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In 1990, the World Wide Web was invented on Steve Jobs' computer. Steve ignored it.
This is the story I tell in my new book Steve Jobs in Exile. Here is what it should tell the rest of us about the moment we are in now.
Steve was running NeXT, an unsuccessful computer company. He had been pushed out of Apple five years earlier and was burning his fortune trying to build a successor to the Macintosh. The machine NeXT sold was a matte-black magnesium cube -- expensive and beautiful and not selling.
In October of that year, on the other side of the Atlantic, a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee took delivery of a NeXT Cube at CERN, the physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border. He used it to invent the World Wide Web. The web ran on the Cube for its first year of existence. The revolution was happening on Steve's hardware, and yet Steve ignored it.
Here is the question I keep thinking about from my book.
If Steve Jobs, the most visionary tech mind of his generation, missed the Web, the most civilization-shaping tech of his lifetime, how are the rest of us supposed to see anything coming?
Berners-Lee had been asking his boss at CERN for a NeXT Cube for months. His boss finally signed off, hoping to test the exotic Cube. "He suggested that I should buy one of these NeXT machines I'd been talking about so enthusiastically," Berners-Lee later told Fresh Air. "And if we needed a sort of test project to run on the NeXT machine ... 'Why not just do this hypertext thing you're talking about?'"
The "test project" evolved into the World Wide Web.
The problem Berners-Lee was trying to solve was not a glamorous one. CERN employed thousands of scientists from over a hundred countries, most cycling through on short assignments and taking their knowledge with them when they left. Berners-Lee was trying to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door. He wanted a system that worked the way human memory does, where any piece of information could connect to any other without permission or central control.
Through late 1990, he coded in his gray-floored office. The Cube's object-oriented system let him build in months what would have taken a year on anything else.
By December, the first website went online. The World Wide Web now existed, running on a single black NeXT Cube in CERN's Building 31. Berners-Lee scrawled a warning on it in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
Underneath the elegant interface he was building HTTP, HTML, and the server software that would deliver web pages. These three inventions would form much of the invisible plumbing of our modern connectivity.
When a colleague of Berners-Lee's brought a demo of the Web to NeXT's headquarters in California, he could not get anyone there to pay attention. Nobody even dared show it to Steve, afraid he would dismiss it. NeXT was busy with its own internet plans, which Steve eventually killed.
So back to the question. If Steve Jobs missed the web, how are the rest of us supposed to see whatever comes next?
The honest answer is that we cannot. Nobody can. The rest of us are not going to outpattern-match Steve Jobs.
But here is what I learned writing Steve Jobs in Exile. Transformations almost always begin in obscurity, on the margins, solving boring problems with boring tools. The web did not look revolutionary in 1990. It looked like a tool for sharing physics papers.
We are in another such moment now. AI is the obvious changemaker. But the biggest transformations are rarely the obvious ones. The next one is happening somewhere right now, and it is trickier to spot than any sweeping proclamation about AI. We will recognize it, if we recognize it at all, from the unglamorous work few people are focused on.
I will not speculate on what Steve would have made of AI today. But if he could miss the Web, the rest of us are going to have to look harder.
Photo of the original CERN NeXT Cube courtesy of Robert Scoble.
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The glory work of GPU scheduling is in the frontier data centers with hundreds of thousands of GPUs, but a lot of research work is done with single GPU jobs on modest clusters, and the scheduling leaves much to be desired.
I wish there were a clean way to preempt GPU tasks, so long running tasks could be transparently paused to allow higher priority tasks to get the minimum time-to-results. Manual checkpointing and cooperative multitasking is an option, but it complicates codebases and is fertile ground for bugs.
It feels like most of the pieces are present: Everything goes through page tables on the GPUs already, Nvidia UVM (Unified Virtual Memory) allows demand paging to host memory, and MPS (Multi-Process Service) could act as a CUDA shim to force everything to use a different memory allocator. Memory page thrashing would be catastrophic for GPU tasks, but the idea would be to pause the host task of the low priority process, then let the high priority process force only the necessary pages out (or maybe none at all, if the memory pressure wasn’t high enough) while it is running, then resume the low priority task on completion, allowing it to page everything back in. Task switching at the level of tens of seconds, not milliseconds.
Even if it didn’t handle absolutely all memory (kernel allocations and such) and had some overhead, that would be quite useful.
Of course, Nvidia would prefer you to Just Buy More GPUs!
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Elon Musk just measured your existence by how many times your atoms have been inside a dying star.
Musk: “How many times have your atoms been at the center of a star? I think it’s like on average three or four times.”
Every atom in your body has already survived the core of a star.
Multiple times.
Crushed under pressures that would flatten planets.
Superheated to millions of degrees.
Blown apart in explosions so violent they forged new elements.
Then gravity pulled those scattered pieces back together.
New stars formed.
And the cycle repeated.
For 13.8 billion years, your atoms have been fuel for the most violent process in the universe.
And they are not done.
Musk: “In terms of existence as measured by the number of times your atoms will be at the center of a star, we seem to be roughly halfway.”
Halfway.
Your atoms have been through the furnace three or four times.
They will go through three or four more.
But right now, in this impossibly thin sliver between cycles, those atoms are doing something they have never done before.
They are conscious.
For billions of years before you, they burned through stellar cores with no awareness.
No memory.
No sense of what they were or where they had been.
After you, they will return to that state.
Unconscious matter drifting through space until the next star claims them.
This is the only moment in their entire journey where they can look back at the stars that made them and understand.
Musk: “If you want to look at the big picture… that’s the really big picture.”
The big picture is not that we are small.
Everyone already knows that.
The big picture is that we are temporary witnesses to a process that does not need witnesses.
Stars do not need observers to burn.
Atoms do not need anyone to understand where they have been.
The universe ran for billions of years with no one in it.
It will run for billions more after the last conscious thing disappears.
But right now, matter is examining itself.
That has never happened before in 13.8 billion years.
You are not a person who happens to contain ancient atoms.
You are ancient atoms that briefly figured out how to think.
The universe did not design consciousness.
It designed stars.
Consciousness was the accident.
And the accident is half over.
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Good night everyone, I hope everyone has a good night. I am the owner of this piece of art. If you like my work, let me know. Good night and good morning.🩷🤍💫⭐️🐇🍈🍈🎀💗💝💖💞💕🔞🌶️
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tailzkim# #
mihoyo# #
zenless_zone_zero# #
zhao# #
art# #
yiff#
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コスパティオさんから登場!
『月姫 -A piece of blue glass moon-』
「アルクェイド・ブリュンスタッド デート服」を着用モデルをさせていただきました!
▶︎
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Made another pixelated piece of
@JennaLynnMeowri piece this evening, this time in an elegant, sparkly green dress. Working with the satin gradient on the dress was definitely a challenge, but I do like how it turned out in the end. And now, I shall jump onto Overwatch!
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei : "Software is going to become cheap, maybe essentially free.
The premise that you need to amortize a piece of software you build across millions of users, that may start to be false.
But at the same time, there are whole jobs, whole careers that we've built for decades that may not be present.
And, you know, I think we can deal with it. I think we can adjust to it. But I don't, I don't think there's an awareness at all of what, of what is coming here and the magnitude of it."
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From "The Wall Street Journal" YT channel (link in comment)
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Bao’s new model might be the most majestic piece of art I’ve ever seen holy shit