Udacity Updated +Created
It is a shame that they refocused to more applied courses. This also highlights their highly "managed" approach to content creation. Their 2022 pitch on front page says it all:
for as few as 10 hours a week, you can get the in-demand skills you need to help land a high-paying tech job
they are focused on the highly paid character of many software engineering jobs.
But one cool point of this website is how they hire tutors to help on the courses. This is a very good thing. It is a fair way of monetizing: e-learning websites must keep content free, only charge for certification.
AKS primality test Updated +Created
XP School Updated +Created
Amazing self-directed learning direction:
The pupils have a parents' evening coming up but instead of their teachers giving an account of their progress, it is a "student-led conference" at which they must present a portfolio of their work, explain what they are most proud of and discuss where they need to put in more effort.
world.hey.com/gwyn/no-excuses-bc4152fb mentions that the founder was inspired by other schools: High Tech High and Expeditionary Learning.
Lots of focus on showcase student work.
The founder Gwyn ap Harri is quite dirty mouthed, which is also cool.
Ciro Santilli tried to contact them in 2021 at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1448924419016036353 and on website contact form to see if we could do some project together, but no reply.
U-Math Updated +Created
Weekend Updated +Created
Days of the week where you don't do what you set out to do. And yet, it is in those days that you save your sanity, and possibly the world. Wait, this sounds exactly like a week day?
Figure 1.
Calvin and Hobbes "Oh No! I overslept! I gotta get up!" cartoon
. Source.
Allegory Updated +Created
Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics Updated +Created
AMO is a slightly more general area than condensed matter physics, including related phenomena with smaller numbers atoms and optics. The two terms are however sometimes used as synonyms. The term AMO has gained wide usage and acceptability, see e.g.:
If Ciro had had greater foresight, this might have been what he studied at university!
Electrolysis Updated +Created
List of instant messaging software Updated +Created
Physics World Updated +Created
PsiQuantum founding myth Updated +Created
Once upon a time, the British Government decided to invest some 80 million into quantum computing.
Jeremy O'Brien told his peers that he had the best tech, and that he should get it all.
Some well connected peers from well known universities did not agree however, and also bid for the money, and won.
Jeremy was defeated. And pissed.
So he moved to Palo Alto and raised a total of $665 million instead as of 2021. The end.
Makes for a reasonable the old man lost his horse.
www.ft.com/content/afc27836-9383-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271 British quantum computing experts leave for Silicon Valley talks a little bit about them leaving, but nothing too juicy. They were called PsiQ previously apparently.
The departure of some of the UK’s leading experts in a potentially revolutionary new field of technology will raise fresh concerns over the country’s ability to develop industrial champions in the sector.
More interestingly, the article mentions that this was party advised by early investor Hermann Hauser, who is known to be preoccupied about UK's ability to create companies. Of course, European Tower of Babel.
SQLite Updated +Created
The minimalism, serverlessness/lack of temporary caches/lack of permission management, Hipp's religious obsession with efficiency, the use of their own pure Fossil version control[ref]. Wait, scrap that last one. Pure beauty!
Official Git mirror: github.com/sqlite/sqlite
Create a table
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 "
CREATE TABLE 'IntegerNames' (int0 INT, char0 CHAR(16));
INSERT INTO 'IntegerNames' (int0, char0) VALUES (2, 'two'), (3, 'three'), (5, 'five'), (7, 'seven');
"
List tables:
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 '.tables'
output:
IntegerNames
Show schema of a table:
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 '.schema IntegerNames'
outputs the query that would generate that table:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'IntegerNames' (int0 INT, char0 CHAR(16));
Show all data in a table:
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 'SELECT * FROM IntegerNames'
output:
2|two
3|three
5|five
7|seven
Apache Jena CLI tools setup Updated +Created
The CLI tools don't appear to be packaged for Ubuntu 23.10? Annoying... There is a package libapache-jena-java but it doesn't contain any binaries, only Java library files.
