mgh95

That's good. I generally think these kinds of tools (lsp, analyzers, etc.) should be based upon CLI tools. I'll be more open to when either projects seeking to integrate rust utilize tools such as buck or these tools can be more easily integrated into make/cmake based projects.

There is a lot of legacy code out there and I generally feel like many of the rust advocates forget how important it is to play well with legacy project setups.

Unfortunately, that is the way rust set up their toolchain. In many ways, and for most if not all ecosystems, I do agree with you.

> But with more advanced optimizers the gradient is not really used directly. It gets per weight normalization, fudged with momentum, clipped, etc.

Why would these things be "fudging"? Vanishing gradients (see the initial batch norm paper) are a real thing, and ensuring that the relative magnitudes are in some sense "smooth" between layers allows for an easier optimization problem.

> So really, how important is computing the exact gradient using calculus, vs just knowing the general direction to step? Would that be cheaper to calculate than full derivatives?

Very. In high dimensional space, small steps can move you extremely far from a proper solution. See adversarial examples.

Large parts of tooling dependent on cargo; for examples, lsp, analyzer, etc.

Once you take out cargo, rusts development environment becomes quite poor.

The bigger question is if you have a model that is "good enough" that is open source if there is a market for APIs delivering said models that able to justify the funding.

As someone who generally prefers not to use python in a production context (I think it's excellent for one-off scripts or cron jobs that require more features then what bash provides), I agree with this sentiment. I recently wrote some python (using uv) and found it to be pleasant and well-integrated with a variety of LSPs.

> if they refunded every penny we put into (with interest) it’d go well. these should be called entitlements as much you going to grocery story to buy food for your family is an entitlement

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that the government will collect tax revenues necessary to even keep up with some of these mandatory programs, such as social security. The reality is there is a very serious chance many people do not receive the fully stated benefit value.

** SPOILER **

> You lean back, exhausted but triumphant.

> Dana is dead.

Thank you for a good laugh.

When a currency strengthens against another as the Euro did from the aught until now it weakens that markets export

That's why a strong euro is a porblem

Reply, since I cant edit: even the commentators agrees it's looking increasingly necessary to weaken the euro: https://archive.is/biCxs

Its fixed at that proportion by the index cboe. The dixie weakening is indistinguishable from the euro strengthening

The dixie is weighted heavily towards the Euro (~58% weight). The euro is enough to move the index independently of other movers.

It's substantial for the eurozone economy, namely their exporters. The machinery sector in particular is under major pressure as a result of the stronger euro.

Sure, but I think we are seeing the US's future more in France at the moment than a secular decline against all other developed nations. There are very real questions about how society is structured that need to be resolved, but the US is far from alone or the worst in that regard.

> I don't see any evidence that EUR is particularly strong against USD. Except maybe if you take a very short-term perspective.

Yes; this is a short term perspective. Europe is functionally an export market and these currency fluctuations hurt badly. For example, Mercedes-Benz had a consolidated profit margin in '22 of around 9%. These swings do either force loss of jobs (bad) or require a devaluation of the currency.4

> I'm not sure why your hand-picked list of currencies is revelant, or why your particular dates are relevant. The course for the future looks to be a greater devaluation of the US currency.

What other currencies do you believe are important? We pulled 2-5 of the most commonly used reserve currencies and some other ones as well.

No, ordinarily tariffs result in currency appreciation (see https://www.wto.org/english/blogs_e/ce_ralph_ossa_e/blog_ro_... for an accessible discussion).

But yes: weaking the dollar was the goal, but the US did not achieve that to the degree of something like the Plaza accords.

In October of last year, people were betting on Trumps election leading to tariffs leading to a stronger dollar. This trend continued post-election pre-inaguration. Since the tariffs did not materialize to the level expected, the dollar weakened to its levels prior to his election.

The EUR is unusually strong, in part due to fiscal tightness by ECB (see their balance sheet L2 Liabilities here https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/annual-reports-financial-sta...) compared to the US. This is having a knock-on effect that the EUR strengthens against the dollar, which actually causes a whole host of problems for an export economy.

