Akuehne

Lol at the obvious Intel CPUs used on the headline

As a noogler, I feel like I missed all the cool toys. And now I'm stuck with whatever they've acquired.

That is really easy to use. I haven't tried any game design or anything like that for a few decades now; but in my 10 minutes playing around on it, I liked it a lot.

This has some very interesting privacy and security risks. If the tech can do more complex frequency analysis, then couldn't it essentially be used as a microphone for a device that doesn't need permission.

I feel like lots of people here are just commenting on the headline.

This isn't about the local models you're running on your old gaming rig, or the tesla p40 rig you build for local llm's.

This is about code leveraging the local resources where the code is running for it's AI needs. Rather than making an API call to an external AI service, the code leverages the AI capabilities built into the hardware it runs on. With modern Apple, Intel, and AMD silicon all shipping dedicated AI acceleration, this is the where IMO the focus should be heading.

How many Flops or whatever can your phone do? I bet it's enough to paint the walls of your living room, or draw a pretty good pelican on a bike.

Gitops. I use janky infrastructure as code to manage the services running on any stateful machines, and mainly just stuff I through together. I run k8s because everyone runs k8s now, and it's good to have a local environment to play with.

Cheap mini pc on an isolated vlan. Running a cloudflared tunnel or reverse proxy to a vpc on digitalocean, maybe moving to Hetzner soon, or in addition to for failover/ha.

All containers. Some just docker/podman, some one k8s cluster. Mainly it's just for fun. Except the cloud and local backups for our phones/Gcloud, which my wife will get really mad if it doesn't work.

With the majority of popular music decided by a handful of people in LA, Nashville, or New York, let me ask one question: is this actually a bad thing?

Hear me out. Most of what's on the radio could have been made by AI already and no one would've noticed the difference.

To be clear, I'm not talking about legitimate artists doing something original or authentic. I'm talking about the execs who find performers to sing and dance over their perfectly manufactured hit single. Songs made by people like Max Martin, who aren't trying to express anything beyond their knowledge of which combination of notes has the highest ROI. No disrespect to Max, he's incredibly talented at what he does. But now the execs have the data, and they don't need the Max Martins, Diane Warrens, or Carole Kings anymore. They can plug in the numbers and out comes a perfect song for their next artist.

So let's embrace the new AI pop. Let it dethrone the kings who've shaped the sound of pop culture for too long.

Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. Yet. When a model writes a song that lingers the way "Linger" does, maybe it will. But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?

Two things. One, surely I'm not the only one who knew this data was being stored? Two, calling it a "leak" feels like a stretch when the data was publicly accessible by design from the start.

Yes, some users probably didn't realize their edits to public pages were saved publicly, and that's a legitimate UX complaint. But some of the responsibility has to sit with the user. Otherwise we'd be running daily headlines about Meta "leaking" user data to every advertiser with a checkbook.

So many people are victims of what I like to call the "Field of Dreams Fallacy."

Also known as: If you build it, they will come.

In the real world, it doesn't matter in the slightest if you build the best product in the history of the universe. If you don't have the proper marketing and sales pipelines, you will lose to the product that does.

There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.

Same for HD-DVD against BluRay. And for so many other great products that have died on the vine.

I think this is actually a bigger problem with society as a whole than people notice. The majority of people think that an idea alone is as valuable as a business. People regularly tell themselves that if they would have come up with X, Y, or Z, then they'd be rich and successful. When in reality, the product or idea doesn't equate to success in the slightest.

It's the same thing that I'm sure a lot of you in tech see, where people say "Can you make me an app?" or "We should start a tech company that does this one thing better than the other guy." And yet almost every single time I explain to them that there are 4,000,000 versions of their app already, and that it's still a business that requires significant effort, they act like it's my fault for not helping them or not believing in their idea.

I've let millions of better ideas fade from memory without a second thought. Because I've learned that operating a successful business is an entirely different world from building a cool thing. The idea is the easy part. Everything after it is the actual work.

Great article.

Thank you for fielding questions. And please don't stop, your work is great.

My most used windows command is, and will always be, `ls`.

Then I'm reminded that it's not a know file or directory.

This got me. Thought it was real, busted out laughing when I read the project leads name. It still didn't click.

You should learn about RAG.

Then have whatever ai you used rewrite it with that knowledge.

This article/post mashes together two different things and gets both wrong.

"The American market has not been free" because companies use call centers and friction to retain customers? That is the free market. No regulator forced Comcast to have bad hold music. They did it because it's profitable and because switching costs are real economic phenomena, not government distortion. Rent-seeking has a specific meaning in economics: capturing value through regulatory manipulation, not through being annoying to cancel. What's described here is just transaction costs. Coase wrote about this in 1937. The complaint is literally "firms optimize against consumers in an unregulated environment," which is the free market working exactly as designed.

AI as "the great equalizer." Equalizing what? AI agents that negotiate on your behalf get countered by AI agents that negotiate against you. The asymmetry doesn't vanish, it escalates. The company still has more compute budget, more training data on customer behavior, and more incentive to invest in adversarial optimization than you do. You get a chatbot. They get an enterprise deployment tuned on millions of interactions. The gap widens.

China "wants AI as a public utility" is doing enormous work with zero evidence. China wants semiconductor independence and geopolitical leverage. Qwen is open-weight because Alibaba wants cloud customers, not because the CCP is running a charity. Commoditizing the model layer serves Chinese hardware and cloud interests exactly the way the post itself explains ("commoditize your complement") then inexplicably frames as altruism.

The punchline the post avoids: every historical example of "friction removal" at scale (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon) concentrated wealth upward, not downward. The middlemen died, the platform owners became billionaires, and consumers got cheaper goods produced by worse labor conditions. No mechanism is proposed here that changes that outcome. "An AI on a box under my desk" doesn't redistribute anything. It just means the rent extraction happens at a layer you can't see yet.

Rooting for the collapse of the US economy as a feature rather than a bug is a take that only lands if you already have enough money to survive one.

This is why I have always said, that a degree in CS is useless without some degree of passion towards it.

No professor can enable you for tomorrow, and a CS career is one of constant education.

I'm glad I learned some STM32 assembly, but with the resources available today, I wouldn't get anywhere near as deep as I did in the early 2k's.

I am building a local low power RAG system for the programing languages I like, but I'll still include stm32 asm.

The appalling thing about Spotify DJ/Radio is that it starts playing songs that cost them less to play, and intentionally leaves out songs that cost more. Regardless of what input you give it, it will fall back to the same slop for each subgenre.

Can we get some of the ancient Nvidia Teslas, like the p40 added?

Bought one for my wife

AI review in every step of the pipeline; from the ide to deployment.

Then it's all about who has the best models, and the most secure environment to run it all in.

So what benefits does this have over AWS EC2 Image Builder?

This surely won't lead to anything bad or reckless at all.

Building a local llm to manage my homelab, and eventually my life.

As long as I don't let it control the pod bay doors, I should be fine.

Just wanted to also reiterate how thankful I am that you took your time to let us know. It speaks volumes.

And just like that, China's competitive Dota scene will disappear.

I wonder how this will effect the Perfect World/Valve partnership.

Can these scripts be compiled into executables?