Of course it depends on your system but it's more a matter of minutes than of hours. It's a really enjoyable experience to hack on the system and being able to rebuild in seconds. Just have a look at some SerenityOS hacking videos, they are truly inspiring.
From my experience building it under WSL on a reasonably recent laptop: from cloning the Git repo to seeing SerenityOS pop up in QEMU, maybe half an hour. A lot of it is downloading and building the toolchain.
And then incremental rebuilds (when I go and pull the latest changes once in a while to see what's new) take anywhere between 1-10 minutes, depending on what changed exactly. YMMV.
For an entire operating system, it's pretty cool already! I wonder if C++20 modules will take it down some more, it's been mentioned a few times as something to investigate.
Yes, George Hotz (geohot) reverse engineered the neural engine and could make it work for tinygrad, the videos posted in the other reply describe the reverse engineering process.
I wonder why Apple didn't provide low-level API's to access the hardware? It may have various restrictions. I recall Apple also didn't provide proper API's to access OpenCL frameworks on iOS, but some people found workarounds to access that as well. Maybe they only integrate with a few limited but important use cases, TensorFlow, Adobe that they can control.
Could it be that using the ANE in the wrong way overheats the M1?
Because machine learning accelerators are, in the broadest sense, not "done" and rapidly evolving every year. Exposing too many details of the underlying architecture is a prime way to ossify your design, making it impossible to change, and as a result you will fall behind. It is possible the Neural Engine of 2022 will look very different to the one of 2025, as far as the specifics of the design, opcode set, etc all go.
One of the earliest lessons along this line was Itanium. Itanium exposing so much of the underlying architecture as a binary format and binary ABI made evolution of the design extremely difficult later on, even if you could have magically solved all the compiler problems back in 2000. Most machine learning accelerators are some combination of a VLIW and/or systolic array design. Most VLIW designers have learned that exposing the raw instruction pipeline to your users is a bad idea not because it's impossibly difficult to use (compilers do in fact keep getting better), but because it makes change impossible later on. This is also why we got rid of delay slots in scalar ISAs, by the way; yes they are annoying but they also expose too much of the implementation pipeline, which is the much bigger issue.
Many machine learning companies take similar approaches where you can only use high-level frameworks like Tensorflow to interact with the accelerator. This isn't something from Apple's playbook, it's common sense once you begin to design these things. In the case of Other Corporations, there's also the benefit that it helps keep competitors away from their design secrets, but mostly it's for the same reason: exposing too much of the implementation details makes evolution and support extremely difficult.
It sounds crass but my bet is that if Apple exposed the internal details of the ANE and later changed it (which they will, 100% it is not "done") the only "outcome" would be a bunch of rageposting on internet forums like this one. Something like: "DAE Apple mothershitting STUPID for breaking backwards compatibility? This choice has caused US TO SUFFER, all because of their BAD ENGINEERING! If I was responsible I would have already open sourced macOS and designed 10 completely open source ML accelerators and named them all 'Linus "Freakin Epic" Torvalds #1-10' where you could program them directly with 1s and 0s and have backwards compatibility for 500 years, but people are SHEEP and so apple doesn't LET US!" This will be posted by a bunch of people who compiled "Hello world" for it one time six months ago and then are mad it doesn't "work" anymore on a computer they do not yet own.
> Could it be that using the ANE in the wrong way overheats the M1?
Was it really necessary to expand the fourth paragraph post-script to get your point across? Before it was a fairly holistic look at the difference between people who want flexibility and people who want stability, where neither party was necessarily right. Now it just reads like you're mocking people for desiring transparency in their hardware, which... seems hard to demonize?
There are other replies talking about Apple or whatever but I'll be honest: because 2 decades of online forum experience and FOSS development tells me that the final paragraph is exactly what happens anytime you change things like this and they are exposed to turbo-nerds, despite the fact they are often poorly educated and incredibly ill-informed about the topics at hand. You see it here in spades on HN. It doesn't have anything to do with Apple, either; plenty of FOSS maintainers could tell you similar horror stories. I mean it's literally just a paraphrase of an old XKCD.
