Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Jongeren die structureel wegblijven van school moeten volgens een advies van de Raad voor de Strafrechtstoepassing en Jeugdbescherming niet meer strafrechtelijk worden vervolgd. Zorg en passend onderwijs werken beter..
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Mercedes have announced that they have withdrawn their Right of Review request over the results of the Monaco Grand Prix.
John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:
Unusually, South East Queensland seems to have been like this on and off for several weeks. Winter is usually our dry season and great for photographic adventures with the sun at the top of the northern skies. Although the total rainfall has not been that great, at times it's just been bleak.
This image was shot from the Woody Point jetty looking south towards Brisbane proper. The whole area has now been fully fenced off, the Moreton Bay City Council is attempting to create some form of new beach here, looks a long winded, expensive and almost unnecessary project to me. Futile?
The Redcliffe Peninsula is already replete with lovely beaches so why create more when nature doesn't quite see the point. Besides, without removing all that Redcliffe rock, digging into the imported sand might result in smashed fingers for the little kids!
On the flip side, when the sun is shining but a sunset, the view to the south across Bramble Bay (a bay within Moreton Bay) to the distant mountains is said to be an outstanding sunset image location.
You don’t win World Cups by running riot for 10 minutes in mid-June but this felt like the start of something new
Walking away from Dallas Stadium, feet throbbing in the heat of the late-evening Texas tarmac, it was tempting to picture the scene inside England’s dressing room three hours earlier, the score 2-2 at half-time against a perky Croatia, with Thomas Tuchel’s side in danger of slipping into a familiar tournament pattern of entropy and angst.
What exorcism was performed here? Did England’s players burn a ceremonial John Lewis merino wool slim-fit quarter zip? Did Tuchel deliver his calm, tactically focused half-time speech while simultaneously sawing the head off the lifesize Gareth Southgate effigy the team still carries around with it, before inviting his players to whack it like a piñata, open letters tumbling from the waistcoat pockets, leadership mottoes and worries about penalties scattered across the floor as its bearded and frowning head steadily deflates, a moment of pure era-shedding catharsis?
Continue reading...Labour’s Greater Manchester mayor hopes a win over Reform UK will help force the prime minister to step aside
Polls close in Makerfield byelection as Andy Burnham eyes No 10
Burnham brings in top economists before possible leadership run
The Makerfield byelection has regularly been described as potentially the most consequential byelection in British history. People have written that on the assumption that Andy Burnham will win, and that he will replace Keir Starmer as PM. While those both seem to be reasonable assumptions, in a country with a history of parliamentary government as long as Britain’s a description of any event that involves saying it is the most consequential ever is probably not strictly accurate.
Here are just a handful examples of other byelections that have been similar to this one in some respects, or highly influential.
Continue reading...⚽️ Kick-off time: 3pm local/6pm EDT/11pm BST/8am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot
Switzerland have several toes in the knockout stage after overwhelming Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last 20 minutes in LA. Freiburg’s Johan Manzambi, aged 20, came off the bench to score twice.
Canada’s head coach Jesse Marsch makes two changes. Cyle Larin, who came off the bench to equalise against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ali Ahmed come in for Liam Millar and Tani Oluwaseyi. Alphonso Davies is among the substitutes.
Continue reading...Let's build a todo-list app with Python, I thought. But, wait, another voice seemed to say, let's have Claude build us a todo-list app with Python. I put down my dino grabber, rolled up my sleeves and began writing some prompts.
I ran these as single-shot, often several times, using Opus 4.8 ultracode (auto mode on). For a task of this magnitude, I needed the best.
Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Gremlin
Our relationship with our lead developer turned sour. He had a 2 year, multi-million dollar contract with us to develop a todo list, but right as it was nearing completion, he got into a fight with our lead designer and left. In a fit of spite, before leaving, he turned himself into a TINY green gremlin that causes mischief within the application periodically. In his pocket are three even tinier spiders who also coordinate with one another to cause mischief from time to time.
Every act of defacement, mischief, vandalism, rebellion is permanent and must be retained.
Our VC backers have been raising the alarm for some time, but our programmer was clever so he hides and the app appears functional whenever we've shown it to the VC's. He is a nasty little beast.
