TPUs aren't transformer ASICs. The Ironwood TPU that Gemini was trained on was designed before LLMs became popular with ChatGPT's release. The architecture was general enough that it ended up being efficient for LLM training.
A special-purpose transformer inference ASIC would be like Etched's Sohu chip.
I had a similar starting point to the author but ended up in totally the opposite direction, haha. Took computer engineering in undergrad and did well in both CS and EE courses. My first job was as an SDE at AWS but I hated it. Went back to school for EE, got a PhD, and started working as an ASIC designer, which I'm still doing today.
It's definitely the case that there's a bigger jump from school project to actually useful product for EE than for CS. But now that we have affordable but decently featured FPGA boards, the barrier is much lower than before, at least for digital design.
No? There's plenty of overlap. I studied computer engineering in undergrad, which is similar to the author's original major. There are a lot of subjects that straddle the boundary, like computer architecture, embedded systems, and digital signal processing.
Obviously yes, if you're doing heavy analog/power/RF stuff you're going to be pretty far from software, but EE is a really broad field.
United States is literally on the other side of the world. There are places like Malaysia, a very good friend of Rohingya Muslims, China, Thailand, and others that would be perfect places to accommodate. I am not sure why you think that United States should be a deposit box for all sorts of human miseries from across the globe.
Because the U.S. can afford it, being the wealthiest nation on earth, and should therefore take on its share of the burden. Also, because the U.S. can do good, and give these people liberty and safety; if they don't deserve it, why do you?
Do you apply the same standards to your own life? I bet from your presence on this site that your income or potential income is above the median. When a drunk husband across town starts getting abusive towards his wife, do you open your house to the wife? If no, why not? Are you shouldering your share of the burden?
> Do you apply the same standards to your own life?
Yes, absolutely. Most mature people do and most modern societies do. The U.S. has actively supported freedom and democracy around the world since it became a major power, and part of its ethos has been to take in the 'hungry, tired and poor'.
In fact, if you are an American, you are one of the major beneficiaries of this attitude: The entire society, it's freedom, safety, and prosperity, is build on sacrifices of others. Like everyone else alive today, it was given to you by the generations before you. What will we give to others? Recent generations won WWII, gave the nation civil rights for women and minorities, and did so much more. What will we give to the next generation? Hatred and greed?
I have done that, but the implication isn't serious: My giving up part of my home isn't the same as a nation of 320 million people and $18 trillion in income taking in a few thousand or hundreds of thousands of refugees. Nor is the level of sacrifice a serious question - the U.S., beyond any doubt, can easily afford it.
I also give money and food directly to the needy, and also to organizations who provide for them (they have far more expertise and resources than I do). Several of those organizations are governments, and I advocate for higher taxes in order to provide more of these services.
To truly believe that these actions are somehow extraordinary is to be naive about how the world really works. This is the norm of how communities function; if I didn't do my part, I would be looked down on and rightly so - I would be a parasite on everyone else. Who do you think takes care of your needs - food, shelter, education, healthcare, the arts, solving community challenges and problems, and much more? Some of it you pay for, and without a doubt some was paid for and worked hard on by people of good will (and some enlightened self interest). That hospital you went to is funded to a great extent by donations and tax dollars, for example. If you live in a democracy, it's up to the people to provide these things - they won't just happen for you.
Charitable giving is not an unusual or even noteworthy activity; it's done by many, many people throughout the U.S. and the world. Without it - and not just money, but time - society would collapse.
Charity is also provided by government via tax dollars, something else the U.S. has always done and will continue, even under Trump.
> the Buddhists didn't woke up one day and decided to commit genocide
Germans didn't wake up one day in the 1930s and decide to exterminate the Jews either. That doesn't mean the Jews were at all to blame for their persecution.
> What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year?
Uh maybe, I don't know, actually giving them more unstructured play time? Schools have been drastically cutting back on mid-day recess and other types of "free time".
My point is that there's a small window of time remaining in their day once school is out. And my wife picks them up right after school. Most kids are in after care until 6pm.
How can we make the 2 hrs of actual free time he has feel like 3? That's what I'm asking.
Thank you. I wondered if anyone else could see why the original essay is so ridiculous. It assumes that bad culture is the cause of poverty, and not the other way around. It's pretty obvious that the decision to get married and stay married is affected by material conditions. One consequence of the decline in manufacturing jobs is that less-educated men have pretty low employment rates. Since they can't hold down a stable job and be the primary breadwinner (as "bourgeois culture" expects them to), there's little reason for them to stick around (or for their partners to keep them around). This also explains the data Haidt and his group turned up on the correlation between parents' marriage status and children's future success. The couples that managed to stay together were the ones that had a better financial/employment situation. There's no reason to believe that a deadbeat dad would improve his child's future competitiveness that much just by staying married to the child's mother.
There's also the fact that single moms on welfare would lose their benefits if they married the father of their children. As one astute internet commenter on a similar article remarked, "Only an ivory tower egghead could think that poor people don't make rational economic decisions."
What does this have to do with the article? People (all people) fled violence, hunger and death that came from a series of conflicts so dire that some populations haven't fully recovered still.
Add to that incredible amounts of political violence at the dawn of the 20th century, and you have the immigration flows. Similar thing happened when the Soviet block collapsed and economic/political strife spilled out.
A special-purpose transformer inference ASIC would be like Etched's Sohu chip.