> 25K parameters is about 70 million times smaller than GPT-4. It will produce broken sentences. That's the point - the architecture works at this scale.
Since it seems to just produce broken and nonsensical sentences (at least based on the one example given) I'm not sure if it does work at this scale.
Anyway, as written this passage doesn't really make a whole lot of sense (the point is that it produces broken sentences?), and given that it was almost certainly written by an AI, it demonstrates that the architecture doesn't work especially well at any scale (I kid, I kid).
The Transformer is the more powerful model than Markov chain, but on such a weak machine as the C64, a MC could output text faster - but it surely would sound "psychedelic", as the memory limits a MC to a first-order or second-order model, so to predict one word, only the two words before would be taken into account as context (and no attention).
On a plain vanilla C64, the Transformer cannot really show what it's capable of doing. An implementation using 2 bit per weight (vectorized) could be slightly better, perhaps.
You can build an unlimited-order Markov chain by, instead of pre-computing a table of counts for all possible contexts, using a substring-search index on the training data to count possible continuations on the fly: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17377 That paper uses suffix arrays, but more compact indices are possible: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12229
This seems like such a strange comment to make on an article about the leader of Canada advocating for exactly the sort of national reflection you’re talking about and explicitly calling for an end to that status quo you’re worried we’ll try to recreate.
So far the major move has been undermining Canada's auto industry[1] to create closer ties to China. As the saying goes: Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
> Carney's Davos speech (Jan 2026) evoked "workers of the world unite"
No it didn't. He gave it as an example of something people behind the Iron Curtain didn’t believe but parroted "to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along".
The man is a banker. The implication that Carney - arguably the most neoliberal leader Canada has ever seen - is a communist is absurd.
yeah exactly. it's bizarre to highlight that quote from his davos speech completley out of context. he inteded it as a way to completely discredit communism. and to ridicule the idea of unionization. he then spent 10 minutes passionately making the case for continuing the neoliberal capitalist agenda
That is...also a misrepresentation of what Carney was saying.
He was referencing the words of a writer from Czechia, a country where communism discredited itself, who discussed how people pretended not to notice the gap between the government's rhetoric and its actions, and compared it to how countries politely have pretended to ignore the gap between the aspirations of the "rules-based international order" and how it played out in practice.
Of course, he could have used as an example a different dissident who said something similar from a different country who operated under a different totalitarian regime. Or skipped the analogy to political repression altogether. You could say that reflects Carney's particular biases, I guess, but I wouldn't go further than that. At no point does he ridicule or even mention unionization.
i agree that discrediting communism wasn't really the topic of his talk. but the phrase is a call to unionization in itself. especially when shopkeepers use it, like in the story carney referenced. capable politicians don't leave clear subtext like that to chance. which is why it's bizarre to highlight it without context, like in OP's message. on its own it doesn't convey the scorn with which carney framed it
Bush II was awful in all sorts of ways; it's not crazy to say that as chaotic as Trump's first presidency was, it was nowhere near as destructive as Bush's terms. I in no way want to white-wash Bush, which I feel like some people have done in the wake of Trump.
But despite that, Bush's presidency was generally continuous with American presidencies since World War II. He still, at root, steered the ship as though he were a believer in the narrative of America as a leader of the free world, rather than as a selfish actor who needs to get one over on everyone else in order to get ahead. Regardless of the world's judgement of Bush, I don't think it sowed much doubt in many minds about their overall relationship with America, and not just because of 9/11 or because he was just one president. The US could have continued electing Bushes forever and not much would have changed.
Whereas: Trump's presidency - especially this second term - is utterly destabilizing. He's single-handedly destroyed America's soft power and place in the world.
I agree. I think it’s fair to say that while many people might agree Bush II is someone you could have a beer with compared to the current prest his foreign policy decisions lead to excess mortality in the range of half a million.
I think racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. who do that sort of thing aren’t doing it to convince anyone - it’s partially for shock value, partially to help normalize their attitudes and make other bigots feel more comfortable expressing their views, and partially to make the members of the group that they hate upset and feel unsafe.
Not at all! Use of the Copper to punch up visuals was de rigeur on the Amiga - Amiga games are immediately recognizable by their Copper-fueled sky gradients for instance. I actually think that if there's any really good explanation for why you like might find Amiga graphics more pleasing than VGA, the Copper is the thing.
This is a classic dispute when it comes to the 68000. I'm inclined to agree with your perspective, actually, but my impression is that it's highly contested.
Commodore and Atari marketed their 68K machines as 16/32-bit, which is I guess technically the most correct. And other 68000-based machines, like the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, were marketed as 16-bit - it even says it right on top of the unit!
The bus always seemed like the oddest part to zero in on. By analogy, an Opteron in 2003 was a 64 bit CPU with a 32 bit HyperTransport bus, but no one called an Opteron system 32 bit. The width of a particular internal implementation detail is a strange duck IMO.
I think part of it was that to hardware companies the bus width is actually extremely important - the whole system is built around it, and the programming model the software guys work with less so.
And then the other part of it is the marketing angle: everyone knew full 32-bit inside and out chips were just on the horizon. Downplaying the 68k’s 32-bitness would give them a selling point for the 68020.
All ALU operations are also more expensive with 32 bit operands. So 16 bit data bus, 24 bit address bus. Slower arithmetic with 32 bit operands. I never though of it as a 32 bit CPU.
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