Observations from Uppsala – Page 2 – Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)

RI.SE AI Day – More on LLMs (and some)

The Swedish research institute RI.SE hosted an “Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science day” (AI and CS day) last week. RI.SE has a long tradition of hosting interesting open houses, both as RI.SE and in their previous guide as SiCS. The day was a mix of organized talks in the morning, and an open house where RI.SE researchers showed off their work in the afternoon. Most of the AI discussions were related to large language models (LLMs), but not all. I got some new insights about LLMs in general and using LLMs for coding in particular.

Adventures Traveling to and from Italy

The big family vacation his summer was a cruise in the Mediterranean. Most cruises sail from Italian ports, unfortunately. Traveling to and within Italy is a bit of a challenge, resulting in far more heartburn and stress than necessary. Here is our story.

The HidrateSpark… Internet of Drinking Bottles

Earlier this Summer, I received a HidrateSpark PRO water bottle as a gift. It is a fascinating piece of “smart” technology. The bottle itself is a decent piece of engineering and a somewhat practical product. But the overall product concept just strikes me as mostly contrived. The associated app is almost comical in its attempts to turn a piece of hardware into a “service”.

Intel Blog: Demonstrating Simics Threading using RISC-V Simple

In my third post based on the Simics RISC-V simple virtual platform, I use the it to demonstrate how the Intel Simics simulator uses multiple host threads to simulate multiple target cores. The RISC-V platform is nice in that it has less noise than more complex platforms, allowing for clear and simple measurements.

That’s Odd: How iCue and Windows 11 Ruin Simics Performance

While working on some screenshots for an upcoming blog, I noticed something that something was off with the performance of Simics on my Windows 11 laptop. The CPU load did not quite go as high as I am used to – typically, compute-intense run should get close to 100% processor load using a single host thread to execute the simulation. Instead, I got to no more than about 50%, which was decidedly odd. I also had a screenshot from a few days earlier that showed some 90% CPU load. Turns out the culprit was a combination of factors, including the Windows 11 scheduler and the Corsair iCUE software pack.

Intel Blog: Playing with Instruction Sets in the Public Simics RISC-V Platform

As noted previously, the Public Release of the Intel Simics Simulator has added a simple RISC-V virtual platform.

In my second blog post about the platform, I reconfigure the instruction set, crash Linux, debug the issue, and reconfigure the software to match the hardware.

Intel Blog: Public Simics RISC-V Simple Virtual Platform

The 2023-19 version of the Public Release of the Intel Simics Simulator added a simple RISC-V virtual platform. This is the second architecture supported by the public release, after x86.

I will be producing a series of blog posts to show a bit of what the you can do with this virtual platform. The f irst Intel blog post talks about system-level simulation use cases, in particular networking and simulating x86 and RISC-V systems together.

Berlin – Cold War, Third Reich, and Ukraine

A few weeks ago I visited Berlin. A fantastically interesting city, and much more affordable and accessible than places like New York or London. However, it is almost comical how much of what you see ends up being about either the Third Reich or the Cold War and the DDR. The war in Ukraine was also noticeably present.

Paste as Plain Text

Windows PowerToys is a fantastic set of utilities for Windows, and it just got better with the addition of “Paste as Plain Text”. Just like the mouse pointer locator I blogged about before, it is a small thing that you get used to and immediately notice if it is absent.

ChatGPT and Legal

In previous three blog posts (1,2,3) about ChatGPT in particular and large language models in general, I touched on what they can do, what they cannot do, what they seem not to do, how they fall down in funny ways, and why I think they are fundamentally flawed for many applications. There is one more aspect left to consider – the legal and licensing side. I am not a lawyer, I am not an expert, but it seems obvious that there is a huge problem. There are also clear questions about business morals and what the right thing to do would be. I also doubt the business viability of LLMs in the way they are currently trained.

ChatGPT and Critique

ChatGPT and other transformer-based models like Dall-E are technologically very impressive. They do things that seemed totally impossible just a few years ago. However, they are not really generally intelligent, and there are innumerable problems with how they work, what they do, what people think they do, ethics, and legal and licensing issues. This is my third post about ChatGPT, where I present my critique of and reflections on the technology. The previous posts were about ChatGPT and Simics and Coding using ChatGPT.

ChatGPT and Code

In my previous blog post about ChatGPT and Simics, I tested it on its knowledge and abilities with a fairly niche subject. Not unsurprisingly it did not do all that well. However, one area where ChatGPT appears to really work well is when dealing with program code. This seems more practically useful as well, especially as a generator of starting points and boiler-plate code. It can also sometimes do a decent job explaining code, subject to quite common bizarre mistakes and errors. Update: Part 3, a critique of ChatGPT has been published.

ChatGPT and Simics

It is an understatement to say that ChatGPT has been a hot topic since it was launched a few months back. Everyone seems to be seeing what it can do in their favorite domain, so I had to try it on what I work with, Simics and virtual platforms. The results did not live up to the hype some people think the technology deserves, but it was very impressive and a little scary nevertheless. This is the first post in what looks like it will be a series about ChatGPT. Update: Part 2, ChatGPT and Code, is now out. Update to the update: Part 3, a critique of ChatGPT has been published.

The NUC12 Enthusiast

Right when our old NUC5 died, its replacement had been delivered and brought online – a new Intel NUC12 Enthusiast, also known as the NUC12SNKi72 (I work at Intel, but even I find that name a bit obtuse). This is a seriously fast machine in a fairly compact package, even though admittedly not as small as the old NUC5. On the other hand, as a machine with an ambition to be a replacement for a dedicated gaming PC, it sports a dedicated graphics card and not just the integrated graphics typical for the classic NUCs.

“100 Ways to Improve Your Writing”

Just before Christmas I stumbled on a most excellent little book: “100 Ways to Improve Your Writing” by Gary Provost. I wish I found it earlier, as it has been available for almost forty years. It is a little gem of good advice on how to write better (and how to communicate better general).