delegate

This article is from 2013 and it's not true anymore.

Just did a search and the cheapest 3-bedroom flat in Les Corts area of Barcelona starts at 1500 EUR/month, compared to 680 EUR/month in the article. There are only 2 offers at this price, the rest start at 2000 EUR / month.

Cheapest flight to London (and back) on same date (Nov 20) is now 76 EUR, compared to 34 EUR in the article.

Interestingly, the prices in London seem to be around the same as in the article.

Nobody seems to talk about the whale in the room which is the concept of short videos, aka digital crack cocaine and the ad business model, aka good old brain washing.

People worry about 'data exfiltration', but that is exactly what these products are - collect data about the users and sell it to advertisers.

Where the servers are located is of very little consequence in my opinion.

Yeah, I mind that 'my data' (whatever that might be) is stored on a communist hard drive and there's a brain washed data scientist running ideological queries through it.. The issue is not the ideology, but the fact that someone is running queries through my data collected while I'm using the digital drug to later manipulate me.

For a global catastrophe situation (WW3, asteroid) with worst case scenario consequences, here's what comes to mind:

- bootable linux usb drives which can be inserted into any PC.

- archives of programming languages - the source code for the language as well as all the libraries. Eg. mvn, npm, cargo, pip, etc.

- archive of 'important' projects on Github

Ideally, you should be able to boot from USB and compile any application without internet.

- Maps (including trails)

- Growing food - agriculture, raising animals, etc

- Medicine, chemistry, biology, pharmacology books/videos/etc

- Educational programs (like Khan Academy)

- AI models and all the dependencies required to run them offline (eg. GPU drivers, etc).

This archive would be quite clumsy if it came as just a bunch of zip files, so a search index for all this content would be of great help.

I've been long thinking about working on this Archive.. I believe there would be enough people willing to purchase it just for archival purposes.

It would come in handy if we were to travel to other planets too !

Hit me up if you think this is worth working on, I'd happily join/lead such an effort.

I assume it is not as powerful at some tasks than full sized model, so what would one use this model for ?

Quit smoking, gained 30+ kg of weight, was a cardiology patient, high bp, kidney issues, depression, etc. It was horrible. Restarted smoking, lost the kilos in several months, started hiking and biking. Ended up climbing lots of mountains and now practicing endurance sports and alpinism, doing things which were unimaginable 10 years ago. Haven't seen a doctor in years. Still 'pack a day' smoker. Not condoning or recommending, just my story for perspective.

It's a general purpose programming language that runs on the JVM.

It can easily interop with Java and do the same stuff that Java does ('enterprise stuff' and more).

It excels at handling data transformations, so it's popular for tasks involving complex data pipelines, analysis, or real-time processing.

Clojure’s immutable data structures and concurrency story make it great for building highly concurrent systems, so things like financial services, real-time monitoring, event processing.

Clojurescript compiles to Javascript and interops with it well, so web based front end applications. It's used for mobile app development too.

There are libraries for AI/data sciences and there's python interop via library too, so you can build Clojure apps on top of Python libs.

Native-fast shell scripts using Babashka.

I would not use it for low level system programming (eg. where C is used), but for everything else - it would be one of my first choices.

It's a very pragmatic and practical programming language, with a strong philosophy behind every design decision and the fact that it can interop with pretty much everything makes it a powerful tool in skilled hands. Learning curve is quite steep though, but well worth climbing it.

Genuine question: I've been hearing good things about PopOS. How realistic is it as a windows replacement ?

There's honeysql library in Clojure, where you define queries as maps, which are then rendered to SQL strings:

    {:select [:name :age]
     :from {:people :p}
     :where [:> :age 10]}

Since maps are unordered, this is equivalent to

    {:from {:people :p}
     :select [:name :age]
     :where [:> :age 10]}

and also

    {:where [:> :age 10]
     :select [:name :age]
     :from {:people :p}}

These can all be rendered to 'SELECT... FROM' or 'FROM .. SELECT'.

Queries as data structures are very versatile, since you can use the language constructs to compose them.

Queries as strings (FROM-first or not) are still strings which are hard to compose without breaking the syntax.

I think the author is conflating technology with people. To me, this is a natural effect of getting everyone online.

In the beginning the web was 'nice', because only a certain kind of people had access and interest in publishing content. Geeks, programmers, scientists, students, etc. The place felt more 'elitist' because it was. We worshiped those who fell asleep coding in a basement, fueling on left over pizza and coffee, so that they could give that software away to us all for free as 'open source'.

Those were the people building the early internet and then there was the rest of the people who were not yet online - on TV, on the streets, government, etc.

But the people building the internet were building it for the people not yet online. As soon as hardware got cheap enough for everyone to afford it and software got 'simple' enough for everyone to use it, the masses flowed, bringing with them all the 'bad stuff' from the offline world times 100. They also brought some 'good stuff' too, like better visual designs, fonts, icons, images and videos, online payments.. but we're focusing on the bad now, so let's ignore the good for now.

