Much to ponder on as I look for small metal cutting lathes on Craigslist and peruse news sources about the global economy in advance of the USA election '24.
First to the metal cutting lathes, there seems to be many used options with some home hobbyists favoring EMCO from Austria.
I have 28mm Titanium barstock to thread, M8 down the center axis and M6 down the transverse axis for Jasmine's (Hobie 20) rudder fittings. The Hobie Assembly is outlined here: I need to fixture and drill the barstock, drill and tap and also cut/singulate the two pieces, one for each rudder.
 |
| Tiller End Cap from Ti Barstock |
The US is in the midst of a media spending spike in the run-up to the '24 election. 2 Wars rage at different hot spots, the traditional mid-East with Israel on the one hand and Iran backed Hamas spanning Gaza to Lebannon. Then the ongoing border war from Ukraine into Nuclear-armed Russia.
Tech companies are struggling to adopt AI in meaningful ways as researcher Hinton wins a Physics prize for Computer Science and applied Linear Algebra work.
I take a moment to study how the ChatGPT "generative" system works following along with these excellent explanations by 3 Blue 1 Brown here: https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown
The essence of LLM appears to me as simple "Brute Force" minimization of a "Cost Function" where local minima are identified by finite difference methods, but on a grand scale.
The minima identified are particularly striking when paired with human language as the output, essentially next word predictions applied repeatedly to build up a corpus of text. (eg a high-tech plagiarized paper submitted by an unethical & grinning HS student.)
There is a random aspect due to feeding models such an incredible quantity of parameters (1.5+ Billion parameters) and allowing the model to chug probability distribution matrices in order to "generate" the next word in the sequence. Linear order minimization is apparently not a feature of human language, (Eagles that fly swim, swim describes Eagles despite being on opposite ends of the statement)
Using brute force is the last logical approach when the fundamentals of a processes of human cognition elude us -- it seems incredible wasteful, both time and energy wise, and that these higher order vectors can be "plugged and chugged" at all is a testament to improving GPU and Semiconductor technology as a whole.
