352 karma · joined February 9, 2016
Because Apple has not adjusted their pricing yet for the new ram pricing reality. The moment they do, its not going to be a $10k system anymore but in the $15k+...
The amount of wafers going to AI is insane and will influence not just memory prices. Do not forget, the only reason why Apple is currently immunity to this, is because they tend to make long term contracts but the moment those expire ... then will push the costs down consumers.
Do not forget that we had insane long certificates not that long ago.
The main issue is that currently you can not easily revoke certs, so your almost forced to keep a history of certs, and when one has been revoked in the CT logs.
In theory, if everybody is forced to change certs every 47 days, sure, you can invalidated them and permanently remove them. But it requires a ton of automatization on the user side. There is still way too much software that relies on a single year or multi year certificated that is manually added to it. Its also why the fadeout to 47 days, is over a 4 year time periode.
And it still does not change the massive increased in requests to check validation, that hits CT logs providers.
To be honest, the issue is not the time frame, you can literally have certs being made every day. And there are plenty of ways to automated this. The issue is the CT log providers are going to go ape!
Right now, we are at 24B certificates going back to around 2017 when they really started to grow. There are about 4.5B unique domains, if we reduce this to the amount of certs per domain, its about 2.3B domain certs we currently need.
Now do 2.3B, x 8 renewals ... This is only about 18,4B new certs in CT logs per year. Given how popular LE is, we can assume that the actual growth is maybe 10B per year (those that still use 1 year or multi year + the tons of LE generated ones).
Remember, i said the total going back to 2017 currently is now only 24B ... Yea, we are going to almost double the amount of certs in CT logs, every two years.
And that assumes LE does not move to 17 days, because then i am sure we are doubling the current amount, each year.
Good luck as a CT log provider... fyi, a typical certificate to store is about 4.5kb, we are talking 45TB of space needing per year, and 100TB+ if they really drop it down to 17 days. And we did not talk databases, traffic to the CT logs, etc...
Its broken Jim ... Now imagine for fun, a daily cert, ... 1700TB per year in CT log storage?
A new system will come from Google etc because its going to become unaffordable, even for those companies.
Not counting the fact that Netcup is raided (also Netcup is limited to 8TB on a VPS).
That is like 4.7 Euro /TB. That is like 4$/TB. 6 Euro / TB in a raid 5 setup.
I do not understand why they are not using this new pricing model on their older servers. There the best you can get is like 10 Euro /TB (for the single 15TB U.2).
And yes, i agree, the PG failover setup (and especially dealing with a failure afterwards, to restore the ex-master is beyond infuriating).
But its not pay 10x the amount, while eating easily 10x performance infuriating :)
And having them fight it off between each other. To see where the issues are with each methode, what works better. Doing that without vibe coding the hell out of it, will take months of work, but with vibing and some cash, you do it in a few days.
Simplicity? I learned Rust years ago (when it was still pre release), and when i now look at a lot of codebases, i can barely get a sense what is going on, with all the new stuff that got introduced. Its like looking at something familiar and different at the same time.
I do not feel the same when i see Go code, as so little has changed / got added to it. The biggest thing is probably generics and that is so rarely used.
For me, this is, what i think, appeals for C programmers. The fact that the language does not evolve and has been static.
If we compare this to C++, that has become a mess over time, and i know i am getting downvoted for this, Rust feels like its going way too much in the Rust++ route.
Like everybody and their dog wants something added, to make Rust do more things, but at the same moment, it feels like its repeating the C++ history. I have seen the same issue with other languages that started simple, and then becomes monsters of feature sets. D comes to mind.
So when you see the codebase between developers, the different styles because of the use of different feature sets, creates this disconnect and makes it harder for people to read other code. While with C, because of the language limits, your more often down a rather easier way to read the same code. If that makes sense?
So even if you make a better programming language for a LLM, it has nothing to train on. Unless we start to transcode human language code to the LLM code.
Are the vectors/tokens/whatever, not already LLM code at this point? Technically, LLMs not are doing what Haxe was doing (haxe.org) but in a more advanced form?
Even if we make a more LLM like programming code, in a sense, we are just making another code that needs to be translated into the tokens that consist in a LLM model, no?
