Colin Percival

2024-04-06 23:30:00

There has been a lot of talk about AI recently, and one particular point has received sigificant attention in the tech industry: The cost of training models. According to some insiders — and the market capitalization of NVIDIA — the computing power needed for AI training threatens to upend the entire semiconductor industry. This should not be a surprise: Generalist AI doesn't scale.

Reduced to its essentials, the task of training a size-N model is one of hill-climbing in N-dimensional space. You take O(N) inputs, run them through your model, and after each of them you nudge the model slightly uphill towards the desired responses. You need O(N) inputs because with any less than that the model will overfit — essentially memorizing the specific set of inputs rather than generalizing from them — and for each of these inputs you need to perform O(N) computation since you have N parameters in the model to tune. End result: O(N^2) computation.

2024-02-27 06:45:00

I just announced the availability of FreeBSD 13.3-RC1. This is the first release candidate of FreeBSD 13.3, and if no further issues are reported will be the only release candidate; I would like to start 13.3-RELEASE builds on Friday, with (allowing time for mirrors to update) the release announcement going out on the following Tuesday (March 5th).

This means there's a few days for people to do some last-minute testing and report any problems they find. If you have time to help out with testing, there are two things in particular which I'd like to see get attention:

1. Wifi, especially the iwlwifi driver. Bjoern Zeeb merged a significant number of changes to the wifi and linuxkpi (which is used by iwlwifi) code between BETA3 and RC1. While these changes were tested extensively, it's still a big chunk of code — more than I would normally have wanted merged so late, but it fixed serious stability issues with iwlwifi so I thought it was worth including anyway. But I'll feel much better about the release if I know people have been testing this code.
2. The installer. Most people who test FreeBSD BETAs do it by upgrading existing systems — fair enough, you test what you have. But this means that the installer doesn't get nearly as much testing as running FreeBSD systems get. So if you have a spare system laying around, please download an installer image and make sure that you can install FreeBSD 13.3-RC1! In particular, keep an eye out for any "missing" hardware or error messages about drivers being unable to reserve resources; we had a late fix to the way that ACPI devices reserve resources.

2024-01-11 01:55:00

Like most countries now, Canada has regulations requiring passengers to be compensated for flight delays under certain circumstances; Canada's regulations are called the Air Passenger Protection Regulations (commonly known as "APPR"). In May 2023, I flew to and from BSDCan on Air Canada; on the way home, one of my flights was cancelled and Air Canada rebooked me for the following day.

I filed a request for compensation with Air Canada, but received a response indicating that the cancellation was due to "unforeseen maintenance" which was "required for safety purposes" and thus exempt from the compensation requirements. There were two appeal mechanisms available at this point: First, via the Canadian Transportation Agency — which theoretically reaches decisions within 90 days but has recently been reported to have a case backlog of over a year — and second, via small claims court. I opted to take Air Canada to small claims court — which in BC, means the online Civil Resolution Tribunal.

2023-12-31 08:00:00

The Canada Revenue Agency publishes, on a regular basis (they're now up to the 119th edition), a document entitled "Payroll Deductions Formulas". This document contains all of the formulas needed to calculate payroll deductions collected by the CRA: Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance, and Income Tax. As someone running a small business in Canada and not wanting to use an external payroll provider, I implement these formulas myself in a spreadsheet.

2023-11-22 02:35:00

I assumed the role of FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead a few days ago, and one of my first duties in the role was to write and send out the FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE announcement. (To be clear: Glen Barber did all of the work of getting the release ready; the final bits had already been copied out to mirrors at the point that I took over.) FreeBSD 14 is a great release, but there are a few last-minute issues which deserve to be documented — probably somewhere on the FreeBSD website, but I can post to my blog much faster and hopefully we'll get these onto the FreeBSD website later.