Notices by David Mankins (lain_7@tldr.nettime.org)

@csepp @suricrasia @alcinnz I’ve heard that the Common Lisp these LLMs produce is terrible (no doubt due to a poverty of examples), so I expect Coq to be incorrect both syntactically, and logically. Maybe if one has a substantial body of Coq to train it on?

@alcinnz I’m kind of hoping you’ll take a look at the Connection Machine( late 80s): 64000 (2^16, actually) 1-bit processors connected in a hypercube network; each processor has an instruction set that was actually just an 8-bit truth table with result determined by the contents of three one-bit registers. Basically a GPU, only five feet on a side.

Only… it wasn’t a GPU, it was for AI.

They decided there was a big market for supercomputing, and added 2000 floating-point chips (in those days, 32-bit floating point). Now, 32 one-bit processors were responsible for the bits in a floating-point word (each processor was responsible for one bit in the word). The processors and network were a routing mechanism for moving data to the floating point chips.

Then, as now, a supercomputer was a device for turning a computation-bound problem into an I/O-bound one.