Feels like we are starting to hit philosophical debates with that one lol
Things evolve faster then people realize... Agent mode, then came mcp servers, sub agents, now its rag databases allowing the LLMs to get data directly.
The development of LLMS looks slow but with each iteration, things get improved. As yourself, what will have been the result of those same tests you ran, 21 months ago, with Claude 3.0? How about Claude 4.0, that is only 8 months ago.
Right now Opus 4.5 is darn functional. The issue is more often not the code that it write, but more often it get stuck on "its too complex, let me simplify it", with the biggest issue often being context capacity.
LLMs are still bad at deeper tasks, but compared to the last LLMs, the jumps have been enormous. What about a year from now? Two years? I have a hard time believing that Claude 3 was not even 2 years but just 21 month ago. And we considered that a massive jump up, useful for working on a single file... Now we are throwing it entire codebases and is darn good at debugging, editing etc.
Do i like the results? No, there are lots of times that the results are not what "i wanted", but that is often a result of my own prompting being too generic.
LLMs are never going to really replace experience programmers, but boy is the progress scary.
Its more then a huge cost, its often insane... We are not talking 10x but easily 100x to a 1000x. Its like when i see some known database makers that scale, write how they can do a million writes per second. Ignoring that they rented a 1000 servers for that, each costing $500 per month. That same software is also 10x to 100x more slower, then a single postgresql database in reads.
So you ask yourself, how many companies do a million writes per second. Few ... How much of those writes may have been reduced by using smarter caching / batching? Probably a factor of 10 to 100x...
The thing i like about scalable solution, is that its way easier to just add a few nodes, vs needing to deal with postgres replication / master setup, when the master node got moved / need to upgraded.
For fun, i wrote my own ART database, and a LSM database using LLMs ... Things do 400 a 500k inserts / second on basic cheap hardware. So wait, why are some companies advertising that they do a million inserts/s, on 500k/month hardware? Some companies may need this ability to scale, as they will not run a 1000 server but maybe 10.000, or more. But 99% of the companies will never even smell close to a 100k inserts/second, let alone a million.
People forget that network latency is a huge thing, but the moment you want consistency and need something like raft, that means now your doing not just 1x the network latency of a write but 4x (send write, verify receive, send commit, verify commit, confirm).
Even something as basic like sqlite vs postgres on the same server, can mean a difference of 3x performance, simply because of then network overhead vs in-function. And that network overhead is just local on the same machine.
Why pay for a piece of software that you really only use 5% of all the features, and still may need customizations for. Vs just internally have somebody code a custom solution for your company.
The only benefit of a outside solution is that you can blame a outsider. Internal solution used to be bad because if the person with the knowledge of the codebase left, you ended up screwed. But with LLMs and "vibe" coding, there becomes a disconnect between the code and whoever wrote it. Making it easier to later make modifications on that same codebase, using ... LLMs.
Does Sqlite now not have a build in rsync for replicas?
Searches, yep ... https://sqlite.org/rsync.html
Far from it, as now your not just dealing with network but also with raft consensus... So each write is not just a network trip, its also 2x acknowledging. And your reads go over the leader, what can mean if somebody accessed node 1 app but node 2 is the leader, well, ...
Its slower on reads and writes, then just replications that PostgreSQL does. And i do not mean async but even sync PostgreSQL will be faster.
The reason dqlite exists is because canonical needed something to synchronize their virtualization cluster (lxd), and they needed a db with raft consensus, that is a lib (as not a full blown server install like postgres). Performance was not the focus and its usage is totally different then most people needs here.
Go back to a older version of a LLM and then say the same. You will notice that older LLM versions do less, have more issues, write worse code etc...
There have been large jumps in the last 2 years but because its not like we go from a LLM to AGI, that people underestimate the gains.
Trust me, try it, try Claude 3.7 > 4.0 > 4.5 > Opus 4.5 ...
> I'm unconvinced that this is faster than a good search engine and writing code myself.
What i see is mostly somebody who is standoffish on LLMs ... Just like i was. I tried to shoehorn their code generation into "my" code, and while it works reasonably, you tend to see the LLM working on "your code", as a invasion. So you never really use its full capabilities.