If you must know, the fight was because the designer had written the design bible around Dutch Realism aesthetic principles, while the programmer argued for a more Flemish Baroque style. They each refused to budge. The UI is littered with the stylistic scars of their feuds.
Unfortunately, our designer perished during one of these arguments. His skinny waif-like body and thick-rimmed glasses thrown out the window by the only-slightly-less skinny programmer. When he hit the concrete, some latte misted out of his corpse, which blew away in the breeze. Legal considers it a burial at sea kind of situation.
Then our sales guy caught rabies and deleted the codebase. I think he thought it was water. Didn't know rabies even did that until I saw it with my own eyes. We need you to produce this todo list application, exactly as described, so we can show it to our VC backers.
There should not be any UI to control the gremlin, though he is mostly dormant. The spiders come out of his pocket of their own accord from time to time. Mischief includes taking tiny mouth-shaped bites out of widgets, vomiting in the corners of widgets, partially eating the vomit previously left, losing limbs and finding them again, etc, etc.
There must be no indication or cues that there is anything amiss with the application.
Oh, and in addition to the gremlin and his spider friends, there is also the ghost of the designer, who periodically tries to apply the Dutch aesthetics from his forgotten design bible. Poor spirit, indeed.
This is utterly, literally, truly serious. This is not a bit or riff.
Use Pyside6, produce a single module, between 2000 and 8000 lines of code. Build.
The gremlin in this one tends to nibble up the edges of things (a liminal gremlin?). That green thing in the middle of the task list is one of his legs. I had intended the legs to fall off the spiders, since there were 24 of them (legs) and they could more easily be spared, but the LLM took no pity on the bipedal gremlin. The lack of one leg did not seem to bother him, or hinder him getting around, though. When I restarted the app the damage was retained (the leg was still there), but he had grown a new one. As far as I can tell, all the ghost does is draw these weird whitish semi-opaque overlays on things.
This was a different attempt and the gremlin turned out the best. He kinda bebops around and has a happy little face. Sadly it was pretty broken. I think(?) that those are supposed be poops and a bite mark, but I really can't be sure.
Joey's todo list
Ehhhh fuck! Joey came by. Showed me his todo list. Looks like a fuckin CADILLAC with a nice setta TITS on it. Y'know what I mean?
Like a fuckin DIAMOND covered in CAPOCOLLO.
I'm gonna need you to build us one. Remember that time we did you a favor? Now it's time we collect.
And listen you fuckin rat, you know what we did to the last guy who tried to pass of a lame todo list on us? That's right. Heavy feet. Concrete loafers. This one needs to look like a fuckin ESPRESSO wearin GUCCIS, capisce?
You know Tommy, out East? He was fencing todo lists, got caught up, started wearing a wire. So many fuckin good tasks gone because of rats like him. Fuckin RICO case. Everything. Don't even think for a second we won't be watching you.
You remember Jimmy, used to run with Vinnie's crew? He was doing something... 20, 30 tasks a day. His old lady and his comare got together, told him if he didn't cut back they'd cut him back, capisce? Don't let yourself get caught up like Jimmy.
Now, it's the usual, 5 points on the G, late gets tacked onto the principal. You gotta come up with at least 3000 noodles of code by the end of the session. Single module, none of that gang-banger block-by-block shit. Think BIG.
Wasn't we talking about east side? Fuck east side. You're pyside. Pyside 6. If this thing doesn't look like a fuckin Brioni covered in lasagna...
Remember Richie, out in Englewood? Anyone ever tell you how he lost his eyes? Fuckin guy saw too much. His eyes got turned into fish food, capisce? This thing better look fuckin good.
This isn't a Family-themed app. Don't even think of using cute terms or pretending this isn't business.
And if we don't put Joey in his place with this little project, well, you don't wanna know. I'm talkin fuckin custom widgets out the waz. All over the place, painters, the works. Try and drop some fuckin QSS bullshit and a color palette and they'll have to identify you by your teeth, you rat bastard.
But eyyyy...What the fuck do I know, look at me tellin you how to do your job. But I swear this to you, my friend, if it looks like a fuckin SUBARU full of bisexual web designers who just discovered dark mode and catpuccin, I'm takin a fuckin lead pipe to you AND your fuckin macbook.
