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ip26on Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

Before LLMs, the use of parallelism on your typical laptop was limited to application level parallelism, e.g. one thread for Outlook and one for each tab in Chrome.

ip26on What makes you senior

And what if no junior under a certain senior ever makes it past junior?

Any mentor type figure is going to be at least partially evaluated by progress of the mentees against some benchmark.

ip26on Baumol's Cost Disease

It’s not like their wages will always go up exactly in proportion to your income. Goods and services that are afflicted will become less accessible if your own wages increase at a lower rate.

ip26on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle

If someone generates a ten thousand word slop essay with AI, do I have a moral obligation to critique its reasoning step by step instead of merely pointing out its origin?

If I do, it just so happens I have a ten thousand word rebuttal for you…

ip26on The past was not that cute

Not sure there's much market for quality plywood furniture. It's neither cheap nor fancy, just functional, which as a market segment has vanished. The price of today's plywood also seems to have closed a lot of the gap with hardwood - it's often actually a superior material depending on project.

ip26on The past was not that cute

My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble, small tables were a months pay.

I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.

ip26on 210 IQ Is Not Enough

Bent over, as in reading, for long periods of time? (Admittedly it’s been a while)

ip26on 210 IQ Is Not Enough

Not sure it is, so I assume a lot of stretching of the truth is involved. Most twelve month olds struggle to support their head, are just learning to shape their mouths to form syllables, and have only had eyes capable of resolving letters on a page for a few months. IQ won’t make blurry images sharp, or your neck muscles stronger.

ip26on DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

I imagine data centers make the best economic sense when they can run full tilt 24/7. You’ll double your payoff time if you can only run work when the sun shines.

ip26on My Git history was a mess of 'update' and 'fix' – so I made AI clean it up

Using a library keeps the context window smaller than writing it all yourself. I also suspect the whole vibe-coding thing works best when most of the total running code is NOT vibe-coded, and follows carefully defined behavior the fast-and-loose parts can build on top of.

Otherwise, why bother to run your vibe-coded website on nginx? Just have the LLM spit out its own novel web server, its own novel TCP stack, its own novel OS for that matter.

ip26on My Git history was a mess of 'update' and 'fix' – so I made AI clean it up

Counterpoint: LLMs seem to depend on robust, stable, and easy to use libraries nearly as much as we do. Due to context limitations, vibe-coding a mega-monolithic project in one shot with zero dependencies would be a silly exercise. Therefore, there is still a use for sharing code, even if plenty of it is agentic.

ip26on Metabolic and cellular differences between sedentary and active individuals

I assume “daily tasks” has been defined before. Taking the trash to the curb or walking from bedroom to kitchen, daily task. Saving your client from drowning in dangerous rapids after they capsized, not daily task.

ip26on The great decoupling of labor and capital

Indeed, competition is highly inefficient. It would be superior to eliminate it. (Signed, The Bourgeoisie)

ip26on Public Montessori programs strengthen learning outcomes at lower costs: study

Intervening when they are merely far behind their ability!? Sounds like imposing adult anxieties onto the natural development path of a child!

ip26on Harnessing America's heat pump moment

gets to -30f where I live (about once every 10 years)

For this specific problem, I'm always inclined to just keep a 1800W space heater or two in the closet.

ip26on Harnessing America's heat pump moment

Some heat pumps bottom out at 35F, some at -15F. It seems to be down to the breed of heat pump, and there isn't much in between.

ip26on Harnessing America's heat pump moment

the aux heat comes in because their output is a multiplier. At 30F, perhaps they produce 4x the heat as the electricity put in. At 0F, perhaps they produce 1.8x the heat. This means the output declines with temperature, until eventually they don't produce enough heat to hold temperature. Enter aux heat.

Cold weather heat pumps help because they stay above 1x for longer, but you also wind up needing to oversize a bit.

ip26on Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

Hypothetically, AI coding could completely absorb all that surface level iteration & posturing.

If agentic coding of good quality becomes too cheap to meter, all that is left are the deep problems.

ip26on Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

If writing a good document and a strong API had to happen anyway, and now you can write just that and the rest will take care of itself, we may actually have progressed. Plus the documents would then have to be there, instead of skipped like today.