It's why you see Lagarde calling for a reserve EUR; it's the only way to export EUR at this point. But that's a topic for another time.

Exactly what people are saying here (the USD is weakening at an alarming pace! Americans are going Weimar Republic!) isn't borne out in the data. We aren't seeing the USD weaken against other countries in an independent manner. That's the point; not to prove that we are seeing a stalwart dollar, but that we are seeing roughly "business as usual".

That operates on calendar year. That is primarily due to the rapid appreciation of the USD vs global based after Trumps election on the perception that tariffs would be far higher and more continuous than they actually were.

The truth is, the currency markets are roughly where they were about a year ago, with the exception of EUR, but thats a special case which I think is a symbol if a misstep by the ECB.

> The value of the dollar has already plummeted, 10% or so this year.

Compared to what? From Nov 3, 2024: the USD against:

GBP (3)%

JPY (1.7)%

EUR (6.7)%

INR 4.6%

AUD 1.3%

CAD .74%

RMB .4%

The EUR (if that is what you are going by) is unusually strong, and that's actually starting to cause issues. But the dollar isn't "collapsing".

> Catching up for how long though? Large models are expensive to train and the money has to come from somewhere, and for now that somewhere is the charity of ostensibly for-profit companies which release their models for free and just eat the losses. That doesn't seem very sustainable to me.

Catching up enough to execute a business successfully on the open source (and free as in free beer) alternatives to OpenAI. Once you have a single model that works, you can bootstrap your own internal ML infra for just that one use case and grow from there.

I did it for my own startup. Messed up the whole "how do we break down what constitutes a tenant" thing in the initial design at 0 customers. Made me really feel the whole "experience is reading your own code from 5 years ago and wondering what idiot wrote that" thing.

Worked out OK in the end, but took substantial effort to fix.

I really like this post. The only caveat I would add is it is possible to change your data model, but it requires constant and sustained high-effort work. It can pay off in spades, and it's always preferable to get it right.

There is a new facility coming online from MP Materials (see https://fortworthreport.org/mp-materials-awarded-58-5-millio...) later this year that serves dual purpose customers (GM and the US gov)

> And you know all this because of your deep study, in the original language of course, of the CPC, their internal factions, and the collected writings in their leading policy journals, I assume, yes?

Perhaps not original language, but per Qiushi, the CPCs theoretical journal on their ideology, an official[translation of a speech by Xi Xinping](https://en.qstheory.cn/2025-07/28/c_1110292.htm):

> Marxist ideas and theories are wide-ranging and profound and maintain relevance through constant study. In the new era, we Chinese Communists still need to study Karl Marx, study and practice Marxism, and continually draw on its powerful knowledge and theories. In this way, we will uphold and develop Chinese socialism in the new era with more resolve, confidence and wisdom. It will support the coordinated advance of the Five-sphere Integrated Plan and the Four-pronged Comprehensive Strategy and ensure that we always stay the course towards national rejuvenation as we break the waves and sail ahead.

If it says its a duck...

> You can call it Economic nationalism all you want, but these are similar principles that were applied in authoritarian states like in Fascist/Nazi times.

Simply because economic nationalism is a characteristic of authoritarian state and has been a characteristic of fascist (Italian fascism, especially) and Nazis does not imply economic nationalism is intrinsically authoritarian fascist.

America for much of its history was protectionist. Europe remains a bloc intended to protect local industries characteristic of national identity, for example the rejection of Mercosur by the French. India seeks to grow its domestic titans and shut out foreign firms while purchasing abroad through activities such as the ArcelorMittal acquisition.

Economic nationalism is very much its own independent theme.

> I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say oracle to postgres) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.

The bigger problem is that there was never a way to move data between oracle->postgres in pure data form (i.e. point pgsql at your oracle folder and it "just works"). Migration is always a pain, and thus there is a substantial degree of stickiness, due to the cost of moving databases both in terms of risk and effort.

In contrast, vendors [1] are literally offering third party LLMS (such as claude) in addition to their own and offering one-click switching. This means users can try and if they desire switch with little friction.

[1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2025/09/introducing-claude-age...

The US is currently an AC grid. HVDC is not currently in any meaningful use in North America (yet)