site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30115 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Honestly I’m amazed that the 4070, being a 3090 with half the RAM, sold as well as it has. Though I stop being amazed once I talk to people that by all rights should know better.

It’s worth noting that even with a 3090 it’s still running in low-RAM mode anyway since the encoder has to fit in there too; but you can get it running better if you care to optimize it (or just use the 3090 as a secondary GPU) or just use the 8-bit quantization. It takes around 40 seconds per image at 1024px square.

You're still looking at ~850 USD for a 3090 new today today, compared to around 600 USD for an nVidia 4070, plus the increased size and power/heat. Not a great deal if you need the VRAM, but it's not clear you do need it yet. I'd err in favor of futureproofing, but if you've got One Game You're Gonna Play for seriously for the next couple years, I could see the argument.

Though the various suffixes are more clearly dumb. 4070 TI Super Omega Super Saiyin Blue is at the same price point, nearly the same size, and similar power profiles, so looks like you're trading slightly better DRSS for less VRAM?

I do beg to differ on the VRAM, specifically because other GPUs in the same price class all carry 24GB (and any next-gen console is going to have unified memory or at 16GB of VRAM, I suspect), and after that it’s just the wanting it now, not after optimization. And while I do get that you’re still not fitting a 70B LLM in 24GB, it’s still going to have an impact as far as needing to swap with main memory goes, or at least that’s my impression.

It’s also worth noting that a 3090 is no less capable in AI tasks than a 4090, 5090, or 6090 will be, simply because a card with more VRAM than 24GB won’t be released for a long, long time due to market segmentation.

The market seems to have caught onto that fact, unfortunately.

a card with more VRAM than 24GB won’t be released for a long, long time due to market segmentation.

What does this mean?

They want to be able to charge enterprises and server operators massively more than ordinary consumers, even for very similar silicon, because they can afford it, and the product is more valuable to enterprises doing work on GPUs than to consumers playing Hogwarts Legacy or dicking around with open source AI models.

The goal is to charge each customer as close to their maximum price as possible. That's much higher for enterprises, so the graphics companies load features that are especially valuable to them on specialty cards that cost much, much more than consumer cards without them. Much of this strategy has collapsed lately, with features like GPU vm passthrough coming to consumer cards, so they've reoriented this strategy to promoting using clusters of cards to get max VRAM for enterprises, which consumer platforms cannot accommodate.

CPU manufacturers do it too, which is why it's very hard to use ECC RAM on a computer unless you shell out for a workstation/server grade platform.

than to consumers playing Hogwarts Legacy or dicking around with open source AI models.

Somewhere in here is an idea to prompt AAA game studios to develop games that require huge amounts of VRAM so that GPU manufacturers are elbowed into offering consumer cards that can do this. But that will take time, and for all I know looks like some sort of time-persistent AI shading model ("game rendered in the style of Van Gogh").

huge amounts of VRAM so that GPU manufacturers are elbowed into offering consumer cards that can do this

It has to be in a console first; developers don't just lead with PC-first, console-second, because of the sales figures (and nVidia still has some levers to pull, since they can always say "you can buy our chips under cost if you agree not to put more than X GB of unified RAM on your console" and defend their margins that way). And texture memory ultimately has diminishing returns past 1080p; even the biggest texture packs for modern games aren't using even half of the 24GB the largest cards have.

It is in nVidia’s interest that cheap GPUs don’t get very much VRAM, because the limiting factor for how smart and performant an LLM/image generation model can be is how fast it can access the matrices. If you could get 80GB of VRAM, which is eminently reasonable, on a card for 2000 dollars then no business would buy the overpriced purpose-built cards.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats