kemiller

Short term, I 100% agree, but remains to be seen what "short" means. According to at least some benchmarks, Deepseek is two full orders of magnitude cheaper for comparable performance. Massive. But that opens the door for much more elaborate "architectures" (chain of thought, architect/editor, multiple choice) etc, since it's possible to run it over and over to get better results, so raw speed & latency will still matter.

This only holds water if they are able to retrain frequently, which they haven't demonstrated yet. But if they are as efficient as they seem, then maybe.

I mean, it's good they are doing the right thing here, even if it were only damage control. But doesn't give a lot of confidence they won't harm creators who don't yet have 3b1b's reach.

Is it just me, or is Ruby experiencing a renaissance of sorts? There has been a bunch of positive press, and the community seems more active and vibrant than ever?

This is true, but I look at it differently. It makes it easier to automate the boring or annoying. Gotta throw up an admin interface? Need to write more unit tests? Need a one-off but complicated SQL query? They tend to excel at these things, and it makes me more likely to do them, while keeping my best attention for the things that really need me.

Elixir/erlang/gleam also have the advantage that many libraries are written as servers and so automatically gain the benefits and resilience. Something all these actor frameworks can’t give you.

There is truth to that, but it’s also true that cars simply have way more functionality than they did 20 years ago and it’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing.

There’s a pre/trans fallacy at work in here. We are not returning to the buttons we had before, we are recreating the role of physical buttons in a world where the long tail of controls has somewhere to go. And I’m all for it.

English takes influence from other languages left and right, but there's always someone salty when it goes the other way.

I don't think it's a content issue as much as a comfort issue. Literally everyone I know who bought a VR headset, high-end or low-end, has said more or less the same thing: It's impressive, but it starts to hurt after an hour or so. Hard to get and stay immersed when you're in physical discomfort.

I genuinely wish I liked using emacs.

Yeah, I get that, but it's still not a great experience, and inconsistent. It would be cool to see something that uses iTerm's support for inline images: https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html

Not sure how practical that actually would be, but I can dream.

I miss using a TUI for mail but it looks like they haven’t really solved the most important reason I don’t, which is rendering HTML emails.

Warning, rambling old man story ahead.

I've been a Mac fan since it was released. I was 8. My dad wouldn't let me get one because he disliked them pretty intensely, said you couldn't tell what they were doing and couldn't fix them, and they were overpriced. And I mean, he wasn't wrong. I remember once, probably 1985 or 1986, we were at a computer show where they were raffling off, I think, a Mac 128k or Plus. My dad told me if either of us won we would sell it and get an Amiga. In retrospect that would have been cool, TBH.

The only thing that ever got my attention instead was when NeXT came out. It was just so badass, this ominous black cube with the cool 3d grayscale UI. But even more out of reach financially, so I just hung out at the local university computer base that had a bunch. I think the guys in the store viewed me as a kind of mascot. But TBH NeXT struggled just as hard as Apple and didn't even have their legacy brand equity.

Those of us who suffered through the bad years are still the most loyal, I find, even though they are stagnating, and even though the modern OS and hardware, though unquestionably vastly better in functional terms, are just not quite as interesting and unique.* In the late 90s, when Apple was at its nadir, I had to reluctantly mostly abandon the Mac. I still had one but most of my time was in the unix/Linux/FreeBSD world. So when NeXT reverse-acquired Apple, and the classic look and some of the classic feel of the Mac married the unix foundations of NeXTStep, it was game over, and the first chance I got I convinced my boss to let switch and I've never looked back.

* John Siracusa's excellent explanation of what I mean: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

How’s the stability on Orion lately? I want to use it be plugin compatible was too dicey.

I like your product but find the inability to set it as default very aggravating. Your plugin has improved a lot but it’s still janky. I blame Apple as much as Google. They could choose to align with users but instead they made Safari a profit center with Google’s collusion.

Honestly the big tech tech companies are already captured by their employees. I used to think that would be a good thing but in reality it just means the economic opportunity is limited to a small set of people with highly elite and performative entry criteria. But a gradual path to employee ownership might make sense at smaller companies.

I dunno — if an open source project required, say, a proprietary compiler, that would diminish its open source-ness. But I agree it's not totally comparable, since the weights are not particularly analogous to machine code. We probably need a new term. Open Weights.

Sounds like we need a monitoring station on Mars.

Yeah I’m exactly the same. It’s like I can “visualize” my proprioceptive sense for where things are in space but it’s more like a lidar map.

You don’t have to be hypervigilant. And in particular you don’t have to pay attention to basic lane keeping, which frees your attention to scanning ahead for potential issues. Not sure if or when it’ll ever be truly autonomous but it’s still a huge value as is. Maybe not $12k like they tried for a while, but significant

I think the point is chatgpt as a development partner rather than the core product

The problem is that small organizations cargo cult large organization interviews, when for most small organizations (ones that are not building infrastructure for others) speed of delivery is vastly more important than algorithmic purity. Lots of n^2 and even 2^n algorithms are in fact perfectly reasonable in many contexts.

Even in large organizations, lots of people aren't touching the massively-scaled systems and are in fact just application developers.

Whoa it was still going??

Re: The Expanse. I must have missed that. Maybe that’s the point. People no longer think of a computer as some separate thing that needs to be interacted with.

California is already planning a giant off-river reservoir that will be dependent on pumping to fill. If it could be set up to kick in instead of curtailment it could be a win win.

Yeah. Humans can't count more than ~5 things intuitively; we have to run the "counting algorithm" in our heads. We just learn it so early in life that we don't really think of it as an algorithm. Not surprising at all that LLMs have the same limitation, but fortunately computers are extremely good at running algorithms once instructed to do so.

These types of move are sold as empowering workers but they are really about kicking the ladder so there’s no pathway to the executive class. It’s always hard to find leaders who aren’t empire builders, but this makes it impossible.

Welp, someone at a maritime insurance company is having a bad day.

You can self host, yes, though you’ll probably be inventing a lot of wheels.