lucaspiller

Google did the same bullshit on Android.

With Google Assistant (old assistant) I could say "Hey Google, play daft punk" and it would start playing Daft Punk on Spotify.

With Gemini (new assistant) it says "sorry I cannot play music, but here are links to services where you can find Daft Punk albums".

Fortunately at the moment you can still toggle between them. I guess not for long though.

This breaks down when someone goes on holiday to Greece for a week, and the RTT over the airbnb wifi is 5 seconds.

Optimistic updates on the frontend are probably simpler too.

The best box cutter is the Moby Safety Knife. I used it when I was working in a supermarket 20 years ago, and I haven't found anything even remotely comparable.

The short blade on top is perfect for breaking the tape to open the box without damaging the contents. Then the mouth can be used for quickly breaking down boxes or cutting shrink wrap. You are just cutting tape, so the blade never wears out.

I cringe every time I see someone using a Stanley knife in a supermarket.

https://www.safeknife.com/

I think it's more a consequence of pushing for the biggest valuation/IPO. Rumoured profits on inference are north of 70%.

Taking SpaceX as an example, they have increased prices across all their consumer products over the past six months. But they definitely aren't short on money with Alphabet and Anthropic combined paying them over $2 billion per month.

Microsoft/GitHub lost out here as they were just repacking other people's products.

Reolink has always been like that, but at least they aren't a random no-name brand that could disappear at any minute.

Don't forget the fan controllers to try to make it silent and the neon lights. I still have that machine at my parents house, used it a couple of years ago to rip all my teenage CDs to digital formats.

Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".

My agent has access to my email, my messages, my work, my finances, my life. But thank god it doesn't have access to root on my machine.

> we like all the dopamine hijacking garbage

I basically don't use Facebook any more because of this. Opening the app shows me the most sensationalist, fearmongering and outrage bait content they can find. It's worse than news channels (I haven't watched TV for 20 years). I have auto play turned off, and every few months the setting gets turned back on.

The first few posts I see scrolling through:

- US adds mandatory tips ahead of world cup.

- Woman dies after being hit by Audi in city center.

- There was a huge queue for women's toilets at a tech conference.

- 50% off mattresses.

- Some influencer I don't follow bought 20 rolls of 3M tape from Lidl.

Do I still have friends, do they still post stuff? I only see them in the reels/stories section at the top.

The only reason why I still have Facebook is because of groups. It's the main 'groups' tool people use in my country, so there are various local groups I am part of.

This also perfectly describes the career change from software engineer to engineering manager.

Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.

Better to outsource, then if something goes wrong, the execs don't have to take the blame themselves.

There are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.

If training robots doesn't pan out, they could always pivot and use the data to train AI to control humans instead. Some industries such as Amazon warehouse pickers and drivers are effectively already this.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

This is why they are pushing more for non-tech folks to use their products with desktop apps. They are not going to switch on a whim.

You mean a team of humans who are labelling datasets?

I run some numbers, how much would it cost to build MaltaGPT - sovereign hosted ChatGPT.

Malta has a population of 500k. Let's assume 100k people use MaltaGPT daily, and they send an average of 10 messages per day, so roughly 1M messages per day. That averages 694 per minute, but at peak could be 3-5x that, so let's say 3000 per minute. Usage will of course vary by day of week and time of day (they could partner with a Pacific island and share inference hardware).

Those 3000 messages per minute translate to 50 messages per second. Let's say average prompt input is 5k tokens, and output is 500. So 250k tokens per second for prompt processing (let's ignore caching for simplicity) and 25k tokens per second for output decode.

If we take a 500B dense model, that concerts to roughly 1 trillion flops per token. So we need 250 petaflops per second of prompt processing and 25 petaflops for output decode. So 275 PFLOPS in compute.

That may sound like a lot, however a NVIDIA DGX B200 machine (8xB200) has a compute of 144 PFLOPS at FP4. That is assuming 100% efficiency which isn't really possible, and we also need to factor in memory usage which we would be limited more by than compute. So let's say we'd need 10 of them. For an entire country to have a sovereign version of ChatGPT.

The cloud cost to rent one machine is around $50/hour, so that would mean our cluster comes to $4.8m per year. However the list price of a machine is around €400k, so the price to buy the cluster outright would be around €5m (you need the rest of the data center too), with operating costs of around €500k per year.

So per citizen: €10 upfront and €1 per year.

Is there any progress being made on cars so they are less susceptible to rust? In my country that's the main reason why vehicles are scrapped, engines can be repaired easily enough, but when various suspension parts are corroded and need replacing it's not worth fixing anymore.

As I understand one of the reasons against using materials like stainless steel or other alloys for cars is that is is harder to work with, but most new cars today are written off - rather than being repaired - after even minor accidents, so that doesn't really seem like it's a realistic concern.

I'm in the early phases of working on a game that explores that.

The backstory is that in the late 2050s when AI has its hands in everything, humans loose trust of it. There are a few high profile incidents - based on AI decisions -, which cause public opinion to change, and an initiative is brought in to ensure important systems run hardware and software that can be trusted and human reviewed.

A 16bit CPU architecture - with no pipelining, speculative execution etc is chosen, as it's powerful enough to run such systems, but also simple enough that a human can fully understand the hardware and software.