Trolls, criminals, swindlers, script kiddies, everyone was welcome and so the flood dissolved and even reshaped the original 'elite' and now every kid wants to start a startup and become a billionaire.

But whenever I think that 'the old Internet was better', I keep reminding myself that, hey, 'the old Internet' is still here and it's alive and kicking, nobody forces me to go to the sites I don't like (well, in fact, I'm often forced to interact with terrible UX of utility companies or airlines). There's a lot of noise, sure, but it's not that hard to access the 'good internet' if you really want to.

Maybe there's something else at play, maybe the dopamine hits less after all these years, maybe we're getting older and are just nostalgic about something we used to enjoy a lot more when we were younger.

I don't think most people understand that although '100k+ sites are infected', the actual malware code runs on the visitors (our) machines, the servers themselves are fine ! I read the news yesterday and was 'yeah, that's too bad', but only later did it dawn on me that I'm the one that's potentially going to have to deal with the consequences.

This needs to be mitigated client side, not rely on the good will of the administrators.

'Midlife crisis' is just a term, coined by who knows who because who knows why.

It's only a 'crisis' if you do stupid things with the greater income/experience that you have now.

Don't.

Your age means you've grown up and it can be the greatest period of your life.

Also, instead of thinking that you're getting 'older', notice that today you're also the youngest you'll ever be in your life.

Try not to waste your energy regretting the time that has gone by, instead focus on how much more you could do with the time you still have.

Work and tech is just a small part of life. Surely you dreamed to do or get things but couldn't when you were younger. Now is the time to do that!

First and foremost, focus on your health, get fit. Make it a hobby. This will give you the positive energy you need to pursue whatever dreams you've had.

Now on the tech side of things, just a few thoughts:

Storing/pulling from DB, transforming and presenting is pretty much what we all do. The difference is the db and type of transformation and presentation.

So your experience is great and you can learn anything new that inspires you plus apply your skills to that!

Pick a subject and read about it every day, work through the tutorials, start small projects, until you can walk on your own. Technology changes fast and now with the emergence of AI it's hard to tell what will stick or if any of the skills we've learned for decades will still be useful in 5 years.

Fundamentals usually stick, refresh/get deeper into them, grokk the common algorithms, system design, architecture, design patterns.

As you get older, younger people will start to look up to you for guidance. Try softening your skills.

Software development is not just about technology, it's also about communication, intuition, knowing who to engage with, when to take up stand, when to back down, etc.

Those things come to us as we get older, so try to include them in your thought processes.

In my experience (Clojure and Clojurescript), LISP is a powerful tool for quick prototyping and experimentation as an individual hacker. The REPL-driven flow can get you far very fast. Add a couple more experienced hackers to the mix and you can build something great fast.

The downside is that it's a difficult tool to become fluid in and so it's difficult to find experienced hackers, so scaling the team is going to be slower than with other, more popular languages.

I've interviewed lots of developers and recommended 'hire' to about 15 people in the last several years and not once did we get it wrong.

All it takes is a short problem to solve at home, which can be easily googled and one hour architecture interview, where we discuss the technical architecture of a hypothetical 'real world' service.

It takes about 20 minutes to determine if the candidate has the experience with the technologies listed in the resume. Little experience is not necessarily a show stopper.

True that the language we hire for (Clojure) filters out a lot of people ahead of time, but knowing the language is not exactly what I look for..

What I look for is 'passion' - does the candidate love programming and can the candidate articulate technical issues with ease.

The other question I try to answer - will the candidate enjoy working in our team and will we enjoy working with him/her.

Smart people will shine in a certain way, even if they bomb specific questions - they have an opinion, they try, they ask the right questions.

I'd be sad if we missed on some of the people in our team because of automated (inhuman) puzzle interviews.

We're not looking for a problem solving machine, we're looking for a partner to create something great together, someone who shares our passion for hacking and someone who we'd love to work with.

I share TFA's opinion that leetcode-style interviews are not the way to go and I hope the industry comes back around and focuses on the human side more.

I can hardly write a correct Hello World in Java. I can read it, I can probably write it, but I've never really used it. Yet I've been writing Clojure daily for the last 9 years.

This means that you really don't need Java in order to use Clojure.

Coming from a C++ background, I used to dislike the JVM out of principle just like yourself, especially since it needs to run on my local machine and it uses so much memory and is slow to start up.

However, once your app is started, you're in the REPL and that's the only time you need to start your app.. You can keep developing for days without restarting your app once.

Once I finished developing my app and I deploy it to a server, I'm kind of happy it runs on the JVM - that thing is super tuned, very fast and runs on a myriad of hardware platforms.. I don't have to spend one minute thinking about those details.

So while the JVM is somewhat inconvenient on the dev machine, it helps a lot when you deploy it to production.

Things became a lot simpler when I stopped worrying about it and just used the language for its power and beauty.

Cynically you can see that as bragging, but it's just common sense if you dig into it.

