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CamperBob2on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

What does the terminal really give you that you can't get from various other data sources scattered around the Internet, like your brokerage's own API, third-party data sources, various forums and subreddits, ...? Is it just the real-time firehose nature of the thing?

CamperBob2on Dots: Always-on agents

Unspoken in that series of tweets, at least until well down the page, is the fact that it was the corporations that started it. When I need support, I can't reach a human at most companies I work with now. If I manage to do so, it's only after extensive effort and negotiation with support bots.

So why in the world wouldn't I respond to this by automating away the hassle?

The solution for both sides is for the companies to implement support bots that have more power to address my problem than the humans they replaced were ever given. I have a feeling it's not going to work out that way, though. Maybe with a few unusually-enlightened organizations, but I'm not holding my breath.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

How important is it that you maintain a good availability record? I have a few RTX 6000s in a server that I use occasionally for NDA'ed contract work and for experimenting with open models, and now I feel stupid for just letting it idle at ~1 kWh when it could be earning revenue. I didn't realize that anyone would care to rent prosumer-grade GPUs.

At the same time, when I need to use the hardware for something, whoever is renting it from me at the moment is going to get unceremoniously booted, and I imagine they are not going to be happy about that. I assume that vast.ai's providers get uptime ratings that drive their work allocation, right?

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

That argument doesn't hold much water in my opinion. VW AG is partially state-owned, with a double-digit percentage held by the federal state of Lower Saxony.

Meanwhile, in the US, companies like Boeing, GM, and Intel will never be allowed to experience more than minor financial inconvenience before the government bails them out with protectionism, guaranteed loans, and outright subsidies.

I don't see a material difference between how the Chinese government treats their strategically-important industries and the way we do here in the West. Terms like "socialism," "Communism," and "capitalism" are just fodder for Fox News camp-followers.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is to point out that the potential cost of delegating cognitive resources to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic is unbounded.

The AI models we currently have still maintain their working state with a finite and laughably-small context window, but that is already starting to change. My .claude directory contains over 300 .md files that I didn't put there myself. Their contents are eye-opening. The question of who owns, stores, maintains, and can access that data is going to become insanely important over the next couple of years.

If you thought LLMs themselves were disruptive and contentious, just wait until the fight over object permanence gets under way. That's when owning your own box full of graphics cards is going to become important. My own bet is that I won't care too much about the electric bill or my opportunity cost when we all find out what the AI labs really have in mind, and what they're going to have to do in order to justify the valuations they're seeking.

TL,DR: it's not about the tokens, IMHO.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

That's what I did personally, not being a Linux guru. But to your point, I still had to spend a lot of time and effort dorking around with the hardware.

It's worth it, knowing that there are no rugs Sam or Dario or anyone else can pull.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

You can buy 2 of them from Central Computer any day of the week for $30K US, and that's not the lowest price I've heard lately.

So if you can spend $30K and immediately start mining $1500/month out of thin air, that's a pretty nice investment even if the electricity costs $200/month. Two years later the cards will have paid for themselves entirely and (I suspect) will still be pretty useful.

It does argue in favor of just paying OpenAI or Anthropic for tokens, though.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

Seriously? People are paying you $1500/month to rent your 2x RTX 6000 Blackwell cards?

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

Electricity costs money

Not $400 a month, it doesn't. At least not around here (we average $0.12/kWh and I don't personally run my cards over 300W.)

And there's a lot of labour and effort involved...

Theoretically, the people who hang around HN are more likely than most to be capable of the labour and effort of setting these things up and maintaining them.

People don't even run their own email servers...

People don't run their own email servers because a convenient coalition of spammers, standards bodies, and large email providers have done their best to make running one's own email server almost impossible.

CamperBob2on ChatGPT Pro 500

I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve

Interesting, you don't find that the model is perfectly capable of solving those on its own?

Or does it just refuse to try?

