iamleppert

There is a specific distribution of names of people that is very hard to fake. Think all the different first names, last names, their spellings and common names. Generating that many realistic fake names that still match the distribution of real names is hard.

What people fail to realize is that 2D works. It's the optimal configuration of information for the human brain. Adding a third dimension, although possible and supported natively by human brain hardware, adds little to no value to almost everything people do with computers.

Where does it add value? Entertainment, but not nearly as much as 2D entertainment. It also takes a lot more processing power to decode the 3D experience. It's why people get fatigued after spending any reasonable amount of time in VR. Some of that is due to the synthetic nature of the experience, but even a theoretical perfect device would require more energy consumption for the brain to decode than an equivalent 2D interface. The experience in 3D might be more intuitive because it borrows from already learned spatial relationships and behaviors from the real world, but long term it's going to take more energy to accomplish the same task in a 3D environment than a 2D one.

For the vast majority of people, what we have now is optimal. It's like trying to train a model when its already converged.

Because many people don't think that murder is a bad thing. If it's done in the name of one's God, or to clear away an existing culture or people to make way for one who has been taught to believe they are superior to others, special, or deserving in some way.

People like to act like this has never happened before, but the fact is it happens all the time throughout history. We like to think we are evolved past that, but we are not and unlikely to ever be at this point. The true nature of man is destructive, selfish, xenophobic and cruel.

After Israel is done with Gaza, we'll create some holiday that has children dressing up as Palestinians for first grade theater. Palestinians will become like Native Americans: scarce and marginalized. Because of the religious, ethnic and racial homogeneity of the Israeli people, its likely to be far worse than what settlers did to the Native population at the time.

Most people just don't care. If more did, it wouldn't be happening in the first place. Or at least those who are in power don't care and see human life as disposable.

Microsoft Vision is so expensive and has a ridiculous rate limit, is slow, and isn't any better than what you can run yourself. You have to make every request over HTTP (with a rate limit), and there is no ability to do bulk jobs. It's also incredibly expensive.

I've tried his advice several times and it's been a complete failure. Splitting up a PR into a bunch of little PR's causes more problems than it solves, and it makes it 10x harder for the reviewer, no matter how much they complain about long PR's. Now they need to suss out some kind of ordering of the PR's, and navigate between multiple change sets for changes that depend on one another. It doesn't matter how well you can isolate the "concerns" a frontend depends on backend API, etc.

You end up creating more work for the reviewer, and most people just simply won't do the work of a proper review. You also don't have the advantage of any CI or tests running across the entire set of changes, so you also have separate CI reports to review. All this adds up for more places for bugs to hide or happen. All the same risks are still there, and you've also added a few more points of failure in the splitting process.

And for what? To end up, most likely merging in one PR after the next, for a feature that should just be all logically grouped together, or just squashing and merging the PR's together anyway.

They offer YouTube views on any video for $50 per 1,000 views as part of the Product Hunt upvote package.

You can easily decide to purchase the views at the time of purchase of the Product Hunt upvote package.

The last time I tried Gemini, is when I was locked out of Claude due to the 5 hour window or whatever. Here's how that went:

Right away I noticed it's about 2-5x as slow. Maybe a good thing? It worked for a few tool uses and edits, then got itself stuck in a loop of adding and remove a function from the same file, before exhausting all of its credits and demanding I upgrade.

I already have the $20.00 a month package and there is nothing equivalent to Claude Max. And, why should I have to upgrade because it exhausted its own credits and couldn't complete the task?

I just put the Chipotle app from "Hold" to "Adopt". Do people really use cringy stuff like this?

It makes me sick when I think how I have wasted my life in tech. If I had it to do over again, I would have done almost anything else. Spending most of your life rotting in front of a screen, knowing what you are doing is only helpful to a small group of people who don't care about you and you will never meet or know, ephemeral, and for what? Eventually as you get older, your "passion" for learning new things just for the sake of learning wanes and you start to see tech for it really is, and all new tech starts to look the same. If you're around long enough you'll be burned and screwed by the aggressive personalities the industry attracts.

I got into tech because I wanted to help make the world better, not worse. I can confidentially say after working in the industry for over 20 years, that it doesn't do that. That's not what it is. It's not what it's ever been about.

Almost everyone I know in tech is not happy, and works non-stop, expected to give their all for a company that could fire them tomorrow for no reason. They have been doing this for years. If anything good comes from AI, maybe it will be a release? A release from the hell of being chained to a laptop screen for most of our lives?

