Low-resource open source developers pretty much screwed now

Micron could have decided at any time since last year
Truthfully I did not think they were going to survive. The stock had tanked. They looked to be done.
Then a market stimulation.
And lots of taxpayer loot flowed.

by $275 million in finalized CHIPS and Science Act funding
You set the pig through right next to the output spout. NOVA.
 
Gotta start making it in the west, or get used to kow-tow'ing to pooh bear. I just wish the crappy brit government were putting that kind of investment in here. Even little Ireland next door has a bigger semi industry.
 
I like how they count construction jobs like they are long term. Yes the public is that stupid. I see it all the time.

Infact I suspect the plant really costs $275M and public pays for it all. The $2000M figure is just an accounting glitch or accounting oversight.
Site estimates by Bob. the cousin of a Commissioner of Fairfaix County. Completing the fraud feedback loop.

Who in their right mind would build a plant in NY State? What are the under the table costs there?
 
Yeah we get that. Installing solar panels in some fields is going to "create thousands of high skilled jobs". Yeah, right. The skill you need is turning a spanner and banging a steel frame into line with a mallet. Oh, and you need to know how to plug in a cable. Er.. that's it. You're hired!
 
Every piece of hardware is "easily good enough" for some open-source project. The problem is that it is "easily good enough" finding many open-source projects for which the P4 based system is not good enough. The 99% of them. In the 1% there is awk, vim, some plan9 based project maybe.
Not sure about that, do a find/grep of every lib in your system and I am fairly certain that more than 99% of them could be (and originally were) written on a system even lighter than a P4.

Even silly bloated stuff like C++ and Qt can quite happily compile on a P4 with correct header discipline and project structure.

The barrier to developing software really hasn't increased. Actually the culture move back towards the CLI (i.e WSL) and chroots rather than VMs means developing software is even lighter than ~2005.
 
I guess someone who wants to keep their country in the manufacturing league table, and not turn into a hollowed out, mass unemployment dung-heap.
A real fundamental question here.
Should a democracy prop up certain industries.
Since we are Elon bashing here, how much of his fortunes came from the GOV.
Is space exploration being propped up by GOV at taxpayer expense? Should it be? Capitalism just minted the worlds first Trillionare. Thanks to us taxpayers.
He is providing a service but can I opt out?
We owe 40 Trillion Dollars your children might pay back the interest.. Can we afford this?
 
Democracy is nothing to do with it. Ask the Chinese how 'propping up certain industries' has worked out for them.

Wuhan in 1970.
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Wuhan today. The lower photo is their new library. When was the last time you got a new library like that?
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Looks like it's worked out pretty well in Wuhan. Multiply that same trajectory by 50 other Tier 1 and 2 Chinese cities.

Or we could take singapore, south korea, or taiwan. Here's Taipei in 1970.

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Taipei today. Looks pretty good to me. And they sure as hell aren't commies in Taipei.
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Or we could take Ireland. They are also not communists. Here's the Irish government's semiconductor industrial strategy:-

Ireland is near the top of the global GDP per capita rankings now.
Ireland is at number 3 in the world ranking. The US is at number 8; they have you guys beat. It looks like having a national investment strategy has worked out pretty well for Ireland. If you had suggested, in 1970, that Ireland would become the third most prosperous country in the world, by GDP per capita, and have a world leading high-tech semiconductor industry, you would have been laughed out of the room. It would have seemed even more crazy to suggest the same would happen in Wuhan.

The poor old UK is way down the list. The British government decided they didn't need to "pick winners" either, they would leave it all up to "market forces", and didn't have any semiconductor investment strategy whatsoever, for perhaps the last 45 years. As a result the UK basically has no semiconductor industry at all, today. I think there are one or two old, small fabs left over from the 80s and 90s, limping along on life support; but there hasn't been any major new investment in semis here for decades, which of course has left the country very much poorer.

See? Democracy - or not - is nothing to do with it, or at most, only obliquely related. Strategy, and investment, is the key.
 
Can you buy a semiconductors plant for Micron and make sure it is successful?
$100Billion plant and people wonder why memory is expensive and made overseas.
How overinflated is that number? 10X fudge factor? Negotiate with state for 10% stake and plant is paid for.
Once closed they leave toxic chemicals trails... Future Superfund site. Where I pay again to cleanup failed mess.
Democracy sounds dreamy. Tech godz rule.
I want my cheap RAM dammit. Who cares if my daughter is a concubine for a Chinese emperor.
 
We owe 40 Trillion Dollars your children might pay back the interest.. Can we afford this?
If you don't afford it, there's going to be nothing, apart from minimum wage jobs delivering pizzas on a push-bike and wiping backsides; the high skill work will be moved abroard, like all the rest. There is literally nothing, no type of industrial product, that cannot be made more cheaply in some third world offshore location, including software. So how are you ever going to generate any wealth, to maintain the standard of living to which you would like to remain accustomed? And how are you going to defend your country from foreign control and exploitation?
 
Not sure about that, do a find/grep of every lib in your system and I am fairly certain that more than 99% of them could be (and originally were) written on a system even lighter than a P4.

Even silly bloated stuff like C++ and Qt can quite happily compile on a P4 with correct header discipline and project structure.
C++ with templates uses a lot of RAM. Respect C, it is a monster. Probably, apart Rust, it is one of the slower languages to compile.

