linuxhansl

Tangential...

One of the reasons I went with Android over an iPhone. If F-Droid stops working I am done with Android.

Off-topic and somewhat of a rant, but I'd far prefer us all focusing on open standards like HIP, SYCL, OpenCL, etc.

It's unbearable that most LLM inference happens on closed H/W, closed drivers, and closed SDKs.

Will all these data centers really be needed in 5 or 10 years from now?

The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.

Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.

Never heard of A/I and I have no idea what they are about, but rather than a government communication this statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling.

I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.

> The United States Postal Service has spent months developing a U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal to provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states.

Why? Your job is to transfer pieces of mail from one place to another. Just continue that. Everything else is manufacturing a problem where there was none.

Edit: Spelling.

> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company

What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.

Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.

I am hanging on! At home I only use Firefox. At work, unfortunately, I need Chrome for a few things that do not work well with Firefox (most Google products), but for everything else I use Firefox.

IMHO, that Firefox can only really stay free if it is supported by donations (i.e. people like us who use it). Anything else will lead to various things that either push people away or make less free - probably both.

After 35 years in the industry in various capacities (from architect, engineer, VP, and different products, small and large companies, ...) I can heartily confirm this.

A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least).

I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software.

If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.

I feel so left behind with Linux machine on x86.

It's rather interesting that Apple (and Arm) are blazing the trail while Intel is seemingly left in the dust. Maybe not entirely on raw performance, but definitely on performance per watt.

We knew about this all since the 1980's. Carl Sagan testified before congress in 1985 [1]. That's over 40 years ago.

Yet, we continue to burn more and fossil fuels; solar, wind, EVs, etc, non-withstanding. And right now some governments are actively spending money to work against renewable energy.

At this point I am afraid that we humans will only act when the alternative is unaffordable, when the forest is already on fire. I hope by that time it won't be too late.

Those of us who have been saying this all along won't even get the hollow satisfaction of an "I told you so!", because we'll be too busy surviving.

Vote, drive less (combustion engines), fly less, use public transportation, check your utility mix (and demand a larger renewable fraction), install solar, lobby, buy more local (where possible), consume less, support those with jobs displaced by renewables, accept some loss on your fossil stocks, ...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI

I think it's more a mix of anxiety, frustration, and exploration.

Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.

Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?

Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.

The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.

While there are things less than ideal in the US, this is absolutely not the case.

The "Rule of Law" applies to everybody, including the President (recent decisions of the supreme court not withstanding - though they are very unfortunate). You have provisions for the freedom of press, freedom of speech, to be free from unreasonable searches, a reliable court system, etc, etc.

Searches at the border are murky legal territory, and I think that there is a problem here. You may also argue that the president and senate have too much power, or that gerrymandering is a serious problem (which it is). But from these you cannot conclude a general lawlessness.

(I'm from North-Western Europe, living in the US for a few decades now, so I feel that I have at least some data to compare.)

You are still missing my point. It does not matter - at all - whether an idea has "value as an invention". All that matter is whether it cost a lot of money to come to that invention and whether that cost is worth is worth protection to encourage further research.

As a physics layman I find it fascinating how quantum mechanics are tied to information theory.

For example, take quantum decoherence (which, IMHO, is the most logical explanation for the collapse of the wave-function - by saying it does not actually collapse). Quantum decoherence is almost like a giant constraint resolution system - once a particle randomly interacts with another they become entangled and both now have fewer degrees of freedom. When it interacts with many particles, like any macro-effect it has essentially no degrees of freedom anymore. It's all about who knew about what and when. The experiments around this fascinating. (Note that there are other theories, like the many-worlds interpretation, that also explain the collapse of the wave function)

This seems to be another example of this. Anyway, as I said, just a layman.

Darn, originally from northern Europe, I have always enjoyed sardines. I was wondering why they are suddenly harder to get.

I can't believe a weight-loss fad is going to take "my" sardines from the shelves.

Also, why only sardines? Any fatty fish will serve the same purpose. I guess a fad is a fad.

Alas, that only ensures that you cannot be sued for the disclosed invention. You cannot use it to counter-sue and reach a settlement.

I do not like it one bit, but that does seem to be state of the software world right now.

Yes. And that was exactly my point. If an idea is just an idea that anyone can have under the shower, there is no value to society in granting a monopoly to that idea. There was no cost to said idea. In that case is better for society to grant a monopoly on a particular expression of that idea (an implementation).

If that idea had cost (say) a billion dollars (like in some medical research or physical research), there absolutely is value in granting a temporary monopoly in order to encourage such research in the future.

It feels more like an arms-race to me. Where I work we patent stuff for defensive purposes only, so we have something when we get sued (and we have been). Maybe that's just another boogieman, but it seems unless everybody stops nobody can.