CamperBob2on ChatGPT Pro 500

No, now they need multiple $500 accounts. The usage allowance didn't go up significantly, just the price.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

Note that $400 a month is a typical car payment. For the same money -- well, OK, probably a little more -- you could be paying off a set of 4 RTX 6000 cards that will run 4.1 Flash all you want, all day and all night, at hundreds of tokens per second.

CamperBob2on Tcl/Tk 9.1

Indeed. If AI did nothing for me but deal with Xilinx's shit, I'd still nominate everybody from Hinton to Amodei for Nobels.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

Outcompeted them badly. Sent Porsche packing and BMW bawling.

CamperBob2on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

"This machine-intelligence stuff is overrated, they are just using <insert particular machine-intelligence technique here>" isn't the resounding verdict it may have sounded like when you typed it.

CamperBob2on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

There is no prize for being the first to cause a disaster.

How do you think Trump has made more profit during his years in the Oval Office than he did in 30+ years of business before that?

CamperBob2on What would a serious AI product look like?

So, one? That's one more than I've chalked up, dunno about you.

And don't bother trying to claim that they cheated. Even if they did crib off of other mathematicians' notes, (a) that's how this is done; (b) those mathematicians were relying on AI as well; and (c) OpenAI resolved an aspect of the N-S problem that was not being addressed by anyone else.

CamperBob2on Show HN: Pac-Bench – How well can models one-shot a Pac-Man game?

But it takes -- what, two or three sentences? -- to explain how the ghosts should move. The interesting (and important) thing is not that the model gets it wrong at first, it's how easy it is to correct it.

One-shotting something like Pac-Man doesn't prove much. At the end of the day, one-shot fidelity is going to scale more or less linearly with model size/world knowledge. Why wouldn't it?

CamperBob2on World Labs Is Joining AMD

They won't have a choice at first, and they won't know the difference in the end.

CamperBob2on U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls to Lowest Level Since 1982

He is indistinguishable from an attack by hostile foreign agents. A very successful attack.

CamperBob2on What would a serious AI product look like?

How many Millennium Problems did the earlier wave solve?

CamperBob2on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Firstly artificial superintelligence is a science fiction, it does not exist and it cannot be built using existing technology.

By what authority do you claim this? Your school of thought has a really shitty track record of late.

CamperBob2on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

I'm being descriptive, not prescriptive. The "narrative" isn't intended to "work," except as a statement of fact.

CamperBob2on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Well, they'd presumably be different hackers than the ones who work on Linux. We don't know what would motivate them. Maybe they'll do it because they consider the next stage of man's intellectual evolution to be too important to leave up to a couple of American companies and the Trump administration. Maybe they'll do it for the proverbial lulz.

CamperBob2on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Somebody's going to build it. Not building it isn't an option. Would you rather the Chinese built it? The Russians? The Europeans? The Indians? A loose coalition of random hackers on the Internet, like the ones who build Linux?

CamperBob2on Bill Gates Says Trump Is Wrong to Hold Out Against AI Safeguards

Exactly. Even if you believe the industry should be regulated, the only thing worse than failure to regulate would be regulation by the senile, corrupt people in government today.

CamperBob2on When did Google get so weird?

The saddest part is when people take their experience with Google's idiotic AI implementation and assume that's how all LLMs work. Frontier-class models will, in fact, generally admit when they don't know something. That includes the one I run at home on my own graphics cards, but it seems that Google just doesn't GAF.

Your point about "predicting the next word" mostly means that your post was very easy to predict.

CamperBob2on OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields

Well, the reason we introduced it is because we realised it’s a lot of work to make these

Well, it's not anymore.

CamperBob2on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

There is no such thing as moral obligation when it comes to politics and national interest.

There is if you ever want to negotiate a nuclear arms-control deal again. None of this would be an issue if Ukraine had kept their nukes.

CamperBob2on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

Is that why they're electing far-right parties at an unprecedented rate?