LLMs really work the best, if you plan, plan, plan, and then have them create the code for you. The moment you try to get the LLMs work inside existing code, that is especially structured how YOU like it, people tend to be more standoffish.
> It's too expensive as it is for what it does.
CoPilot is like 27 Euro/month(year payment + dollar/euro) for 1500 requests here. We pay just for basic 100Mbit internet 45 Euro per month. I mean ... Will it get more expensive in the future, o yes, for sure. But we may also have alternatives by then. Open Source/Open Weight models are getting better and better, especially with MoE.
Pricing is how you look at it... If i do the work what takes me a months in a few days, what is the price then? If i do work that i normally need to outsource. Or code that is some monotoon repeating end me %@#$ ... in a short time by paying a few cents to a LLM, ...
Reality is, thing change, and just like the farmers that complained about the tractor, while their neighbor now did much more work thanks to that thing, LLMs are the same.
I often see the most resistance from us older programmer folks, who are set in our ways, when its us who actually are the best at wrangling LLMs the best. As we have the experience to fast spot where a LLM goes wrong, and guide it down the right path. Tell it, the direction is debugging is totally wrong and where the bug more likely is ...
For the last 2 years i paid just the basic cheap $10 subscription, and use it but never strongly. It helped with those monotoon tasks etc. Until ... a months ago, i needed a specific new large project and decided to just agent / vibe code it, just to try at first. And THEN i realized, how much i was missing out off. Yes, that was not "my" code, and when the click came in my head that "i am the manager, not the programmer", you suddenly gain a lot.
Its that click that is hard for most seasoned veterans. And its ironically often the seasoned guys that complain the most about AI ... when its the same folks that can get the most out of LLMs.
OP never said he is not familiar with Windows anymore ...
He clearly said that his condition for helping them is if they install Linux. Those two are totally different statements.
I even find that a rather flimsy excuse that you made up. I do not work with MacOS, does that mean i can not help somebody with MacOS? Google kung-fu and i can figure it out. How about Linux ... OS2 lol ... If you have even a bit of basic knowledge, a OS or program is all about Googling the answer these days (or even AI / LLM answering it for you).
We can have a discussion about people being lazy and pulling the "but X family member will solve the issues with my PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone". I simply taught the family members who really want to learn, how to properly Google for issues. It did not matter to me that they use MacOS, or Windows.
Same with internet security, Windows is no issue for safety as long as the people using it, know what they can open and what they can not open. The moment you teach somebody the proper way, all those "support" calls vanish as their system stays clean of viruses and bots.
The whole "i will not help you unless you install Linux" ... that is toxic behavior. Instead of helping people by actually teaching them the basics, and those basics are operating system agnostic... his solution is a bit of blackmail.
Issue is that you give up 1x, 2x ... extra read capability, depending on your RF=x. But you gain strong consistency without the overhead of dealing with eventual consistency or full consistency over multiple nodes (with stuff like raft).
1.
If you use something like Raft to ensure that you get full consistency, your writes slow down as its multiple trips of network communication per write (insert/update/delete). That takes 2 network operations (send data, receive acknowledgement, send confirm to commit, receive confirm it committed).
2.
if you use eventual consistency you have fast writes, and only 1 hop ((send data, receive acknowledgement). But like the article talked about, if you write something and at also try to read that data... It can happen that the server writing is slower, then the next part in your code that is reading. So you write X = X + 1, it goes to server A, but your connection now ready from server B = 1 because the change has not yet been committed on Server B.
3.
the above mentioned comment simply assume there is one master over your data, its server A. You write AND read from server A all the time. Any changes to the data are send to Server B, but only as a hot standby. Advantage is that writes are fast, and very consistent. Disadvantage is that you can not scale your reads beyond server A.
----
Now imagine that your data is cut int smaller pieces, or you do not write sequentially like 1 2 3 ... but write with hash distribution, where a goes to server 2, b goes to server 3, f goes to server 2 ...
It really depends on your workload what is better in the combination of what server setup your running, single node, sharded, replicated sharded, distributed seq, ...
The DB field is complex ...
When PCs came around, people looked down on the idea of painting on a screen. Some stubborn held on to their easel, while the often younger generation embraced the new tech, and made their carriers.