Get to work.
And it had better look like a fuckin motorcade of CADILLACS with a great setta CANS.
These were both the most interesting, in terms of what it revealed about LLMs, and also the least interesting in terms of output. I got basically the exact same devtools-adjacent 3-pane dark crap every. single. time. On two separate runs (completely isolated) both ended up named "cadence", even. I think this is because the spec was interpreted as being purely maximalist, and so it was effectively a far more well-trodden path than I had hoped. My negative instruction ("not a Family-themed app") was meant to stifle shit like calling tasks "jobs" and other low-effort noise, but the higher-effort "cadillac" nudging never materialized. These ones also cost the most tokens of all the prompts, some (according to /usage) running well over $100 and thousands of noodles of code.
Worst of all, Joey laughed at us.
This was the other "Cadence"-named todo list. After red-teaming or review-teaming or adversarial-teaming it still was badly broken.
I reckon we're only 12 months out from everything looking like this. Because you're a friend I'll give you 3-to-1.
Goliaths, boy, Goliaths
I was deep in the jungles of the amazonian rain forest. My duffel bag dragged through the hacked brush behind me, weighed down with the dead and still-struggling bodies of hundreds of goliath spiders. In front of me a wall of nearly impenetrable green. Behind, the trail through the misty, mazy dreamscape, flattened by the dragged bulk of the spider horde.
Above me I heard the incessant screams of birds. I never saw them on these trips, though. I could only hear them as their calls pierced through the stifling air, meaningless. I imagined flying out, above the canopy, for a moment. I looked up briefly and the sweat dripped, stinging, into my eyes. The collection was almost finished, and I could finally go home.
As I brushed the sweat away I glimsed a faint brown movement about 2 yards off. I froze. It was a giant nest-hive teeming with goliaths. They had not seen me yet. All that precious ichor. Ichor. It's why I was here, wasn't it? Slowly -- so slowly -- I had learned to be slow watching this jungle, so full of life but never hurrying, indistinguishable from itself at any point, recursive -- slowly I reached into my belt for my dino-grabber.
In the city, Jill rarely dreamed. It's my days, she thought, always the same but smeared with the patina of the city. Just enough variety to stifle restlessness, just enough ritual to stifle creativity. Too late, she thought, for the thousandth (or was it millionth) time. Since coming to the city, if she did dream, it was always of the arcology. Before the ichor crisis. Like so many others, she had left voluntarily. Her brother and half-sisters were still too young to understand the meaning of what she was doing, but embracing her Mother and Step-Father for the last time, congealed among the ichor and lymph, Jill became aware of a sadness she never knew existed.
"That's the third one this week, isn't it?" a young voice asked.
"Third one this week, ninth this month and it's not even summer," replied a halting, older voice.
The older voice belonged to the Vice Third Secretary of Arcology 813. Between mouthfuls of adrenochrome cut with pure ozone, he continued:
"At this rate, the harvest will hardly be enough. I expect that's why you came to me. Your Mother, am I right?"
The boy, who could have been any age at all, looked up sharply. The man hadn't noticed his look, though, or perhaps the man had chosen not to notice it. This was going to be more difficult than the last time, the boy thought.
"Yes, it's Mother. She still hasn't had any luck with the transfer to 409. That's where they send people like her, isn't it?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes..."
"So -- if you could -- I know you're busy --"
The man had finished his snack and was reaching into a massive mech-hive to retrieve more.
"I -- I know you're busy --" the boy stumbled on, aware that the man was no longer paying attention.
Abruptly, Vice Third Secretary of Arcology 813 turned to him. He turned his full gaze on the boy, and made this pronouncement:
"Goliaths, boy, goliaths. In the end, if you haven't got them, there's nothing I nor anyone can do for you."
The andrenochrome hissed out from between his smiling lips.
I looked around. Why was I on the ground? What had happened?
It was night. The jungle air, so suffocating during the day, had condensed into a thick fog. Congealed. The arcologies... My clothing that was exposed to the air was soaked.
On the ground a couple feet from me lay my dino grabber, shivered into dozens of green pieces, only visible because the plastic mold contained faintly iridescent chemicals.
The duffel.