To run the CLI tools easily we can download the prebuilt:
sudo apt install openjdk-22-jre
wget https://dlcdn.apache.org/jena/binaries/apache-jena-4.10.0.zip
unzip apache-jena-4.10.0.zip
cd apache-jena-4.10.0
export JENA_HOME="$(pwd)"
export PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)/bin"
and we can confirm it works with:
sparql -version
which outputs:
Apache Jena version 4.10.0
If your Java is too old then then running sparql with the prebuilts fails with:
Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: arq/sparql has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 55.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:756)
        at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:473)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:74)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:369)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:363)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:362)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:418)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:352)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:351)
        at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.checkAndLoadMain(LauncherHelper.java:621)
Build from source is likely something like:
sudo apt install maven openjdk-22-jdk
git clone https://github.com/apache/jena --branch jena-4.10.0 --depth 1
cd jena
mvn clean install
TODO test it.
If you make the mistake of trying to run the source tree without build:
git clone https://github.com/apache/jena --branch jena-4.10.0 --depth 1
cd jena
export JENA_HOME="$(pwd)"
export PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)/apache-jena/bin"
it fails with:
Error: Could not find or load main class arq.sparql
as per: users.jena.apache.narkive.com/T5TaEszT/sparql-tutorial-querying-datasets-error-unrecognized-option-graph
Animal intelligence Updated +Created
Amazon acquisition Updated +Created
Amazon EC2 GPU Updated +Created
As of December 2023, the cheapest instance with an Nvidia GPU is g4nd.xlarge, so let's try that out. In that instance, lspci contains:
00:1e.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU104GL [Tesla T4] (rev a1)
TODO meaning of "nd"? "n" presumably means Nvidia, but what is the "d"?
Be careful not to confuse it with g4ad.xlarge, which has an AMD GPU instead. TODO meaning of "ad"? "a" presumably means AMD, but what is the "d"?
Some documentation on which GPU is in each instance can seen at: docs.aws.amazon.com/dlami/latest/devguide/gpu.html (archive) with a list of which GPUs they have at that random point in time. Can the GPU ever change for a given instance name? Likely not. Also as of December 2023 the list is already outdated, e.g. P5 is now shown, though it is mentioned at: aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p5/
When selecting the instance to launch, the GPU does not show anywhere apparently on the instance information page, it is so bad!
Also note that this instance has 4 vCPUs, so on a new account you must first make a customer support request to Amazon to increase your limit from the default of 0 to 4, see also: stackoverflow.com/questions/68347900/you-have-requested-more-vcpu-capacity-than-your-current-vcpu-limit-of-0, otherwise instance launch will fail with:
You have requested more vCPU capacity than your current vCPU limit of 0 allows for the instance bucket that the specified instance type belongs to. Please visit aws.amazon.com/contact-us/ec2-request to request an adjustment to this limit.
When starting up the instance, also select:
  • image: Ubuntu 22.04
  • storage size: 30 GB (maximum free tier allowance)
Once you finally managed to SSH into the instance, first we have to install drivers and reboot:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-510 nvidia-utils-510 nvidia-cuda-toolkit
sudo reboot
and now running:
nvidia-smi
shows something like:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 525.147.05   Driver Version: 525.147.05   CUDA Version: 12.0     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Tesla T4            Off  | 00000000:00:1E.0 Off |                    0 |
| N/A   25C    P8    12W /  70W |      2MiB / 15360MiB |      0%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
From basically everything should just work as normal. E.g. we were able to run a CUDA hello world just fine along:
nvcc inc.cu
./a.out
One issue with this setup, besides the time it takes to setup, is that you might also have to pay some network charges as it downloads a bunch of stuff into the instance. We should try out some of the pre-built images. But it is also good to know this pristine setup just in case.
Some stuff we then managed to run:
curl https://ollama.ai/install.sh | sh
/bin/time ollama run llama2 'What is quantum field theory?'
which gave:
0.07user 0.05system 0:16.91elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 16896maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+1960minor)pagefaults 0swaps
so way faster than on my local desktop CPU, hurray.
After setup from: askubuntu.com/a/1309774/52975 we were able to run:
head -n1000 pap.txt | ARGOS_DEVICE_TYPE=cuda time argos-translate --from-lang en --to-lang fr > pap-fr.txt
which gave:
77.95user 2.87system 0:39.93elapsed 202%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4345988maxresident)k
0inputs+88outputs (0major+910748minor)pagefaults 0swaps
so only marginally better than on P14s. It would be fun to see how much faster we could make things on a more powerful GPU.
São Paulo (state) Updated +Created

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