Four short links: 24 April 2020
Remote Playbook, GPU Graphics in Python, NLP Training Costs, and Net Neutrality
- The Suddenly Remote Playbook — I just want to note that if you have to look after kids when you’re supposed to be working, you’re not working from home. Not everyone’s getting a glorious introduction to the delights of working from home.
- taichi — a programming language designed for high-performance computer graphics. It is deeply embedded in Python, and its just-in-time compiler offloads compute-intensive tasks to multi-core CPUs and massively parallel GPUs.
- The Cost of Training NLP Models — We review the cost of training large-scale language models, and the drivers of these costs. The intended audience includes engineers and scientists budgeting their model-training experiments, as well as non-practitioners trying to make sense of the economics of modern-day Natural Language Processing (NLP).
- Killing Net Neutrality Did Not Save the Pandemic Internet — there’s no evidence that European networks have fallen apart during the COVID-19 crisis. Or that any differences in performance have anything to do with deregulation or net neutrality. Netflix’s decision to throttle back its bandwidth usage by 25% was done entirely pro-actively. There was no underlying network data provided by regulators to justify the move. It was just EU regulators being cautious (perhaps overly so). Indeed, similar steps have been taken here in the States. YouTube for example has downgraded video quality to conserve bandwidth. So has game platform Steam, which is slowing some game downloads. You can’t selectively highlight the EU’s efforts on this front then ignore the US ones because it supports your flimsy narrative. Well I guess you can, but you should be laughed at.