The counter-argument is that code is the only way to concisely and unambiguously express how everything should work.

ip26on Apple M5 chip

The sales volumes of the 1TB+ models has got to be fairly low, which makes this fascinating. Since they are being somewhat quiet about it (rather than trumpeting "the 1TB+ models are even faster!") it suggests the P-cores don't yield well enough to support 4 P-cores in the 256GB and 512GB SKUs.

ip26on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice

I mean to ask both: "checking whether X is true and crashing the program if not", like the assert macro, OR assert as in a weaker check that does not crash the program (such as generate a log event).

When crashing the program is acceptable and correctness preconditions can be efficiently checked, postconditions usually can be too.

What's interesting to me is the combination of two claims: formal verification is used when crashes are not acceptable, and crashing when formal assumptions are violated is therefore not acceptable. This makes sense on the surface - but the program is only proven crashproof when the formal assumptions hold. That is all formal verification proves.

ip26on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice

Nowhere does the article claim that:

   "formal verification of the code" -> "high integrity system"

Formal verification is simply a method of ensuring your code behaves how you intend.

Now, if you want to formally verify your program can tolerate any number of bits flip on any variables at any moment(s) in time, it will happily test this for you. Unfortunately, assuming presently known software methods, this is an unmeetable specification :)

ip26on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice

This becomes an interesting conversation then. First of all, it could mean "checking whether X is true and logging an error" instead of exiting the program.

- But if you aren't comfortable crashing the program if the assumptions are violated, then what is your formal verification worth? Not much, because the formal verification only holds if the assumptions hold, and you are indicating you don't believe they will hold.

- True, some are infeasible to check. In that case, you could then check them weakly or indirectly. For example, check if the first two indices of the input array are not sorted. You could also check them infrequently. Better to partially check your assumptions than not check at all.

ip26on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice

Is asserting the assumptions during code execution not standard practice for formally verified code?

ip26on Indefinite Backpack Travel

Away from home, I quickly find myself lamenting all the time I spend washing all my dishes, cookware, and laundry. Nothing is ever completely dry, and if you are tent camping you spend 30 minutes striking and 30 minutes pitching every day.

I enjoy the outdoors but it’s also a great reminder of how much I love my dishwashing machine. Repairing it might take a few hours every few years, but it saves far more time on net.

ip26on New California law restricts HOA fines to $100 per violation

Correct. Owners protested any time raising dues was proposed, and so the old board did not raise dues by any meaningful amount for a few decades while costs rose and the exteriors aged. Unfortunately, while this was clearly a mistake in retrospect, the milk was already spilt.

ip26on New California law restricts HOA fines to $100 per violation

Have you ever lived in a townhome or condo? I feel the need to note that those HOA are responsible for the maintenance, repair, and upkeep of everything outside the drywall. Owner overfills dumpster? HOA is fined by sanitation. Owner dumps water on sidewalk, water freezes, neighbor slips and falls? HOA may be liable. You might celebrate, because “down with the HOA!” but when the roof needs to be replaced, it’s paid for by the HOA bank account. If that’s empty, either the roof is left to leak or you are paying a special assessment.

I’m a bit biased, I’ll admit, as I once served on such an HOA that was near the brink of insolvency and wrestling with owners who would dodge their share of funding basic maintenance for years at a time.

Most of the ire, perhaps, is really directed at single-family HOAs, however.

ip26on We bought the whole GPU, so we're damn well going to use the whole GPU

Yeah restructuring for autovectorization with otherwise equivalent results would be a great example and step

ip26on We bought the whole GPU, so we're damn well going to use the whole GPU

Optimizing for the hardware you are on is demonstrably an effort and skill issue. Everyone understands that with enough time and engineers, any piece of software could be optimized better. If only we had large volumes of inexpensive "intelligence" to throw at the problem.

This is one of my back-of-mind hopes for AI. Enlist computers as our allies in making computer software faster. Imagine if you could hand a computer brain your code, and ask it to just make the program faster. It becomes a form of RL problem, where the criteria are 1) a functionally equivalent program 2) that is faster.

ip26on Why friction is necessary for growth

The Internet is funded almost entirely by an ad machine, but has a few knock-on benefits people have grown rather fond of.