To be fair though, I mean. I'm mostly a bitchy nerd, too. And broadly speaking, taking the piss is just good fun sometimes. That's the truth, at least for me.
If it helps, simply close your eyes and imagine a very amped up YouTuber saying what I wrote above. But they're doing it while doing weird camera transitions, slow-mo shots of panning up the side of some Mac Mini or whatever. They are standing at a desk with 4 computers that are open-mobo with no case, and 14 GPUs on a shelf behind them. Also the video is like 18 minutes long for some reason. It's pretty funny then, if you ask me.
For sure, I don't think I disagree with anything you've written here. Where I take umbrage is when there is no choice involved though. Apple could very well provide both a high-level, stable library while also exposing lower-level bindings that are expected to break constantly. If the low-level library is as bad and broken as people say it is, then they should have no problem marketing their high-level bindings as a solution. This is a mentality that frustrates me on many levels of their stack; their choice of graphics API and build systems being just a few other examples.
Maybe this works for some people. I can't knock someone for an opinionated implementation of a complicated system. At the same time though, we can't be surprised when other people have differing opinions, and in a perfect society we wouldn't try to crucify people for making those opinions clear. Apple notoriously lacks a dialogue with their community about this stuff, which is what starts all of this pointless infighting in the first place. Apple does what Apple does, and nerds will fight over it until the heat death of the universe. There really is nothing new under the sun. Mocking the ongoing discussion is almost as phyrric as claiming victory for either side.
Absolutely. It provided a visualization reminder of so many people that come out of their holes to argue whenever there is some criticism of open source. Its one thing to desire freedom but the reality of the situation is that community is toxic for some reason and just not fun to even converse with.
He's not wrong - that's absolutely what YouTube and online Linux commentators would do. They have their own echo chamber, just as much as any tech community. Heck, considering your past posts, it's probably something you would do.
As for transparency in hardware, it probably will become more transparent once Apple feels that it is done and a finished science. They don't want to repeat Itanium.
I get where you're coming from. It's par for the course on Apple's behalf to push this stuff away in lieu of their own, high-level implementation, but I also think that behavior puts them at an impasse. People who want to use this hardware for arbitrary purposes are unable to do so. Apple is unwilling to do it because they want their hand on the "API valve" so to speak. In a case where absolutist rhetoric is being used on either side, I think this is pretty expected. If we're ultimately boiling this down to "having choices" vs "not having choices" though, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect the most valuable company in the world to go the extra mile and offer both choices to their users and developers.
Or not. It's their hardware, they just won't be selling any Macs to me with that mindset. The only thing that irks me is when people take the bullet for Apple like a multi-trillion dollar corporation needs more people justifying their lack of interoperability.
Perhaps the "high-level access only" ideology extends to policy considerations as well. End-users appear to have no shortage of time or ideas to make AI trip over its shadow in ways that may have unfortunate policy implications for corporations with uncomfortably-large social and political footprints (where "footprint" represents "potential impact" and does not indicate extant specifics).
In much the same way the App Store is an infuriating shh-don't-call-it-censorship bottleneck that gives Apple total and final control over what your (sorry, Apple's) devices can do, I wonder if political considerations represents a portion of Apple's motivation to keep things reasonably locked down. Obviously Apple can just kick apps it doesn't like out of the App Store, and binaries that would need to be downloaded and run directly on Macs is exceedingly unlikely to go viral to the same extent, so perhaps I'm overthinking things to the point of paranoia.
Possibly just to avoid having programs that rely too much on specific implementation details of the current engine causing issues in the future if they decide to change the hardware design? An obvious comparison is graphics cards where you don't get low level access to the GPU[1], so they can change architecture details across generations.
Using a high level API probably makes it easier to implement a software version for hardware that doesn't have the neural engine, like Intel Macs or older A-cores.
