

But as I said elsewhere: “The real point I meant is that fake concepts can still be useful. Like the concept of ownership.”

If we can achieve the post-scarcity part, I’ll happily accept the communism part, but I don’t see that happening until we develop Star Trek style matter replicators

Ya, because that works out great in real life.

🙄

It’s sad and hilarious that people hear “zero waste” and think “I need to take aaaaall my cans to the recycling center and compost my scraps”, when the waste that is actually destroying the biosphere is the exhaust from your car. If we’re talking about “doing lower waste”, the first priority is to stop driving a car. Recycling bottles and composting scraps is the thing we can afford to do imperfectly. But not cars, ditching cars is the big important thing and the first step to sustainability.

The problem is getting millions on board. In the 1970s, the zip code was a hard sell, and it had PSAs

I’m partial to the TM 31-210 handbook myself