Having my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is "not obvious to someone skilled in the art" and that actually protects a monetary investment.

Software patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research; simply having an idea is not costly (but it makes in medical research for example). All that software patents do is creating a minefield that hinders competition.

For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.

Sorry for the rant.

Edit: Spelling

Disclaimer: I use AI at work and for some projects at home and find it really useful (as long as you know when and how to use it)

With that said... It's funny how we went from "vibe coding" to review burden, sloppy contributions, copyright issues, unclear ownership (as in: who will fix bugs), needlessly verbose code, etc, etc. Several projects have banned AI contributions now and counting.

As I said, I use AI to help architect and write code and really like it; still, I cannot even count the times anymore where the model (we use multiple of the frontier ones) has completely gone down the primrose path. I always make sure I make it my code, every line is reviewed and understood, maybe I rewrite the AI output here and there, I understand the tests and testing strategy, etc, etc.

So I wonder where this is all going. We are past "vibe" coding already, and so far monetization of AI has been "patchy". On top of that local AI is becoming more and more viable.

I'm honestly surprised he held on for so long.

Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.

I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.

While I agree on some level, this not a great comparison.

A compiler/linker/etc is an algorithmic, precise, verifiable, repeatable, debuggable, etc, etc, process.

Using an LLM is an inherently stochastic process. It can is very, very helpful, but I think we are arriving at the realization that "vibe coding" wasn't the best idea - unless you are doing a PoC or demo.

In any case, neither absolve you from understanding in detail what is going on.

Maybe we'll get there, and we can fully trust what the LLM produces, but it seems we are not quite there, yet. Until then we'll have to understand everything the LLM produces and that's what the author is getting at.

I almost feel that we have a new generation of the "script-kiddie". People without much (or any?) knowledge of software engineering using outside tooling to do "stuff" they wouldn't be able to do themselves.

Maybe it's a not a perfect analogy - in this case the intentions seemed to be laudable - but we will see much more of this, including from malicious actors.

Yes... And, perhaps the political comments here are a reasonable reaction to the misguided political influence that shaped grok.

How can we trust grok after this? At least it will take a while.

I need a model that can answer questions in an unbiased way and do what it is told. If I need a specific political opinion I can find that myself - thank you very much.

Not much one can do I fear...

Install f-droid and all kinds of 3rd part apps now.

Install GrapheneOS. (I'm guilty of not having that done that,yet :( )

Sign the petition (https://keepandroidopen.org/).

What Google is doing is shameful. One of the promises of Android was being more open than the restrictive Apple ecosystem.

Now that they reached penetration they do the switch - under the guise of security.

Just let me do with my hardware what I want to do it. Let it be my responsibility to install whatever I want (and stop calling it "side-loading", as if I am doing something shady from the "side").

We need to resist this! Alas, from the broader response it seems that most people just do not care.

How qwen3.6:27b compare to qwen3.6:35b-a3b (MoE) in your experience (if you tried). I find the dense models are way too slow on my H/W.

I soooo wish that to be true. Alas, in my experience it is not... Yet.

What is true is that it gets easier and faster to run local models. With QAT (quantization aware training), turboquant (or similar) K/V compression; what used to be impossible to run is now fairly easy.

I can run gemma4:26b-a4b-qat on my laptop with 20-30 tokens/s with a 256k context window. That was unthinkable just 6 months ago.

So the local models are "OK" for small'ish projects.

But it does not at all(!) compare to the frontier models. For a large project Claude's Opus 4.6+ just work, whereas local gemma tangles itself up, makes weird mistakes, and just can't handle it (for those cases it is faster if I do it myself).

If the trends continues, with 1.58bit QAT models, even better K/V compression, faster multi-token prediction et al, maybe soon it will be comparable.

This is really awesome. I tried my test-task (generate a Python wrapper for a fairly complex C-interface) with gemma4:26b-a4b-it-qat. And for the first time it would just do it, without prodding and without errors. (Of course Claude just did it a heartbeat, too.)

My optimal local setup now is gemmma4-qat and Q8_0 K/V cache quantization with 256k context windows. And that runs fine with 12GB VRAM and another 10GB in RAM.

Previously I tried with gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M and qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M, and they both would tie themselves into knots (especially qwen3.6 can take forever with incessant "but wait..." thinking loops.) More often than not, they would not finish the task.

It seems true these 4b QAT models are as precise as Q8_0 quantization (which is supposedly indistinguishable from bf16).

I am really excited about the prospect of local LLM inference.

Thank god some sanity prevails.

Adding these to the index immediately would force passive index funds (multiple trillions of $) to buy this stock, and thus not allow the market to make performance based decisions.

It's truly a shame that the NASDAQ caved and I will definitely reduce my position in such index funds (I have less trust in it now).