DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501
A whole lotta fun and useful programming info. DHH goes from a skeptic a year ago to a convert today, running 5 linux boxes — 16 concurrent threads is his current limit.
And DHH gives Lex a new Omarchy laptop on his birthday!
Unified Memory Concept but for x86 computers?
I was looking at these ‘AI Cluster’ videos where they are using 4 Mac Pro studios and making these clusters work for AI. They kept on talking about how the ‘Unified memory’ made it possible for these Macs to make it run. By the looks of Nvidia being cheapskates with VRAM on their latest GPUs, do you guys reckon the concept of ‘Unified Memory’ will trickle down to x86 computers eventually to the point that GPUs will no longer have VRAM in them but it’ll be on us if we wish to put in more or less memory in our systems depending on our needs?
Eventual Answer:
It won’t be universal but might be more common (since it already exists).
Strix Halo is the best example of a high-end x86 competitor to the Mac Studio and it highlights both the advantages and disadvantages of that arrangement. You can allocate enormous amounts of memory to the integrated GPU for rendering or AI tasks at a far lower cost than the equivalent amount of VRAM in a discrete GPU. But Strix Halo still gets demolished by a RTX Pro 6000 in GPU-based workloads.
People are playing with clustered Mac Studios because it’s a relatively cheap way to stack tons of fairly fast RAM, which is important since AI workloads are primarily memory bottlenecked. A Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra and 256 GB of RAM runs at about 820 GB/s memory bandwidth and costs less than an RTX Pro 6000 which only provides 96 GB of VRAM. That’s a lot better than Strix Halo which runs at 256 GB/s or standard socketed DDR5 which runs at around 90 GB/s depending on speed.
The RTX Pro 6000 though still crushes all of them at nearly 1,800 GB/s. That’s why actual AI companies are treating cards like that as entry level. Processing speeds are much faster especially since you can stack multiple GPUs using PCIe on a single board with faster interconnect speeds than TB5 on a Mac Studio (and data centers use even faster interconnects than consumer PCIe).
from Reddit
That’s a quote from an Anthropic internal planning document. Basically they’re buying used books on the cheap and anonymously, then scanning them, so they can legally have fair-use in their AI models.
For more details, go here or search for yourself.
“The crux of the matter is how to choose a good security plugin. We’ve compiled an essential list, getting rid of things that aren’t related to security.
As you can see, there are only 3 essential features you need to worry about. A security plugin should be great at these 3 things: malware scanning, malware cleaning, and firewall. Everything else is gravy. We aren’t putting down brute force protection or two-factor authentication, because those are important too. But you can get other plugins for that functionality.
MalCare is the only security plugin that has great malware scanning and cleaning capabilities, and an advanced firewall that keeps out threats. Every other plugin fails in one place or the other.”
—From an article comparing WordFence to Sucuri.
Another article comparison: 13 Best WordPress Security Plugins Compared & Tested
OK, this article was taken from the MalCare site, so they have an agenda, but I’m going to check it out.
Here’s another article: 12 Best Security Plugins for WordPress to Protect Your Website, from a wordpress site that is promoting their own product as well.
Adi Da Samraj writes:
Mind is “artificial intelligence”. Mind is the first “robot” that human beings ever made. In the usual discussions of such matters, artificial intelligence is presumed to be something generated by computers. In actuality, however,
language is the first form of artificial intelligence created by human beings.
from The Ancient Walk-About Way, by Adi Da Samraj, page 55
Adi Da then goes on to discuss the limitations of “mind”, and then defines real intelligence: “Real Intelligence is tacit (or intrinsically wordless) living
existence.” –page 56
So then what? What happens if you’re really intelligent? the World-Friend, Adi Da continues: “If you are sensitive to the actual nature of your experience, you discover that conditionally manifested existence is disturbed and limited and unsatisfactory. Therefore, you actively look (even if only inwardly, in a feeling sense) for Something Greater.” Ibid.
This reminds me of a Disney story, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from the movie Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse, as that apprentice, decides to cast a spell so the broom works for him (his robot!) and then things get out of hand and that’s rather amusing. Disney got the story from the German Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
“The earliest known written version of the tale was penned by the Greco-Roman satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. 120–180 AD). In his work The Lover of Lies, a character named Eucrates recounts his time studying under an Egyptian magician.” —article “The Greek writer Lucian provided some of the details about the sorcerer being a priest of Isis and learning his art in the catacombs under the city of Memphis.”–article2