Instead of a large group of low power, easily manipulatable and controllable workforce, you will have traded for a small group of very powerful, wealthy and influential business and tech people who now fully control the production of your labor. I'd be very worried if I was that business, in terms of the control that company would now wield over me.

They could release a software update and disable your entire workforce unless you agreed to pay more money. They could slow your workforce down to prop up a competitor, etc.

At this point, it's obvious and clear that you can outwork these 996 companies by simply requiring employees work 7 days a week in the office.

What is preventing one of these 996 companies from doing that and taking the lead in their respective AI niche? If they really believe that an additional day is their competitive edge, that seems like a really easy moat to overcome for a competitor, and by that logic why stop there? Wouldn't you want to maximize your chances of success by requiring your employees work 7 days in the office?

Just have your employees work a full 7 days in the office. I'm not joking either. Would some CEO who has adopted this practice care to explain why they don't just make things simple and require their employees to report to the office 7 days per week? It's simple and will only select for the most hardcore of the hardcore. I'm actually surprised someone hasn't tried this yet.

16 GB? What a joke!

People could see this coming a mile away. The automakers, whom currently produce the vast majority of vehicles, are tired of financing their competition (Tesla), who for years now has sucked all the air out of the room in the auto industry, despite accounting for a small fraction of vehicle sales overall. The carbon credits are solely responsible for creating Tesla. They created an unfair environment where we have an industry propping up a company that should have never been propped up to begin with. Had it not been for those credits, Tesla would never be able to compete on its own and would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

Electric vehicles have a dubious environmental impact, require special and costly new infrastructure, are inferior economically and do not align with US policy goals around energy.

Look at every business who has tried to adopt Tesla vehicles and you will see only failure followed by trying to unload the vehicles for a huge loss. Tesla cannot or will not produce a decent work truck, and are grossly disconnected with the needs of the average American (self driving, robots and other such bric-a-brac need not apply).

For those that want to purchase these vehicles, they should remain an option, albeit a minor one. The technology (still quite inferior) needs to stand on its own, not be propped up by the public, the vast majority of us do not want an electric vehicle and will never want one.

This is always the straw man A/B testing people reach for. When in reality, this only works on the worst possible designs or bizarre layouts, that no one really uses. It's a myth that you can somehow ring out extra few % by making tiny changes to fonts and colors -- in every case, they simply stop the experiment when the results tip in their favor.

The ONLY time I've ever seen it used successfully was to make changes to the layout of ads, making them look like more organic content or likely to be accidentally clicked. You can see this at work if you've ever clicked on an ad by mistake, or maybe you were trying to close the ad and noticed someone has "optimized" the close button placement using one of these A/B tools.

There it is, that's the market for these tools. That represents the vast majority of the these companies use-cases, revenue and usage. Anyone else who implies an innocent intent is either ignorant or inexperienced.

The problem with A/B testing, and anyone who has ever done it at scale can tell you, beyond the banal basic stuff that people are already aware of like making things accessible and discoverable, once you get to a certain point, people just have no opinion. The default opinion is no opinion.

It's why every mass consumer product devolves into a feed or a list of content delivered by an algorithm. Once you reach a certain point, you come full circle and even that doesn't matter anymore: users will happily consume whatever you give them, within reason.

A/B testing platforms are mostly used by an odd collection of marketers and "data driven" people who love to run experiments and drag out every little change in the name of optimization. In the end, it all completely doesn't matter and doesn't tell you anything more than just talking to an average user will.

But, boy, are they sure a great way to look busy and dress up an underperforming product!

The headlines are going to write themselves. What could go wrong with putting a group of startup people together, who never worked at a big corporate company together? The task isn't to "create superintelligence" (whatever that is), it's to fluff Zuckerberg's ego.

And the fact they are hiring these researchers, it's the same logic as hiring Einstein and asking him to "discover" a new theory for you. Science, thank god, doesn't care about money or who you are.

“I don’t think they have a VEP at Meta by the way,” Cicconi said.

This was said in response to having a month sabbatical at Facebook after 5 years. The Google exec seems to think having a "voluntary buyout" program is good enough and makes them competitive.

At this point, what is the purpose of Google hosting these town halls? It's a waste of time, just send the employees an email with whatever updated policies have been decided and dispense with the pleasantries.

It's obvious and clear that Google's end game is to completely replace the creator, and auto-generate all their videos. How far off we are from this, no one knows, probably not that far. Google likely already has all the data they need, it's now just about how long it will take to develop the AI.

Many satellite cameras have line scan sensors or push broom sensors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_broom_scanner) and make their image as they move in their orbit.

