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hermitShell

192 karma · joined January 6, 2025

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hermitShell··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
It sounds like your regulatory environment has properly incentivized infrastructure.

Where I live in Canada, it's extremely unclear whether anyone is making their ROI on solar installations.

hermitShell··on Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available
Does anyone know of some good scripts or workflows to install Ubuntu (because it 'just works' e.g. comes with a lot of drivers) and then scale back to a Debian-like experience?

I've had issues starting with Debian because it doesn't ship with broad support for wifi hardware, and internet over USB to iphone hotspot also didn't work. The only option was to get wired ethernet to bring up wifi.

hermitShell··on Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case
Didn't Spotify also start by streaming a whole bunch of pirated music?
hermitShell··on Meta VR Glasses
I am also very glad for Meta's investment into the future, so second your voice here. In a sense though it's Palmer Luckey who punched the tech into a defensible product. John Carmack surely tried to do the right thing, but I think part of why he left is that it's too difficult for any individual to make significant (risky) design decisions.

Do I have faith in Meta to 'win' in VR or AR commercially? Well... not really, but the technological advancements are real.

hermitShell··on The Claude Delusion
The AI generated character is a weighted average of many characters written by humans.

Which are not created from nothing. People write characters based on a combination of other fictional characters, real characters, and perhaps some 'RNG'.

Seems the distinction is that the AI generated character can not have any direct bearing on reality, because the LLM never got to know anyone directly. Not derived directly from experiences rooted in reality.

hermitShell··on Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA
It's ARM.
hermitShell··on Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA
I fail to see how they will take a significant market share or even break even on this venture.

It's an overcrowded market. Far better would be to focus on semiconductor supply chain, which Japan already supplies some elements, to sell to fabs.

Because the bottleneck is the fabs. If a new 2 nm fab came online today, it would immediately sell all its capacity to 2030 no problem, without Fujitsu trying this gambit.

It's not 'sovereign', the architecture is not designed in Japan, the silicon is not fabbed in Japan. This whole thing is sideways.

hermitShell··on Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA
You have to load the model weights into VRAM over PCI-E (from RAM). So the (PCI-E) bandwidth strongly affects time to first token.

You have to run inference on the GPU by reading and writing to VRAM. So TFLOPS of the compute matters, and bandwidth to the VRAM (Always integrated with the GPU, rarely a bottleneck), and this strongly affects tokens/s

If you're doing training workloads or offloading to system RAM, it gets more complicated. (And mostly bound up trying to feed compute on time)

(Edits for clarity.)

hermitShell··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
People sometimes call EU the sleeping giant. Big potential compared to the actual results.

I'm more aware of what Canadian government does with its tax dollars. And I'm just assuming that the EU is similarly quite expensive for what it achieves, and the budgets only change in one direction.

hermitShell··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
There are deeper structural problems when you look at the incentives inherent to government driven society.

While I do appreciate and even support the idea that the immense wealth available on planet earth should be more evenly distributed, and people should mostly be focused on raising families, deepening their philosophy, and perfecting their craft... (some societies in Europe are pretty laid back in terms of hyper-productivity culture)

Regulation is possible without paralyzing industry. Laws about the internet are possible without stifling freedom. Central planning is possible without crashing the economy so bad you end up with a regime change. It all comes down to execution and for the most part, it's been a series of failed experiments.

As much as I want a happy future for Canadians and Europeans, I just don't see the odds being super favourable.

hermitShell··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
Manny comments I agree with - it's a mistake, it's a reason to leave the distro...

I'd like to point out that Ubuntu/Canonical is now seemingly philosophically separate from the origins of GNU and Linux. If you're curious, read "Hackers" by Stephen Levy. They've lost the plot, so to speak, about the core spirit of open software and hardware, which is what gave the projects life in the first place. A philosophical understanding and unity between many, many top notch independent developers.