The ones that are not fit are intimidated and look away, because they stand no chance (I know because I was like that too). The 'beautiful' ones are the ones that do the hard work to stay in shape, so they know and are interested in people who do the same.

The term 'midlife crisis' is ridiculous tbh, forget it, there's no crisis, it's called growing up and becoming a man.

I got fit after 40 and my fitness level keeps increasing now that I'm nearing 50, endurance sports are now part of my life.

Me ! The obese slob on a bunch of pills for heart and kidney conditions and getting ready to die. All it took was to accidentally meet the person who showed me the way.

After dozens of mountain peaks climbed, thousands of km ridden on the bike and buckets of sweat left in yoga classes, I now look like a model and I have women's eyes on me each time I look around. The most beautiful too, because they know what it takes.

Radical change is possible and from what I've seen, some people just take a bit longer to wake up to their true potential.

Believing that you have what it takes is all it takes :).

I've long pondered on the idea of a unified, indexed database of all my personal data, which can also be stored on multiple removable drives (not your storage, not your data).

I've started work multiple times, but the scale of work required just scares me away.

Ideally, I'd like to see a timeline of everything that happened in my digital life - from photos, messages, health data, e-mails, even web sites I've visited.

For documents and files it should offer full text search and semantic search, etc.

The reason I want to have all my data in one index is not just for backup. As AI keeps evolving, I'll be able to use this data to train ever more capable AIs, which could eventually know pretty much everything about me and be able to sound like myself or even emulate me :).

Looking far into the future, this thing could eventually outlive me ...

Presumably. Less time the giant chip has to draw power for computation. The point is that everyone's interested in making AI power efficient, while crypto's proof of work is a competition for more power burned hashing and throwing away the result.

Crypto energy requirements go up as the currency gets more traction.

TFA shows that groq is many times faster than GPT-4. Up to 18x groq claims. Faster means less energy. So I think it's just a matter of time until these things become ridiculously power efficient (eg run on phones in sub second times)

It's easy to confuse text generation with thinking.

I found that if I treat it as a program that can generate text, it's a lot easier to write the prompt that generates code that's more or less what I need.

It can do the boring stuff pretty easily, like generate boilerplate code or settings files. It can explain technical issues better than googling.

It also helps that I use a functional language with immutable data structures and the code it generates is either good or good enough to give me an idea on how to move forward.

Once you lower your expectations and use it for what it is, it's a very powerful tool.

That got me thinking that these things will be able to first learn and then write the optimised code to avoid the energy usage. Think 'muscle memory' but for AI interacting with external world (or another AI)...

It's a good overview, but I think there's one important aspect that's not discussed.

We're looking at AI competing with the jobs that programmers do today, but it's likely that these new AI tools will change software itself.

I mean, why have a complicated UI with design/validation/etc when you can just tell your phone you want a plane ticket to Paris tomorrow ? I'm just going to guesstimate that at least half of the apps we use today can be done without a UI or with a very different type of UI+natural language.

Add AI agents that are fine tuned on all your personal data in real time (eg. photos you take, messages you send, etc) which will end up knowing you better than your mom. In a company setting, the AI will know all your JIRA tickets and Slack/Teams conversations, e-mails and so on.

On the backend, instead of API endpoints, you'll have just one - where the AI asks you for data piece by piece, while the client AI provides it. No need to program this, the AIs can just figure it out by themselves.

Definitely interesting times, but change is coming fast.

Because, frankly, most of this content is very cheap. As in the value of these 'news' is zero and often negative.

These are not starving journalists trying to reveal the 'truth'. These are big corporate entities peddling a lot of fast food content and the agenda of their shareholders/sponsors. The 'real' journalists (if such a thing still exists) who work there get paid peanuts compared to how much they squeeze from the millions of readers through these anti patterns.

Now that they built this huge ship, they have to keep producing content just to keep it afloat, regardless of whether there's any value in it for the readers. Most of the time there is none. Important news will reach you without any paywalls.

I don't feel entitled, in fact I don't really care about TFA. The link was posted to HN and then immediately someone commented with a archive link, because the original link is not working for most of the people here who never pay for news, because they know better.

But the WWW is now broken for everyone because of this.

Subtitled 'Here's what you'll never be able to do'.

Oh yes, 3 files changed compared to parent and the changes are gitignore and updated URLs to the forked repo.

Maybe I've missed it in the article - but how long would a full training run take on 2 consumer GPUs (local or rented) ? Ballpark - hours, days... ?

Can also add the photos you take and all the chats you have with people (eg. whatsapp, fb, etc), the sensor information from your phone (eg. location, health data, etc).

This is already possible to implement today, so it's very likely that we'll all have our own personal AIs that know us better than we do.

This. Ukraine war is a testing ground for these next gen war devices and very soon they will be flying and locating targets completely autonomously.. Combine that with genai models that anyone can train...

> their blades can spin at well over 200km per hour. It is easy to imagine careless birds getting chopped to bits.

Interesting use of the word 'friendlier'.

Anyone who played Factorio knows that belts, especially underground ones, are the thing.