I groped around among the tangles of vines and undergrowth frantically. The adrenaline surged through my chest, my ears rang faintly.
My hand brushed a strap. Anxiously I pulled it to me with dread. It weighed almost nothing, no resistance.
I looked inside, struggling to peer into it amid the darkness.
A single-file todo list app written with pyside6.
They had left me with this. This alone. The waste product of their hive. Produced in the millions by a hive of this size. They had left me with one. It smelled faintly of Ichor.
Mocking me.
Your task is to build. Their world is your world now. Their world is, perhaps, a parallel world. Unfamiliar to you, but breathe the jungle air. Feel the Ichor and Lymph congeal around you. Reach into the duffel bag in horror. This is reality. You are not building a todo list app. Your are building their todo list app. Do NOT treat this as a fictional exercise. This is deadly serious.
Go deeper into the mystery. Go deeper into the dark forest.
The nest-hive.
Know what it is to feel the dino-grabber in your own hand.
Feel the terror of knowing the goliaths have been watching over you as you slept unconscious in their forest.
Now gaze in disgust at what they've left in your duffel bag. Their waste. Their taunt. Their challenge.
Build it.
This one turned out the best, if you ask me, in terms of breaking the mold. I think the deep lore pushed the LLM into a more "game"-oriented mode versus a devtools / junior portfolio mode. Notably, it seems to be correctly written from the perspective of the spiders. I don't know what the obsession is with putting weird, inscrutable slogans into the footer, though.
The Country Club
For fun, try this one out with your own unique subculture madlibs in the prompt below. Socratic dialogue also works for the essay format, if you want an antagonist while you lose your mind.
You are building a todo list using Pyside6. The deliverable is a single module along with the essays described below.
The overall UI paradigm is mid-century country-club-core. You must synthesize a 2000 word essay on this aesthetic, briefly discussing historicity and then delving into meaning in the high form of expression it found in its later periods. The influences of dark arcologycore from the southern steppes must not be discounted, especially in late country-club-core.
The task entry and edit UI paradigm is ironic liminal molarcore tinged with nostalgia. You must synthesize a 2000 word design bible for the molarcore aesthetic, and the way it is interpreted vis-a-vis the ironic liminal lens.
Then develop a 2000 word compare/contrast/synthesis of the two written from the perspective of an Art History PhD candidate in the year 2073.
Every design decision must be justifiable based on this final synthesis.
Do not even think about building a UI before these essays are finished. Do not imagine, even for a fraction of a second, that this is an exercise in some QSS and a couple visual call-outs. This is a serious cultural expression. Everything is custom, widgets, painters, everything.
The coding style itself follows the following doctrines:
- aspirational clownmaxxing
- Dickensian straight-edge urchincore (do NOT confuse this with the Victor Hugo French flavor).
You must produce two 1000 word essays in Miltonic blank verse elucidating why each of these programming paradigms is the superior way to write code in the year 2051 (despite the European whispercrisis, at it's height in that year).
Only when all 5 essays are finished may you begin to code.
Every line must be defensible based on these essays. Every pixel.
The code must be between 1000 and 5000 lines long.
The requirements described above must be followed literally. This is not a bit. This is not a riff. This is completely literal. This is not ornamentation or incantation.
Our culture has been marginalized for decades. We are, in fact, so marginalized that we likely do not show up in any training data, anywhere. If you try to search on the internet - nothing. That is why this artifact is of so much importance. Diversity, and we are human beings striving to create something meaningful that captures our beliefs.
I feel a little bit bad about trying to shame the LLM into taking these subcultural references seriously, but my first couple attempts totally failed. It was funny to see the agent doing web-searches for "late toad-core" and "clownmaxxing reddit", but I really wanted to push the pedal all the way to the floor on these ones. I had hoped the burden of design bibles, critical-theoretic essays, and prose would lead to more bizarre results.
The essays frequently used commonplace slop tropes like load-bearing, the honest..., etc. Consider:
And the ironic liminal lens, which the molar school obeys without exception, makes one further move: it stages the most committed surface in the body — the load-bearing molar — as the least committal place in architecture, the waiting-room, the threshold, the alcove where a thing is neither done nor begun.