Another note is how AI contributions to such libraries and programs is going to have an unknown effect on quality. It's almost like there's a business case to rip all the good FOSS written by humans out of the hands of github and apt, and curate all the best source code to ensure it remains in circulation, and extant copies are available that are not washed out by loose standards WRT AI contribs. Or if not a business case, perhaps a reasonable reaction and a good personal vendetta.

hermitShell··on Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama
> "until the context rot and sampling problem is fixed forever"

I agree, prompt adherence seems to get worse when operating on large inputs. Does anyone have some notion of the SOTA with this? Can we expect big improvements by this time next year? (hopefully in open weights)

hermitShell··on Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama
Your hardware can do way more than 64k tokens context window, can't it? And with Ollama it's very easy, superficially you just drag the slider.

I'm now reading "Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama" linked in another comment so a lot of problems with that approach are surfacing for me right now.

So yeah. Along with others, I think you should come up with some empirical means of understanding if your preprompt is doing anything good since I doubt that it's all necessary and helpful. Second maybe you and I need to fix our runtimes.

hermitShell··on How to Write an Effective Software Design Document
This is good guidance, but what do you have to say about convincing your team of developers to live it out?

I've found that developers usually like writing code and avoid contributing to documentation. For some, it's actually scary because (edit: for them,) high quality writing is harder than high quality coding, and it can be avoided quite a bit.

On the project side, it's rare for the implementation and verification stages to not consume all the budget and more, and delivery creeping past the original optimistic date. So there's no time or money to spend on documentation.

The combination is that even with your great advice in hand, it's hard to navigate to really solid and comprehensive design documentation underpinning the products.

hermitShell··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
It will happen eventually, especially with AI generated books published electronically. I wonder if there is a cutoff date or something to try and avoid this problem of low effort books.
hermitShell··on I have a theory that software drives people insane
If you've not read Fred Brooks MMM, give it a shot.

It seems like you're implying that teams of 60-80 developers should be expected to outperform teams of 12. This is simply not true. The most important feature of source code as a language is that it allows precise mindshare among close knit teams. It doesn't guarantee it, but it makes it possible for people to talk about the product at a level that is otherwise very difficult.

A convenient side-effect of the source code is that it instructs the machine what to do. But instructing the machine was never the bottleneck, the essential difficulty of software development is in understanding what are the correct instructions to achieve some objective, not typing them out.

The problem is that communication doesn't scale at all. Having just 3 developers with good alignment about mental models, best practices, and design direction is hard enough, and if you found the right three people at the right time with the right ideas, you could generate billions of dollars of value.

Large monolithic teams on the order of 80 are a product of people in control not understanding how software development works, and how to make it work well.

hermitShell··on Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills
As a user of local models, does this mean that there are 'magic incantations' that can increase the performance of some local models?

I see some details about recovering information via whatever technique. It's interesting, but appears not generalized.

So for a specific question, yes, but this is not about techniques like adding a good embedding that just generally tends to improve open model performance on certain tasks.

hermitShell··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
When I look at the technology and capability of frontier models for ideation, brainstorming, and research, or when I look at the open source community and open weight models, and running local LLM's... I'm convinced that this is a technology revolution the size of the internet.

When I look at businesses trying to turn this research and technology into profit, I think that this is a bubble that will burst. You are not alone, I am very doubtful of the current concoction of AI features being offered. The true winners and legitimate applications will emerge over the next 30 years. Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft could all become IBM, Xerox, and Kodak. Or maybe they find a way to pivot. Because truly, there is an amazing amount of nonsense BS in the AI hype train.

Acknowledging the outside chance that recursive self-improvement works and we just scale directly into a Kardashev 1 civilization within my children's lifetime, and K-2 in theirs'. Can't rule it out no matter how hard I try.

hermitShell··on IBM Bob
honestly that would still probably mean more than story points. maybe all this AI insanity has an upside that the new cargo cult washes out the old one.
hermitShell··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans. The problem is further compounded by the fact that searching and accessing the internet will be noticed by AI agents that will generate still more swamp content in response.