The goal is to make a near-future space exploration MMO. My Macbook Pro can simulate 3000 CPU cores simultaneously, and I have a lot of fun ideas for it. The irony is that I'm using LLMs to build it :D

SEEKING FREELANCER | REMOTE (North America or Europe) or ONSITE (San Francisco) | Electron Expert

We sell digital signage, and a host of related products, that create interactive retail experiences. This is powered by a small stick, that you plug into the back of any TV. That stick is Intel hardware, which runs Linux, various Docker containers, and the main UI for our service, through Electron.

The software that runs on it hasn't really been touched for a few years, and we are running into issues. The main issue is video decoding, where we cannot get hardware acceleration to work in Electron. For 1080p we've been able to ignore it, but we want to support 4K now, where things don't work without video acceleration.

We are looking for someone who is an expert with Electron + Linux + dealing with driver issues between them. If things go well, there will be more work down the line (and if you want, a full time position).

If you fit the bill, but are located elsewhere, please still get in touch. These locations are preferred, as it'll make shipping hardware for testing to you easier, but for the right candidate we can make an exception.

Email me to apply: luca@blissfulsystems.com

Is there a good alternative available in the EU? Anthropic announced it was available in the EU last month, but it seems now that they've changed their mind.

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-ai-locations

SEEKING WORK | EU or UK | Remote or potentially on-site

With over a decade of experience as a versatile full-stack software engineer, I bring a wealth of expertise gained working with small to medium-sized startups. Recently I've build a team based in Eastern Europe for a US startup, being responsible for the A-Z of hiring and management.

If you're an early-stage founder looking to establish a stellar development team, or an already established entity seeking an additional pair of skilled hands to propel your features forward, I'm here to help. I'm particularly passionate about collaborating with bootstrapped and non-VC funded companies. Let's build something extraordinary together!

Key areas of expertise: Retail, point of sale, payments, ecommerce

Tech stack: TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, Serverless, React, Ruby on Rails

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucaspiller/

Email: luca@blissfulsystems.com

I haven't seen any of OPs comments, but I remember when Checkly (also in this space) first launched the founder of that was posting a lot here and on Reddit.

I wouldn't say their comments were that helpful or insightful - mainly just advertising. Now they've raised ~$10m. It's spam, but it works ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

That's the wholesale price paid to producers. Consumers are paying around 23c/kWh, however that (as with most European countries) has been subsided by the government - the real price should be higher.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-raise-regulated-...

It's probably worth noting why cars are finally scrapped. It's usually not because of problems with the engine, but other issues that EVs also have. Rust (in Northern Europe this is a big thing), crash damage, generate state of disrepair. Of course EVs will remove some issues meaning the lifetime of cars may extend a little, but it's not going to increase it significantly.

Actually fingerprinting is pretty reliable:

https://amiunique.org/fingerprint

I saw a similar technique posted here a few weeks ago [0]. This guy is even worse, as his blog sounds like the typical "five simple steps to loose 200lbs, only $99 a month!" (and he does actually charge $99 a month for coaching). I have a really high bullshit radar, so at first I was just "nope this is nonsense", but I saw past that (as it was mentioned here) and started reading more, and I'm starting to believe there is some truth to it.

The basic premise is that opticians often over prescribe glasses. I've had this personally, an optician prescribed me glasses that were 0.75 dipole too strong for computer use, as the way they test (unless you ask otherwise) is for long distance vision (i.e. driving), not for 50cm in front of your eyes.

The theory is that your eye muscles become lazy as they don't need to work so hard, and you get used to that, so you need glasses to see clearly. If you look at distance text that is ever so slightly out of focus, eventually your vision system will figure out how to correct for that blur, and you will be able to see in focus. If you rinse and repeat, changing ever few months to a slightly weaker prescription (e.g. a reduction of 0.25) you can greatly reduce the strength of glasses you need.

I've only just started, but there are other comments on HN about people who have done this.

[0] https://endmyopia.org/how-to-finding-active-focus/

For anyone thinking to simply host assets in S3 (i.e. skip the Cloudfront part), please do not. I'm not sure if it's my ISP throttling it, or the routing, but from where I am in Europe, accessing a file from an S3 bucket in us-east often results in speeds less than 100kbit/s. The same files served from Cloudfront will saturate my connection (gigabit).

In reality: Even if in a few hundred years we have the capability to travel at FTL to other solar systems, we will still be using GMT as "ship's time".

On Linux you can do the same with ddccontrol. I wrote an article last year explaining how I have my monitor automatically dim at night, in combination with Redshift:

https://www.stackednotion.com/blog/2019/05/07/automatically-...

HTTP clients in programming languages are not as smart as web browsers when it comes to verifying SSL certificate chains. For example, if the chain presented by the server is missing intermediate certificates, modern web browsers are able to fetch those intermediate certificates without issue. Most HTTP clients do not do that though, and instead will throw a cryptic error, something along the lines of "unable to get local issuer certificate". This is known as a 'incomplete chain' error.

Earlier this year I added SSL verification to a website uptime monitoring service I run (https://www.watchsumo.com/docs/ssl-tls-monitoring) and it wasn't anywhere near as simple as I thought it would be. There's so many edge cases regarding verification, and languages usually don't expose the full errors in exceptions, then you have errors like this which only affect a subset of clients.