[1] Although this probably starts a long conversation about various GPU and ML core APIs and quite how low level they get.
Apple don't want to let people get used to the internals and spiritually like to enforce a very clear us versus them philosophy when it comes to their new toys. They open source things they want other people to standardize around but if it's their new toy then its usually closed.
In general I kind of agree with this, but this move isn't anything specific to Apple. Every company designing ML accelerators is doing it. None of them expose anything but the most high level framework they can get away with to users.
I honestly don't know of a single company offering custom machine learning accelerators that let you do anything except use Tensorflow/PyTorch to interface with them, not a chance in hell any they actually will give you the underlying ISA specifics. Maybe the closest is, like, the Xilinx Versal devices or GPUs, but I don't quite put them in the same category as something like Habana, Groq, GraphCore, where the architecture is bespoke for exactly this use case, and the high level tools are there to insulate you from architectural changes.
If there are any actual productionized, in-use accelerators with low level details available that weren't RE'd from the source components, I'd be very interested in seeing it. But the trend here is very clear unless I'm missing something.
Habana has their own SynapseAI layer that their TF/PyTorch port runs on. Custom ops are supported too, via a compiler targeting the TPCs, using a C language variant.
Oh, and they have an open-source UM software stack for those but it's really not usable. Doesn't allow access to the systolic arrays (MME), only using the TPCs is just _starting_ to enumerate what it doesn't have. (but, it made the Linux kernel maintainers happy so...):
Well, that's good to hear at least! I knew there was some back and forth between the kernel maintainers recently due to all these accelerator drivers going in without any usermode support; Habana's case was kind of interesting because they got accepted into accel/ early by Greg, but they wouldn't have passed the merge criteria used later on for most others like Qualcomm.
Frankly I kind of expected the whole result of that kerfuffle to just be that Habana would let the driver get deleted from upstream and go on their merry way shipping drivers to customers, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!
All the sibling comments are better guesses, but I would also guess there could be security implications on exposing lower level access. Having it all proprietary and undocumented is itself a way of making it harder to exploit. Albeit, as mentioned, not having to settle ABI is way more likely the primary reason.
Apple Silicon has IOMMUs on everything - you generally can't exploit a bug in a coprocessor to gain more access on the main application processor (or another coprocessor). The only hardware bugs with security implications we've found was stuff like M1RACLES, which is merely a covert channel (and it's discoverer doesn't even think it's a problem). Apple does a pretty good job of making sure even their private/internal stuff is secure.
I have always thought it is hysterical that there are street drugs (MDMA, Ketamine) that have an immediate impact on emotions, yet the global medical establishment only supports drugs that take 2-4 weeks to 'kick in' with a very slight change that a substantial amount of patients do not even get. What is going on when we measure competency that way.
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but there's a difference between drugs that make you feel good by forcibly triggering your brain's happy paths for a few hours (often followed by severe depression of those paths), and therapies that try to jolt your brain into producing more happy-path-inducing chemicals naturally, without further assistance.
Without further assistance? Anti-depressants are notorious for developing tolerance in users and requiring larger and larger doses over time. We should hope for treatments that can yield results with less frequent dosage and lower chance for dependency.
That's a severe misunderstanding of how these compounds work
On one hand you have a single acute dose (in your words "jolting") which can profoundly 'rewire' synaptic connections
On the other hand you have a compound administered chronically to induce changes that may not last after removing the medication. The goal is the same rewiring but considering dropout rates and success rates of treatment its absolutely lacklustre
Generally speaking, the compounds that are illegal are more profoundly impactful because if their high affinity and specificity than compounds available for prescription
> This is not something only I have seen but also something one of the best psychiatrist ever had has seen.
This tone is off. This is the tone used politically for the last few years - the tone of: 'Trust me', 'The best people in the world think...' No citations, deliberately saying you won't share links. Or facts. Shame-inducing phrasing like "if you know anything..." Offering points for people who can agree with you?