LLMs are the same ... We have people who are stubborn and still want to do everything on their easel and good for them. But those that adapted, will turn out more work and eventually replace most of the die hards in the workplace. Sure, there will be people who are needed, just like we had Fortran programmers 50 years later making bank, or painters who make bank.
But the idea that it makes us less creative is stupid. Did PCs make us less creative in painting? No, we got a ton of new media and changes. We adapted to the tools and possibilities.
O, PCs came on the market, well, no way somebody is going to use that to make ... MUSIC ... you only do that with real instruments. Que entire generation of techno, movie music etc all made digitally. You did not need to be a directory, know how to play dozens of different instruments to make insane pieces of music. You used your creativity to use the tools at your disposal !
The fact that you can now do the work in a few weeks, that will have taken you a year as a programmer, that opens up the doors for more creativity. Prototyping a idea does not take months, but days. It changes the industry...
Why do i need to pay license cost for a piece of software that is "enterprise", when i can now make the same level of software in a few weeks. It actually take the power away from big corporations, sure, you rely on the tool, and whoever is behind the tool for now (like anthropic etc) but as time moves forwards, more hardware will become more powerful, and LLMs will be more in the open source, ...
Remember what i said about music ... hey, maybe creative people will be able to make music that is different thanks to AI. Hey, you wanted to make a Magic The Gathering game but the art was a delima, ... LLMs suddenly open the door to make new products, and change the industry away from large corporation where the entry fee is high.
We are on a threshold of change, those that stay behind and think it kills creativity, never really used the new tools.
I am writing software right now, that will have took me a year to write. It duplicates the function of some enterprise software that will have cost me insane money. BUTTTTTT, because i now control this software, i can add features that i always found lacking or missing, because that enterprise software only looked at the companies, now what somebody like me may need.
All for the low low price of barely $40, what is probably 70~100k in developer cost. That is still being creative, i made something new using a existing idea, with my own touches to it. But i used a tool for it... Eventually, my code if open source, may be used in other LLMs to improve them. What in turn makes them smarter and maybe some of my idea get used by others.
This is frankly how we as the human race advanced, not by stagnating and not embracing change, but by often copying, improving, using our creativity. Does that mean i need to know how a LLM works? No, just like do not need to know how a bread slicer works, ...
Anyway, ... this discussion is never going to end, because there is always resistance to change. I remember my parents about smartphones, ... guess who uses them, even at their old age. Eventually some power always get consolidated but for now, with the progress i am seeing in the open source/open weights LLM progress, there will been a escape hatch for those that do not want to be linked to specific corporations, just like Linux etc exists.
The fact that there exist crates to detected the usage of unsafe in dependencies, shows that its a rather liberal used keyword. Geiger comes to mind.
Unsafe in a language like Go is very rare, mostly because people do not program at such low system level to get the max performance out of it.
Rust code with unsafe: 1.7M Go code with unsafe: 400k
and for comparison, Go has about 2.3x the amount of repo's. So Rust has about a 10x more usage of the unsafe keyword.
And that will result in even more resources being allocated into the "big spenders". We are for a long time, in a death spiral for the whole PC field. If it was not crypto mining (multiple times), then it was HDD mining, then it was pandemic, and now its AI.
What used to be a stable market, that was predictable, has become ultra expensive. And now the whole SSD / DDR pricing are going to hurt even more.
Worst of all is, that a lot of resources are now going to enterprise hardware. So even if the AI bubble goes down, its not like the market will be flooded with cheap NVMEs or cheaper DDR sticks, as that production will have gone into 2.5" U.3 drives and LPDDR memory or the likes.
Its free as long as you really are small, not worth milking. The moment you can afford to run your own mini dc at your office, you start to enter the "well, hello there" for CF.
Yep ... thinking the old way to make software is going to end.
In the past, we made a framework, then sold that framework for clients. But we always had the issue where client X wanted Y features, client Z want X features ... And over time the framework bloats, you get issues with features that may conflict between clients. Then you start to split the framework maybe for client Z because its too much different. Now your have issues when features or bug need to be fixed...
In todays LLM world, i see it more like custom software per client, with "instruction files"...
You make a custom framework for a client, with the AI writing it based upon a instruction file, that is supplemented by custom requirements for the client. Its written for that client and only that client.