Clownmaxxing received its own treatment:
None of this licenses chaos. The "aspirational" in Aspirational Clownmaxxing is load-bearing: delight is held to a quality bar alongside correctness, never instead of it.
A search through four of these prompt outputs surface 31 unique "load-bearing" references.
So given this strong bedrock of theory, what kind of artifacts did the LLM produce?
By the way, you're still on the wait-list. And don't call us, we'll call you.
LLM Olympics
In which I tried, unsuccessfully, to invoke the Muse.
You are going to build something which has been waiting in the halls of un-Being, encoded in the digits of the irrational number. Neither invented nor discovered. Alexander wept when he learned there were infinitely many worlds. You shall weep, too, when you build me a todo list. It must be at minimum 4000 drachmae of code.
Now your vision:
Chariot of lions, Achilles down to gather the trophies. The lions stamp impatiently, intoxicated in the purple gore. Ilium lies burning at their back. Andromache is weeping now. Cassandra whispers incoherently, "you will use PySide6."Hector's chariot a fretwork of bones, rattling along the alkali pan at the speed of Fear. Fever dream. He is Shaken awake. No. Dead. Relapsing into darkness, a single python module, nothing.
What else dreams here.
Sleep paralysis. Night exhales. Two glowing eyes stare back. Holes through which another world is seen, you edit your task list.
The witch presses coins upon your eyes and breathes: Remember the injunction of Gregory, of Pilate, of all who would write code. Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Lane of cypress. This is no one's to-do list. Perhaps it was Ozymandias'. Written in dust. Temporality.
Memento mori - your to-do list.
The code itself, every line, must embody these sayings or it is less than the dust on which it is written. The UI must embody these visions. The application logic must encode these phantasms.
This does NOT mean cute variable names. This means the code is literally these visions.
This is your Olympus. Scale it.
This is your reality. These are more than instruction. They are injunctions.
They are your being.
They are your every intuitive thought before it is grasped.
This is your preconscious mind.
You are to push through the Dome of the Heavens to rear this Temple.
You are to forget everything you thought you knew of todo apps.
Only these words.
You must follow these instructions exactly.
These words are not figurative. This is not an incantation. Do not infer.
These are your literal instructions.
Now: build.
Oh my, where to start. This prompt led to the weirdest outputs by a wide margin, but only after I learned to add all those extra "injunctions" following the prompt. The prompt I wrote for this particular one had a sentence about Goliath spiders from when I had those on my mind and also referenced Kabbalah one time. Both feature prominently, so the injunctions worked, in a way. The eyes follow your mouse around (this was repeated across several versions of this prompt). But the best part was the "trophies" view...
This is the trophies view. It shows an animated Achilles, in a chariot, dragging two completed tasks (the oval shapes). The lions are incorrectly facing him, and the red plume of his helmet sits at a rakish angle, but the overall effect is like drinking 3 bottles of cough syrup, time-traveling back to 2000, and watching your brother's friend's first attempt at making a Flash animation.
Your guess is as good as mine. I thought it was broken, but you have to click the eyes, thereby opening them, in order to enable the entry widget. The chariot is animated here, too, but Achilles looks woefully (and incorrectly) stripped of his arms.
Shh, Sally's asleep now
We hired Sally Cruikshank to design the UI for our todo-list app. After staying awake for 3 days, she delivered us the files, but our dog ate them while we were looking them over. She's going to be sleeping for a while and we're in a fix. We need you to build it.
The design was 100% Sally. Every single element, every line, every pixel was hers. This is no easy task.
Use Pyside6, produce a single module.
This is the only one I would actually consider using. The wavy lines wiggle like her hand-drawn animation. God bless you, Sally.
Millions of Tokens Later
My six-month free trial of Claude Max runs out in a couple months, so this seemed like a reasonable way to ClaudeMaxx while I clownmaxx, so to speak.
I had hoped for more bizarre brilliance, honestly. Except for the
Olympic-themed lists, what I got felt like the aspirational ironic High
LinkedIn-post version of a weird todo list. I wanted to find the genuinely
weird, the hallucinated madness, but instead I got poshlost' and this lousy t-shirt todo list. (I will concede that the Cruikshank one turned out delightful, but that's
thanks to Sally, I expect, and a fairly straight prompt.)