It is possible that you know what you are talking about. But this tone make it look like you are practicing the style of political rhetoric that has caused so much damage recently, and does not inspire me to take you seriously.
Just in case you all still think they are on the right track with these methods of treating mood disorders, look at the data you are basing your claims on.
"Meta-analyses by industry employees were 22 times less likely to have negative statements about a drug than those run by unaffiliated researchers. The rate of bias in the results is similar to a 2006 study examining industry impact on clinical trials of psychiatric medications, which found that industry-sponsored trials reported favorable outcomes 78 per cent of the time, compared with 48 percent in independently funded trials."
And if you think MDMA treatment is not about money you are worse than ignorant:
Venture capital firms have taken notice—pouring money into startups developing psychedelic treatments for everything from PTSD to smoking cessation. A January analysis by Business Insider identified 11 venture capital firms (most of them founded in the past three years) that have collectively invested roughly $140 million in the psychedelics category. Funding accelerated after psychedelic startup Compass Pathways raised $146 million in its September 2020 initial public offering and an additional $144 million in a secondary offering in April 2021.
The point of MDMA therapy is not to pop it on a regular basis to have higher serotonin levels. There's a reason that MDMA is being used for PTSD and not Depression (although I think it would be useful for non-chemical based cases of depression, e.g. psychological based depression). The point of MDMA is to allow that individual to open up enough and bring down their walls enough such that healing through therapy can actually take place. At least, that is my understanding as a non-expert.
Anecdotally when I've taken SSRIs in the past they worked very quickly, what took 2-4 weeks was the side effects to set in. Everyone's response is so different though, I had a friend who was on an identical dose of an identical drug to me and it effectively and lastingly lifted a deep depression in them while it was the real-life equivalent of the Dementor's Kiss for me.
I'm glad these tools exist and do help people, though I do think the potential risks are downplayed in our society.
> I'm glad these tools exist and do help people, though I do think the potential risks are downplayed in our society.
I have been dealing with severe akathisia from medications I took for severe depression.
I have 2 rare immune mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system plus type 1 diabetes. None of this is even remotely as bad as the akathisia.
There are people who are cancer survivors, combat veterans, rape survivors, who all say that akathisia by far takes the cake in terms of traumatic experiences.
Please if you are going to be taking psych meds of any type, get genetic testing done:
Sorry man, I know several people who were injured by some of these meds. It is not talked about enough when they prescribe them.
Regarding Genomind, these are really limited in how much they will help. They test a limited amount of genes that "might" change drug efficacy. Even taking into account the CYP genetics, if someone is anemic these enzymes will function more slowly so emvironment will trump genetics.
"At this time, DTC advertisements are inappropriate, given the public's limited sophistication regarding genetics and the lack of comprehensive premarket review of tests or oversight of advertisement content."
And from the really the only study claiming that Genomind is effective, from their website:
Citation: Perlis RH, et al. Pharmacogenetic testing among patients with mood and anxiety disorders is associated with decreased utilization and cost: A propensity-score matched study. Depression & Anxiety. 2018;35(10):946-952. doi:10.1002/da.22742
"Dr. Imbens reports personal fees from Genomind, for experimental design related to the submitted work, and personal fees from Eli Lilly, outside the submitted work."
And if you look through all of those studies you will find they were funded by Genomind.
I mean, if you've actually taken MDMA you'll know exactly why it's problematic. In terms of a user, it has a week long comedown, and diminished effects when you take it again soon (about a month) after.
> The fact that I have to post this and that is not known for a drug that’s existed for this long is because People need to be spoonfed their sources.
> It’s hacker news, I’m not writing a research paper.
You are the one making claims. If you aren't going to take the time to back them up with trusted sources don't expect anyone to take your claims seriously.
Why does it matter? Even if I do post from "trusted sources" no one takes it seriously. Children continue to be prescribed prozac to this day, and now we have the next prozac; MDMA.