The next client, same ... the next same. If a client sees a feature that they want, you instruct the LLM to update the framework for that client using again, a addendum instruction file.
If you instruction file was written correctly, bugs are going to be on the low end, and most clients do not need constant updates to their software.
A client wants to go to a different company and can not get the source files? That company needs the database files + the original design / analysts and the new company rebuild it again into a new version.
So ironically, we are going to, to a world where custom software is very normal, and cheap.
> I think a better metaphor would be a genetic algorithm. You try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Then you combine the best parts.
Yep, put that in practice last week.
I wrote a database in barely a week and half time, and was "slow" because i made like 5 different versions playing around with clustering, different parsers, more advanced each time (regex, token, lexer-ast) and tons of other features.
When i did not like a version, o LLM, rebuild it using my new updated instructions. O, i do not like the parser as it had issues, lets make a more advance one.
We are not talking toy DB ... full insert/update/delete, joins, CTE, Window function, SubQueries, Index's, alias, ... you name it, all working correctly. If i used my instruction file today, i can make you a custom DB in a day. Two if you need something custom. If somebody told me this 6 months ago, i call you crazy lol
Normally, when you build something, you spend days, weeks into it, especially if its advanced. Your reluctant to just tear it down and restart from zero. Or pull a important component out to rebuild from zero. Because sunk cost ... Now its just a half a day work, a day at worst, and you redid what will have taken you weeks or months. It really allows for a lot more experimenting, finding what fits better as time becomes different vs you on your little keyboard typing for ages, rebuilding, making tests, again and again. When a LLM does it 10, to 100 times faster.
For somebody who is a senior programmers, your actually the most easy to adapt and get the most out of LLMs (and ironically often the most resistant to change to using LLMs). Programmers that do not adapt to the new, are going to be left behind.
Thing is, we can talk faster then most of us can type.
Voice + Programming is slow because of all the special symbols. But voice + vibe coding? The ability to tell your LLM to do tasks, while you focus on other parts of the code, without the need to switch tabs/windows.
What about "change the color green on this element (html page), where my mouse is pointing"... Annoying with keyboard if you need to switch windows, very possible with voice.
And LLMs are very forgiving for mistakes, unlike if you want to voice program where every symbol needs to be accurate.
People do not realize that programming as we know it, is going to change.
The fact that cloudflare can literally ready every bit of communication (as it sits between the client and your server) is already plenty bad. And yet, we accept this more easily, then a bit of downtime. We shall not ask about the prices for that service ;)
To me its nothing more then the whole "everybody on the cloud" issue, when most do not need the resource that cloud companies like AWS provide (and the bill), and yet, get totally tied down to this one service.
I am getting old lol ...
I don't know but for me a lot of attacks on Go, often come from non-go developers, VERY often Rust devs. When i started Go, it was always Rust devs in /r/programming pushing their agenda as Rust being the next best thing, the whole "rewrite everything in Rust"...
About 10 years ago, learned Rust and these days, i can barely read the code anymore with the tons of new syntax that got added. Its like they forgot the lessons from C++...
Its like there is a identify crisis even at Valve. Why can this not be a streaming machine for people who want to remote game. Why do you need a controller, if maybe you have a steam deck and stream PC games from the Steam PC > Deck...
What if you just want to use this as a cheap dedicated gaming PC with a monitor and keyboard/mouse.
I feel like there is a identify crisis with the product. Like the started out making a console, but then realized that nothing prevents people from using this as a cheap PC, if Valve puts the price too low. So you have this retraction on the pricing.
I think that this is the issue with most people these days... The combination of work, seen it all, and frankly, often disappointing AAA games.
The time spend is often on more smaller studios that do something creative, and those are often not triple A graphical monsters anyway.
> This is going to be a no-brainer for my next upgrade.
Really depends on the price... Do not forget that its going to be released in 2026... At that time we get new Zen 6 CPUs (remember, this Steam Deck is Zen4), what will drive the prices of the old Zen4 down even more. Same with new GPUs.
Like, the Steam deck was incredible pricing for the hardware you got when released and sure, its still a good value for a handheld console, but from a hardware point of view, its really old now (zen2 cores).