Unfortunately, it seems that this fiction ended up being prophetic. The open internet will fall to entropy, not legislation or one-sided international trade agreements. I think we need more projects like Anna's Archive, where the public uses torrents and distributed infrastructure to save and organize the world's information. Google has abjectly failed in its original mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

hermitShell··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
America is headed towards techno zaibatsu economy. Just a product of the dynamics of capital and power. Too much cash, Nvidia is forced to try and find ways to deploy excess capital very quickly. Most efficient way is to absorb players in emerging industries, bet on the potential for growth in new markets to help keep ROI up. It is a great day for startups, the goal is to sell out and get rich, no? INB4 China comes in and dismantles the American zaibatsus in 2245 like America did to Japan in 1945.
hermitShell··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
I tend to agree, but the Semianalysis + Dwarkesh side of reporting still does surface interesting information. You just have to take it all with a grain of salt, as indeed it is more hype focused, and look for real information hidden in the noise. And possibly to be a bit more entertained as you do so.
hermitShell··on Nvidia's Risky Business
It seems they had a head start but are now facing stiff competition on all fronts. Software moat, GPU's for gaming, and its distant cousin datacenter compute. They rightfully invested their insane profits into many ventures, and how many of those have turned around into profit?

They are also a robotics AI company with Omniverse. They are also an AI company with Nemotron. They are also a bleeding edge network equipment company after the Mellanox aquisition.

They stand to make a lot of money if they succeed in every venture. Good for Jensen taking risks and driving innovation, I hope they succeed in chewing even 50% of what they bit off.

hermitShell··on What if useful AI is a fantasy?
I take your point, statistically we're already there. Unless humanity was to bootstrap its own biological intelligence to be consistently higher, there's little point in any individual attempting to safeguard the tech stack to first principles. Accept AI or don't accept AI, history tells us that if it works, people will move to the higher abstraction layer.

I can imagine an organization that devotes itself to preservation of the history of technology... like monastic groups that copied texts endlessly. In a post-scarcity world, that would be a sensible outcome... people are free to devote themselves to art or science or debauchery as they please...

hermitShell··on Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
That is a truly terrifying future to imagine. Fortunately I would hazard to guess the medical technology to accomplish something like this is very, very far away. Not only because of the raw technological challenge, but also the barriers to development that scientists, doctors, and engineers would face before even being allowed to conduct experiments.

I do agree though the humanoid form is a dead end for robots. Just build giant cubes that process inputs and give outputs, like a dishwasher. Why wash dishes with meat wand tentacles or try to recreate meat wand tentacles when you can accomplish the job in a wholly different way with far greater efficiency...?

Where's the clothes foldeing cube? Analogous to the clothes washer and clothes dryer.... the clothes folder...

Why stop at dishwashing...? Sell an entire integrated robotic kitchen.

hermitShell··on A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands
Would you be able to recommend any articles or videos that do a deeper more honest analysis than the current media hype cycle?
hermitShell··on What if useful AI is a fantasy?
Do you think this necessarily sends us as a society (as a species) towards a future where we eventually stop understanding technology and science itself?

Like in Asimov's Foundation or Liu Cixin's 'Taking Care of God'.

Maybe we need two tiers of technology. Human in the loop up to the point of AI, and then the AI layer which depends on the human stack.

hermitShell··on What if useful AI is a fantasy?
The author of the article mainly talks about agentic programming, code generation, and reasoning. Ans very rightly identifies a big problem with agentic programming, in my experience. If developers can't maintain the software without AI, it's doubtful they can steer AI to maintain it either. Maybe this is not true and we can tell AI something like 'reduce the number of lines of code' until the essential software is exposed and pared down to a quantity and modularity that humans can then participate.

No doubt, most of the value creation is outside of creating software. But if Nvidia and Anthropic do succeed in making better hardware and better software, then the positive reinforcement loop does seem like it could take off. And coding is a big part of that.

Maybe we don't need to understand the code at all? Hard to fathom.

hermitShell··on Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7
You might find this interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43636230
hermitShell··on A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review
I've been using dual NVIDIA GPU's with Ollama. Even when I push to 30b models and more context window, Ollama manages RAM / VRAM very well. I never got OOM errors, just massive slowdown as the PCI-E bottleneck throttles the GPU's. I've had some large prompts take 30 minutes to process.

But I should mention: I am trying to implement workflows and processes akin to CI/CD that run 24/7 in the background. These are not interactive use cases, so I don't care so much about tokens per second.

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