Get someone here with a degree in Psychiatry and they are a "trusted source" still giving out this medicine that doors not work for the vast vast vast majority of people.
I do not care if people take me seriously, I care if they take the facts seriously. I know I know more about psychopharmacology than the majority of people on HN. I do not need to prove that to anyone.
I have been talking nicely about this stuff for years, it does not matter because the corporate propaganda for these meds is too powerful, so what you hear is a normal human response; frustration. I do not think most people are stupid, I think they are ignorant.
This method of treating symptoms of mood disorders is at best, harmful.
> I have been talking nicely about this stuff for years, it does not matter because the corporate propaganda for these meds is too powerful, so what you hear is a normal human response; frustration.
I hear you, but you're not going to change minds with this kind of talk either. Sorry this has affected your life and those of your loved ones in the way that it has, but it's not helping your case.
I wish you had included even one citation in your first reply, because it would have gone a really long way, even accompanied with the frustration.
I was nice for 25 years. It didn’t change minds. Being nice doesn’t change their mind and neither does being angry. I’m just frustrated and I don’t care anymore. There’s too much money involved in all this for people to change their minds.
This information about the effectiveness of Prozac and most anti-depressants has been out for over 12 years now. What good is it for me to site this information? No one cares. And let’s see if more people started caring, don’t you think the interest, the money interest in these drugs will come back full force?
And whatever about references, references don’t change peoples minds either. Did you just see what happen with Covid? You can show people proof and fax all you want but everyone is in their own individual cult now.
You clearly do care. Otherwise you wouldn't have been so actively involved in the comments here.
Your argumentative, dismissive, downright rude attitude does more harm than good. Perhaps take a step back and think on things for a while before returning to discussions like this.
I meant I don’t care what people think of how I write or speak. I don’t care about being nice. My frustration stems from me caring about people. And caring about people who are being mistreated by doctors.
At its base, it's a solid puzzle game that presents a steady set of brainteasers and challenges. Each builds upon the next, slowly teaching you more depth with a very limited set of elements. It's very well made, it has a lovely ambient soundtrack, gorgeous environments, and a story that is woven through quite elegantly.
The second part is that the game encourages you to think outside the box. Without spoiling too much: each area has stars sprinkled around, each of which seems impossible to reach at first. Getting the stars requires you to be creative, to question what you've assumed, and sometimes, to play in a way that feels like cheating, but was, of course, actually entirely intentional. It's great. There is an entire set of optional puzzles which you have to work to even see.
The third part is that this is a very philosophical and accessible game, which uses religious motifs, monumental architecture and allegory to do its thing... but it was actually made by the people who made Serious Sam, a first person brainless monster shooter which is the exact opposite. Talos is what you get when people who understand the medium incredibly well decide to do something entirely different, while winking and nodding at the player the entire time, and yet, without detracting from the core premise. It wears its FPS heritage proudly on its sleeve through its many, many easter eggs. Some of its best puzzles also invoke hints of speedrunning, of exploits, of going out of bounds.
Once you finish the main game there is a DLC for those who can't get enough, including a final area of puzzles that feel like they were left on the cutting room floor because they were just too devious or mean, but which still manage to surprise you.
Hand this to any smarty pants teen, and if they engage with it, they will come out humbled, more independent, and more humanist. And possibly a few IQ points higher.
I would invest in something that would have an amplified impact, but probably no benefit for me.
Personally, something that would really help me, is that I make very irrational stupid decisions and waste time. I would like to create some piece of software that prevents that. Something that prompts me, with messages like "What should you be doing?" or helps me make decisions.
Also, I would like it if it presented news articles that are not obviously biased, and then you have a quiz that asks questions about if you know what the bias was, or if the conclusion of the article was correct.
Performance: Computing pi to a billion as quickly as possible
Real time guarantee: When a hook for an event is called it transfers all computation to that call within a time limit predictably and deterministically
[0]: https://habitica.com/static/home