georgeburdell

The Chinese are not employing some grand tactic, it’s just an extension of their cultural tendency of involution

I too give juniors the advice to crack open $textbook. It’s just painful to see the complex things they’ve created with horrible performance and no cohesive data model because they don’t have the requisite academic foundation to hand code the same thing given unlimited time

I’m a semiconductor expert and without seeing the details, this seems like yet another smoke and mirrors wunderkind startup that will disperse once practical considerations are made. As far as I know, Mr. Zeloof has not made any fundamental advancements in any steps in manufacturing.

I’m with you. I shoot off small fireworks for my kids and my immediate neighbor on our quiet street, and we have a neighbor a few doors down who invariably calls the cops. This has been going on since the 2000s when she moved in. If I’m fined, I just pay it.

SoMa Costco has the parking under the store. It’s just economics.

On the other end of the spectrum, the notorious (in the Bay Area) Sunnyvale Costco actually demolished a nearby restaurant just to expand the parking lot.

Yeah I actually avoid AI on my own time to keep my skills sharp. I do not like using LLMs but I do realize it’s a necessary tool for my dayjob. At home, I do make an exception if I have to Google an API example but I transcribe by hand rather than copy paste.

Anecdotally it's true for me. I can code all day with an agent and never went above $50, but the second I need to ingest a pdf doc to figure out a command I need to use it's easily $20-30 for 10 mins of work

This is $currentyear. Jobs are 10 years tops

I work in a related field and “inverse” design is what this is called. Such designs usually are not manufacturable. I’m not too worried about my iob.

That said we’ve had some success internally having Claude do parameter sweeps

Tell me where I said they didn’t have fabs

IBM debuts a PDK and some test structures, as they have no production fabs

Due to the high trust they get from the public, I have run into many MDs who are used to making unfounded assertions with little pushback.

Exactly. This sort of retrospective is a soft pulling up of the ladder, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did mea culpa where the conscience is assuaged but the spoils remain where they always were. We should accept that there is a season to burn the candle at both ends, to exploit youthful energy and to do great things.

Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.

I wouldn’t call it stupid, but it is a policy choice. On the other side, why should Grandma pay 5% of the property taxes as the new couple next door while receiving the same access to public services, while also pushing another family to live farther away?

That costs money

An excellent example of Poe’s law. I can’t imagine what kind of Western person would hold such a cognitively dissonant view of globalism, for example.

An agreeable platitude, but such a people are not born, they’re made as their neighborhoods close off, their favorite restaurants and stores disappear, their children are excluded from playdates with school friends, and they’re rejected from employment in favor of one of the tribe.

Also do consider that you’ve advocated for the elimination of people holding a belief that is far more common in the world in aggregate than in the few high HDI countries

It’s disingenuous to imply “industrialists” are the only ones unhappy. Anyone who doesn’t want to die a stranger in their own land is also concerned.

Not that my feelings or opinion matter, but I'm going to be devastated if this xAI grift takes down SpaceX. I am reminded that the 90s Boy Band groups Backstreet Boys and N*SYNC were the side projects of a Ponzi Scheme.

Not a lawyer but my understanding is that a valid contract must involve an exchange of value from both parties

Does not explain India where there is high genetic diversity and generally the South is more educated and wealthy

Agentic for most people should mean an easy way to fix what were previously missing UI features. Hopefully companies are (with permission) paying attention to user prompts in aggregate to guide UX work

The first time it happened it was physics. The next several billion years it was the purpose.

Maybe you should be asking that question on 1.3 acres and not here

Exactly. People make this technology with impunity. If they felt repercussions for working with the “bad guys”, it would give them pause before accepting a job with Flock, Andruil, Anthropic, etc.

I ended up dropping my drawing class because I kept getting docked points for my handwriting no matter how much I practiced. I think I was on track for a B or C.

Profit is not a concern for the Chinese

It was also hilarious

Agreed. I’ve switched to local models for many of my simpler workloads because they’re good enough. Coding is still through a frontier model though

The median of its employees’ geographies is China. That’s how it got worse than your average maturing Bay Area company