It's not as easy as "nudging, cajoling and creating incentives for major customers to diversify their supply chains and use Intel capacity". Changing out process tech isn't like changing the tires on your car for another brand. It requires, in many cases, a substantial redesign....and directly working with Intel.

Why would a company support two different chip designs, for the luxury of deployment on an inferior technology platform, coupled to a troubled company that has a history of not being able to keep up or consistently deliver the latest process tech? It's a substantial, long-term investment that has wide reaching implications on the performance of your own products you are building. Who pays for that and sets up their company for failure like that?

If you build on Intel, you are making a decision that exempts you from competing in the top of market for your products. Your designs will run hotter, consume more energy, have less yield, and lower clock. The design will be more complex and costly and have very little shared between other vendors. You'll need to maintain and inventory two different BOMs for a critical component, and you'll likely have subtle hardware differences or completely missing features that will require further software customization, creating even more complexity and headache to delivering a modern tech product. Hardware designs are hard enough as it is and companies don't have infinite resources or capacity. And don't count on Intel taking the lead from one of the others, giving your product a boost -- anticipate them further falling behind, or lagging behind at best.

Like always, the government doesn't understand any of this and the outcome of this latest missive is going to be completely predictable.

$150k for the current client deal, but I've had projects as high as $300k converting their offerings to plain Kubernetes and Serverless.

Just finished ripping out Databricks at one of my clients, and have several more queued up. Folks can't wait to get as far away as they can, and as fast as they can from any of their offerings. Poor performance, bad product, bad UX: hard to get even decent logs out of the damn thing, and it's incredibly overpriced.

They told a good story and had a good sales team, but the writing is on the wall for them.

It's also not a super profitable term, either. I'm already running Qwen3 coder on my laptop locally and I don't need any AI service. Just like that, the financial ambitions of AI have been snuffed out.

Not everything that seems "interesting" is worth it to learn from an economic perspective. Could it be worthwhile for someone studying for the A+ Computer Technician test? Maybe. Could it be worth it for someone looking to impress their boss Harry? Possibly, if Harry also controls your pay and has a penchant for overpaying for locally run infrastructure and a distrust of the cloud. Possibly. These kinds of investments are based evaluated at the individual level --- not everyone will benefit. Some may find themselves no more competitive in the job market as your average IT clown, but as always, results will vary.

Taking away user choice is often done in the name of simplicity. But let's not forget that given 100 users, 60 are likely to answer with "no opinion" when asked what about their preference to ANY question. Does that mean the other 40% aren't valuable and their preferences not impactful to the other "we don't care" majority?

You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless. Compare this to someone like Jensen, a nerd's nerd who gets up on stage with the latest GPU, can talk about new CUDA API's and goes deep on specs like memory bandwidth. He knows exactly who his customer is, and what kinds of workloads they run for AI.

It's just such a massive difference. You can tell Lip-Bu spends his weekends playing golf while Jensen is checking out the latest model from Huggingface.

You can't buy passion or genuine interest in what you're doing.

I do backups of the production database whenever I apply even modest schema updates. This isn't a story of an AI tool gone rouge, it's a story of bad devops and procedures. It it wasn't the AI, it could have just as well been a human error and operating like this is a ticking time bomb.

The working genes they insert are just into the cell envelope itself, not into the cell nucleus. There are actually a lot of DNA that is free floating around in the cell, and are used during protein synthesis, called episome or non-integrated DNA. This is distinct from the DNA inside the nucleus, which gets copied from generation to generation.

There are techniques that work on modifying nuclear DNA but from my understanding it's much harder (like using CRISPR) and has a lot more risks for things like causing cancer due to off-site editing.

The scales that this technology works is mind-boggling. 10^12 to 10^14 per kg of body weight of individual viral particles that all must do the same thing, and work correctly at scale. Even a few errors could cause serious problems.

I had hemophilia gene therapy. It worked for a period of time but the results were not permanent. The problem with many of the gene therapies is that they do not change the nuclear DNA, they just insert copies of working genes into the cell. If a cell dies, it’s gone. The results aren’t carried through to new cells during division.

The other problem is with viral vector based gene therapy is you can’t have it again. You develop antibodies which prevent it from working again, and it could cause a dangerous immune response.

Then there’s the cost. My single treatment cost $3 million as part of a clinical trial, and lasted about 3 years. Normally, it costs about $1 million a year for my normal factor product, which I had to go back on. So I guess it was a wash and it was nice to be free of the medication for a few years. But it’s definitely not perfect and has its own limitations.

I wish them luck, but I highly doubt they have been on a real job site, or have actually operated a heavy.