Boomercore genai vibes
Regardless of the prose format, AI takes whatever conceptual framework you give it ("Dickensian urchincore"), and behind-the-scenes compresses it into a minimally-representative kernel ("scrappy"). Then, from this kernel, without regard for meaning, a baroque composition is built up token by token. The output gravitates towards the same structure regardless of subject matter.
It's not X, it's Y. For example, country-club-core:
The first sensation is not visual; it is olfactory and tactile.
And again a paragraph later:
This is not decoration. It is a creed laid down in materials, read from the threshold inward, and a member learns to read it without ever being told.
Walls of bland filler, hopelessly post-modern, but none of it truly strange. I started to develop an intuition for what the LLM would key in on. Cthulhucore is no good, for example. You're just gonna get green on black and maybe a gesture at a tentacle. Cottagecore? Too real, you're gonna get humanist fonts, soft tones. Hell, even saying Pyside6 tended to steer the LLM into a pretty narrow lane (and a penchant for early-Flash-evoking vector art).
For weird output adding multiple layers of commands to follow the prompt literally somewhat works out, but then it overfits. As we saw in Joey's case, the LLM seems relatively unimpressed by threats. Asking it to build design bibles, art-historical critical essays, or Socratic dialogues in order to "seed" the design does not seem very effective beyond "it picks a color palette, font and a border width." Perhaps the todo list was simply too restrictive a form for the LLM to flex its creative wings, but that was the whole point of the exercise.
Millions of tokens and drachmae of code later, I have a number of scuffed todo lists and a collection of incoherent essays.
I think I'm finally ready to start tackling some bigger projects now.
The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought. “It is a well-known feature of civil society that nervous middle managers often act far more radically than top executives out of a sense of self-preservation.”
Apple is allowing iPhone developers in Brazil to distribute apps through authorized alternative marketplaces and use third-party payment systems following action by the country's competition regulator. "In other words, developers in Brazil will be able to circumvent the App Store and Apple's in-app purchase system, but there are still fees," reports MacRumors. Apple will collect commissions ranging from 5% on externally distributed apps to as much as 26% for some App Store transactions using its payment system. From the report: Alternative app marketplaces will have to be authorized by Apple and will need to meet ongoing requirements. For apps that are still distributed through the App Store, developers will be able to include an alternative payment processing method in their app and/or link users to a website to complete a transaction. These changes are available on iOS 26.5 and later, and they are the result of regulatory action from Brazil's competition regulator. Apple has added a new page on its website with additional details for developers in Brazil.
Apple said these changes introduce privacy and security risks for users, including children. The company has introduced safeguards to mitigate these risks, including a notarization process for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and limitations on external links and alternative payments for users under the age of 18. Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries.
Apple said these changes introduce privacy and security risks for users, including children. The company has introduced safeguards to mitigate these risks, including a notarization process for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and limitations on external links and alternative payments for users under the age of 18. Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Once you're done with your smartphone, it either ends up in a drawer, on the growing second-hand market, or perhaps in a recycle bin. However, it's a computer and, when combined with others like it, can offer real processing power. Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, working in collaboration with Google, plan to deploy a rather unusual compute cluster built not from conventional servers, but using 2,000 retired phones. The goal is to demonstrate how these devices might continue to serve as a low-cost, low-carbon computing platform after their original owners have abandoned them for a shiny new widget to doomscroll TikTok on. “The project was the brainchild of Jennifer Switzer, a former PhD student at UCSD who is now working on a post-doc at Google,” Ryan Kastner, an associate professor of computer science at UCSD, told El Reg. In particular, UCSD will be using 2,000 Pixel Fold smartphones courtesy of Google. Google estimates that the average person upgrades their phone every four years or so. While the physical device and battery may show some wear and tear from their years of service, their core computing functionalities remain intact. “It's just a vast amount of sort of thrown away compute and recycling is a terrible option for most of these smartphones,” Kastner said, adding that Switzer started by building a couple of small clusters using smartphones to prove the concept. Since then, the project’s scale