Tag: Pcs

The unusual pcs and claustrophobic hallways of Severance

Laurent

In the huge underground office environment of Lumon, the megacorporation at the heart of Apple Tv Plus’ thriller Severance, the personal computers are downright weird. At 1st they glimpse a bit like an aged Mac, but the nearer you search, the much more unusual they turn out to be. The CRT exhibit is someway a touchscreen. The beautiful blue keyboard is saddled with a gigantic trackball. The objective, output designer Jeremy Hindle tells The Verge, was to style and design a unit that does not make a lot of sense, mirroring the purgatory-like world that exists only within Lumon’s basement. “The idea was that something you could see underground does not exist up leading any place,” suggests Hindle. “You’ll hardly ever see that personal computer or that keyboard.”

This report consists of gentle spoilers for Severance.

Severance will take put in a entire world wherever a new technique — the titular severance — enables personnel to break up their life in two following a minor mind medical procedures. They in essence develop into two individuals: 1 who life a relatively usual existence and another whose entire existence resides in a purgatory-like place of work. Mainly because of this, the structure of the office environment by itself was really essential. It needed to truly feel like a location outside of time and space. “You have to make guaranteed that the inside of and exterior globe are [different] plenty of that you are immersed in the environment, so you sense like you’re severed when you are down there with them,” points out Hindle.

The starting off position was offices from the 1960s. “They’re operating in this business office surroundings, and they’re introduced in to just be these pro-personnel, and they’re birthed into the position,” Hindle says. “It ought to be like what offices employed to be like. Attractive desks, stunning structures, attractive lights. Just about work. On the desk there’s a single pen, a rolodex, a telephone. It felt like it had to be that exact same tone — but way far more playful.”

Image: Apple

At initially glance, the

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Pcs can create their individual code. So are programmers now out of date? | John Naughton

Laurent

I researched engineering at university and, like most of my contemporaries, located that I sometimes desired to publish laptop or computer programs to do sure sorts of calculations. These items of utilitarian software program were being prepared in languages now regarded as the programming equal of Latin – Fortran, Algol and Pascal – and what I figured out from the expertise was that I was not a born hacker. The program I wrote was clumsy and inefficient and extra proficient programmers would look at it and roll their eyes, significantly as Rory McIlroy may do if expected to participate in a spherical with an 18-handicap golfer. But it did the career and in that sense was, in the laconic phrase sometimes used by the excellent computer scientist Roger Needham, “good more than enough for govt work”. And what I took away from the expertise was a lifelong respect for programmers who can write stylish, productive code. Any one who thinks programming is straightforward has never completed it.

All of which goes to reveal why I sat up when, very last year, anyone realised that Codex, an offspring of GPT-3, a substantial neural network trained on huge troves of text collected from the website that could produce plausible English textual content, could write applications, ie, limited computer plans including buttons, textual content enter fields and colours, by remixing snippets of code it experienced been fed. So you could question the plan to publish code to do a very simple activity – “make a snowstorm on a black background”, for example – and it would write and run the necessary code in Javascript. In no time at all, there ended up tech startups such as SourceAI aimed at harnessing this new programming instrument.

This was amazing, quirky and probably helpful in some contexts, but truly it was just selecting minimal-hanging fruit. Apps are small programs and the types of jobs Codex can do are types that can be explained succinctly in standard language. All the application has to do is to lookup by means of the big repository of laptop or

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MIT Develops New Programming Language for Substantial-Efficiency Pcs

Laurent

With a tensor language prototype, “speed and correctness do not have to compete … they can go collectively, hand-in-hand.”

Large-performance computing is wanted for an at any time-expanding amount of jobs — these types of as image processing or several deep learning programs on neural nets — in which just one need to plow via enormous piles of details, and do so moderately rapidly, or else it could get absurd quantities of time. It is broadly thought that, in carrying out functions of this kind, there are unavoidable trade-offs between pace and reliability. If pace is the best precedence, according to this look at, then trustworthiness will probably experience, and vice versa.

However, a crew of researchers, primarily based generally at A Tensor Language” (ATL), last month at the Principles of Programming Languages conference in Philadelphia.

“Everything in our language,” Liu says, “is aimed at producing either a single number or a tensor.” Tensors, in turn, are generalizations of vectors and matrices. Whereas vectors are one-dimensional objects (often represented by individual arrows) and matrices are familiar two-dimensional arrays of numbers, tensors are n-dimensional arrays, which could take the form of a 3x3x3 … Read More...

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