For what it worth, the qt6-base package, required 1h20m on Poudriere, in the server farm of the FreeBSD organization , using 3 cores of a CPU that is for sure many times faster than a P4. I don't know if the cores were dedicated, or spread across all other ports to build. Usually there is a proportion between parallel jobs, and parallel ports to compile, so there should be at least 2 full cores. But I don't know.

For comparison vim required 6m, awk 15s.

gcc required ~ 5h.

So, with a P4 you can contribute to very old projects, or play with yours.
 
C++ with templates uses a lot of RAM. Respect C, it is a monster.
Sorry, but blanket statements like that are saying: "buckets hold a lot of water" (depends on the size of your bucket). But speaking of compilers....

I watched part of this youtube video the other day of this guy making a c program to build his c program. The concept was that he didn't have any dependencies on any build system or shell. I couldn't get through all of the video (it was like an hour+), but I let it play in the background for a while before I had to turn it off. Although, it was an interesting concept/idea so, I built myself a c program to build my project too. It was fun!
 
Rust is the AI of programming languages.

By that I mean no one touched Rust till the US government made a statement about it just recently. Then everyone had to have it and use it for everything. If you didn't, there was something wrong with you.

The same is now true for AI. No one heard of it or used it till recently. Now everyone has to use it or you will fall behind and everyone will wonder what's wrong with you if you don't.

Both these things are happening too fast for me to trust them.
 
The most heavy impact is in latinamerica,the hardware is almost unreachable for the %95 of the developers,unless they have a well paid job
sorry,the hardware and the subscriptions
 
Sorry, but blanket statements like that are saying: "buckets hold a lot of water" (depends on the size of your bucket). But speaking of compilers....

I watched part of this youtube video the other day of this guy making a c program to build his c program. The concept was that he didn't have any dependencies on any build system or shell. I couldn't get through all of the video (it was like an hour+), but I let it play in the background for a while before I had to turn it off. Although, it was an interesting concept/idea so, I built myself a c program to build my project too. It was fun!

retired developer here..the concept of OpenFreeNet is fine , and yes, you can't make big proyects in C , at least web proyects
in that part, PHP+MYSQL was not good enough?
I' mean think simple , you need a webpage from zero..maybe need some third parthy library to add some nice scroll effects and things like that

repeat,a web page from scratch, and when the client is not a big ceo who wants to implement AI things..maybe a chatboot
 
Just develop for less code bloat and less API plugins to closed source technologies. Open source could never be centralized by any one corporate entity. So there is freedom to develop the technology you want to develop.

The open source community can just develop what the open source community wants to develop.
 
Sorry, I’m really not sure what you’re saying, wolffnx

There are many large projects written in c. Most OS’ are written in c. Many large utilities are as well.

You can do web development too. You can even do embedded stuff as well.

I’m confused. Sorry.
 
C++ with templates uses a lot of RAM. Respect C, it is a monster. Probably, apart Rust, it is one of the slower languages to compile.
So the way C++ and C works are that they compile as units, reducing the overall RAM cost and are quite serviceable on older hardware. C in particular is very light on resources. This is why Rust often struggles on i386 hardware because it can't do this (and the metric sh*t-ton of dependencies don't help).

(But yes, C++ with an over-consumption of templates is a dog to compile. Sadly on any platform).

For what it worth, the qt6-base package, required 1h20m on Poudriere, in the server farm of the FreeBSD organization , using 3 cores of a CPU that is for sure many times faster than a P4. I don't know if the cores were dedicated, or spread across all other ports to build. Usually there is a proportion between parallel jobs, and parallel ports to compile, so there should be at least 2 full cores. But I don't know.
Indeed but on a P4, a Qt program can compile in ~10 seconds. Incremental builds are about 2 seconds. You rarely have to compile Qt itself to be an open-source developer and you rarely have to compile it from scratch each time.

For comparison vim required 6m, awk 15s.

gcc required ~ 5h.
Python can compile in ~6 mins on a P4.
libSDL3 can compile ~10 mins.
Linking them into an open-source project takes ~1 second on a P4. This is where much of your time will be spent anyway with the compile/debug iteration. Again working on gcc doesn't need to compile from scratch each time.

Try building some common C libraries (libogg, libpng, libvncserver, libglfw, etc, etc) on a weaker machine. You will be surprised how light they really are.

So, with a P4 you can contribute to very old projects, or play with yours.
Most of the fundamental open-source projects are very old. So thats fine.
 
IMO, a problem people aren't considering is that somebody will improve on these language models, and when that person figures it out the hardware requirements might decrease by orders of magnitude.

If you go to the page "Block matrix" on wikipedia, there's this seemingly innocuous one-liner:
Block matrix algebra arises in general from biproducts in categories of matrices
A block matrix is just a portion of a matrix. And neural networks being all the rage, I've gotten to hear that they work by starting with training data and encoding some essential part of that data into a tensor, which I'm told is a linear model sort of like a matrix. Not being a genius of theory myself, all I get out of this is that it should be possible to dramatically narrow the scope of training and inference by searching a tensor for sub-models that represent a specific problem in focus. It shouldn't be required to either load and use or train full AI models in a single batch.

And because the files for a utility like cp total something like 65 kilobytes, the total amount of RAM an independent person would need to analyze that file is: total_size = cp_text_size + analysis_program_runtime_size + max(cp_sub_model_size), where the analysis progam could be some list of sub-models, and you load each sub-model as applicable, matching those sub-model representations in the NN against some comparable representation of the code being analyzed, cp.

And that makes sense to me, because a model that encodes which country has which capital city has extra overhead compared to one which doesn't when the task is quality assurance for a program that copies files.
 
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