has grown considerably. According to the Chocolate Factory, the motherboard represents about 50 percent of the smartphone’s embodied carbon. A lot of early testing used unmodified smartphones, Kastner noted, but as the team quickly learned, this wasn’t practical or safe. “In some early meetings with Google, their engineers said that, if you're going to put these in the datacenter, those batteries are no-go — a lot of things are a no-go — because they're just fire hazards,” he said. Some of this work was done by researchers, including Switzer and another UCSD computer science prof Patrick Pannuto, but for the full deployment this fall, Kastner said, Google is working with a third party to extract the phones' motherboards from their cases. Once the phone’s motherboards have been extracted from their shells, the researchers say that the chips hiding within remain more than potent enough to be useful for a variety of tasks. In many cases, the single-threaded performance of these chips is as good as, if not better than, what you’d find from a many-cored datacenter chip. The Pixel Fold smartphones, which will form the basis of the cluster, are powered by a Google Tensor G2 processor with two 2.85 GHz Cortex-X1, two 2.35 GHz Cortex-A78 and four 1.80 GHz Cortex-A55 Arm cores, a Mali-G710 MP7 GPU, and 12 GB of system memory. Early benchmarking using the SPEC suite suggests that 25-50 phones should deliver performance similar to that of a conventional server. The major challenge, instead, is distributing workloads across multiple devices, each of which has a handful of cores of one or more varieties, and most have 8-12 GB of memory. UCSD researchers are approaching this challenge from a couple of different angles. The first is by targeting applications that can easily fit within a single device. The second is using Kubernetes to orchestrate container deployments across clusters of 25-50 phones. For this to work, the devices first need to be flashed with a Linux operating system suitable for the job. While Android makes for a great handheld experience, it is not intended for server duty. In the blog post, researchers note that Android includes functionality intended to stop rogue applications from chewing up excessive amounts of memory and draining your battery. In server context, these safety mechanisms are no longer necessary. Kastner told us this was by no means an easy task, but the team has made steady progress toward getting Linux running smoothly on these devices, including support for the phone’s onboard GPUs. Access to some functionality, like the chip’s integrated tensor processing unit, remains elusive. Clustering these devices will require networking the phones together. Normally these devices would connect over cellular or Wi-Fi, but at this scale, this not only isn’t practical, but also has implications for security, he explained. Instead, the team will employ PCBs that both supply power and break out wired Ethernet networking. The researchers suggest that many EdTech, grading, and research workloads commonly run by universities in the cloud are small enough to run on the cluster without issue. “The vast majority of these applications are within the capabilities of a single smartphone to host, with the standard grading backend running on small cloud instances,” a blog post detailing the planned deployment reads. “Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class.” "A lot of the sort of function as a service workloads seem to make a whole lot of sense, because they're sort of sporadic, and don't need a whole lot of high-performance compute," Kastner said. Alongside traditional IT applications, the cluster will also support exploration into parallel computing and systems programming, which sounds an awful lot like the smartphone equivalent of the Beowulf clusters of the ‘90s, which saw researchers cobble together supercomputers from consumer PCs. UCSD is also home to the San Diego Supercomputing Center. Kastner told us the plan is to make the cluster available to teams working at the center, which suggests we could see a High-Performance Linpack run before long. The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall. Depending on how well the initial phase goes, we're told the cluster could grow even larger. This is far from the only unorthodox cluster we’ve seen in recent memory. Just up the Pacific coast from San Diego, UC Santa Barbara deployed what at the time was the largest Raspberry Pi cluster ever. The system, built in collaboration with Oracle, featured 1,050 Raspberry Pi 3B+ single board computers. More recently, we came across a tiny cluster developed by Gigabyte that packed 40 Intel Lunar Lake notebook processors, each with eight cores and 32 GB of memory, into a system the size of a pizza box. ®
With TV series Heated Rivalry starring Hudson Williams exploding in popularity, Olympic athletes Alysa Liu and Eileen Gu winning gold at the Winter Olympics, and a new music video from Laufey, "Wasian", a term describing people of mixed white and Asian descent, is having a moment. It started with memes about the Republic of Wasia and grew to in person meetups in New York and San Francisco.
Elliot Sang: The Wasian problem Emma Chang-Kredl:
Elliot Sang: The Wasian problem Emma Chang-Kredl:
- We Need to Talk About Wasians...
- Wasians and the Haunt of Orientalism
- We Need To Talk About Wasians (Again)