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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It’s usually because of all the other bloat running on Windows. Just various background processes on Windows will eat up like 10G of RAM just idling, where most desktop Linux distros I’ve used will use 2-5G idling. Having a few extra gigs of RAM available can make a noticeable difference.

    I feel like system calls in the Linux kernel are just more efficient/faster than system calls in Windows. Windows system calls have decades worth of compatibility layers all cobbled together for business reasons, whereas I don’t think the Linux kernel suffers from that same problem.

    And that’s not even mentioning the multiple layers of absolute voodoo black magic wizardry that is Vulkan (Linux graphics API) and DXVK (a translation later that translates DirectX calls to Vulkan calls). Those are some absolutely incredible pieces of software, and deserve a ton of the credit as well.

    I don’t really think Linux is faster because it just injects noops sometimes though lol. You’d definitely be able to notice if part of the graphics pipeline was just… skipping enough steps to make a noticeable performance difference lol




  • We have computing power in our pockets a million times more powerful than we used to send man to the moon, why do you think we’ll never have enough power?

    Not the person you replied to, but I have thoughts on this point in particular:

    1. Consumer devices have started to slow down their performance improvements because we’re bumping up against the limits of physics
    2. People/corporations with way more money than the average consumer will always be able to run something orders of magnitude more powerful. Any advances that improve things for the average consumer will improve things for rich people/corporations even more.
    3. Training an LLM isn’t really even about compute speed, it’s about access to good training material. The average consumer can’t afford to buy (or pirate) every book in existence like a rich person/corporation can. An average person doesn’t have the ability or time to curate their own training data, but rich people/corporations do.