LESSWRONG
LW

All of fylo's Comments + Replies

Predicting GPU performance
fylo10

Thanks. Another naive question: how do power and cooling requirements scale with transistor and GPU sizes? Could these be barriers to how large supercomputers can be built in practice?

Reply
2Marius Hobbhahn
Definitely could be but don't have to be. We looked a bit into cooling and heat and did not find any clear consensus on the issue. 
Predicting GPU performance
fylo30

Thanks for a really interesting read. I wonder if it's worth thinking more about the FLOP/$ as a follow-up. If a performance limit is reached, presumably the next frontier would be bringing down the price of compute. What are the current bottlenecks on reducing costs?

Reply
3Marius Hobbhahn
We originally wanted to forecast FLOP/s/$ instead of just FLOP/s but we found it hard to make estimates about price developments. We might look into this in the future. 
Analysis: US restricts GPU sales to China
fylo31

Thanks for really interesting discussion and summary of the state of play. I'm curious what you think of Ben Thompson's point that China could have an advantage at the "trailing edge"(28-45nm, and 45+) if TSMC were taken off the board? 

https://stratechery.com/2022/chips-and-china/

Maybe the play is to focus on the trailing edge, which is easier to take control of, but still v important in the short-term at least, and temporarily let go of the cutting edge?

Reply
April Coronavirus Open Thread
fylo40

Hi all,

Does anyone know why US cases and deaths tend to be lower on Sundays and (especially) Mondays, compared to other days of the week? Is it something with the timing of how the data are processed?

I put up some quick plots here:

https://twitter.com/Nick_Lutsko/status/1254067996990959616

Apologies if this has been explained before and I missed it.

Reply
Open Thread March 2019
fylo70

Thanks for the response!

It's interesting to see what your concerns are. There's probably less research on these kinds of feedback loops/tail risks then there should be. Part of the problem is just how uncertain they are -- a combination of the difficulty of measuring things like methane releases and the problem of not being able to resolve these processes in models. Our best guide is probably paleoclimate observations, but I'm not an expert on these.

In terms of blogs, Real Climate is the best place to start. They can get combative, and they... (read more)

Reply
Open Thread March 2019
fylo230

Hi, I'm a postdoc in climate science, just made an account. I've been reading SSC off and on for about two years, then started exploring LW more recently and wanted to join the discussion.

I'm curious what questions you have about climate science, and what resources you think are needed to make it more accessible? More blogs? More easily accessible review papers?

Reply
6ryan_b
Welcome to LessWrong! I appreciate you popping up. Out of the gate, I should probably say this isn't really specific to climate science; getting up to date on any rapidly advancing field is pretty tough. The saturation of political offense and defense just makes it tougher, is all. The likelihood functions over p-values question is one that I expect would help all scientific fields more-or-less equally. The questions I personally have are mostly about the state of the various feedback-loops or runaway-processes that have been proposed as drivers of radical climate change. For example, the clathrate gun hypothesis; the last thing I read on the subject was commentary from a scientist who had just completed sampling of methane releases in the Arctic Ocean, who thought it had already fired. Sometime later I was reading a summary which largely agrees with the Wikipedia article that the role of this mechanism in past events is not as great as we previously thought/feared, but then later still I read that clathrate mining had officially begun. The example of the American natural gas boom suggests to me that mining will probably make the problem worse. There's plenty of stuff on the various equilibrium processes like the nitrogen cycle or the sulphur cycle; I feel like something on what are effectively dis-equilibrium processes would also be useful both for learning and for risk evaluation. For the most part, information about this kind of thing is scattered across papers which are infrequently meta-analyzed, or buried deep in reports like the IPCC's and limited in nuance. I think more easily accessible - and in particular findable - review papers would be very helpful to me. In particular, if papers which discuss the history and intuition of an open problem could be found, I would love that. To give you a sense of what I mean, take a look at Macroscopic Prediction by ET Jaynes. This was a habit of the author more than anything else and it runs throughout his writings; i