pyrophane

Yeah, this is something I am thinking a lot about. Companies won't be able to sustain this level of spending forever, and one of two things will need to happen:

1. Models become commodities and immensely cheaper to operate for inference as a result of some future innovation. This would presumably be very bad for the handful of companies who have invested that $1T and want to recoup that, but great for those of us who love cheap inference.

2. #1 doesn't happen and the model providers start begin to feel empowered to pass the true cost of training + inference down to the model consumer. We start paying thousands of dollars per month for model usage and the price gate blocks out most people from reaping the benefits of bleeding-edge AI, instead being locked into cheaper models that are just there to extract cash by selling them things.

Personally I'm leaning toward #1. Future models near as good as the absolute best will get far cheaper to train, and new techniques and specialized inference chips will make them much cheaper to use. It isn't hard for me to imagine another Deepseek moment in the not-so-distant future. Perhaps Anthropic is thinking the same thing given the rumors that they are rumored to be pushing toward an IPO as early as this year.

Maybe. I don't think we yet have a good understanding of how many deaths he will have caused as a result of DOGE so abruptly cutting off assistance to so many vulnerable people around the world, but I've heard estimates hover around 600,000.

Assuming that number turns out to be close to reality, how do you weigh so many unnecessary deaths against VTL rockets and the electric cars?

Perhaps a practitioner of Effective Altruism could better answer that question.

I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to install Windows 11.

Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?

All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.

Honestly my real fear is ICE agents at polling places on Election Day harassing would-be voters with citizenship checks and aggressive behavior, slowing things down and maybe causing some people to leave.

Regarding voter data though, if it becomes known that registering to vote as a minority will get you extra scrutiny from ICE, and perhaps a visit to your home, that would probably cause some citizens avoid voting altogether, especially if they are associated with people who are not her legally.

Either way, the federal government really has no right to that data or legitimate use for it, so hopefully they don't manage to get their hands on it.

My first thought was of the adventure game Loom.

> I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol.

You didn’t find that to be a little too much unfamiliarity? With the couple of projects that I’ve worked on that were developed using an “agent first” approach I found that if I added too many new things at once it would put me in a difficult space where I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what the agent was doing, and when it seemed to go off the rails I would have to do a bunch of research to figure out how to steer it.

Now, none of that was bad, because I learned a lot, and I think it is a great way to familiarize oneself with a new stack, but if I want to move really fast, I still pick mostly familiar stuff.

Wondering if anyone here has a good answer to this:

what protection does user data typically have during legal discovery in a civil suit like this where the defendant is a service provider but relevant evidence is likely present in user data?

Does a judge have to weigh a users' expectation of privacy against the request? Do terms of service come into play here (who actually owns the data? what privacy guarantees does the company make?).

I'm assuming in this case that the request itself isn't overly broad and seems like a legitimate use of the discovery process.

So Nvidia is giving OpenAI money so OpenAI can buy more Nvidia GPUs?

One thing I’m looking for in all of this is how trump will get a piece of this deal.

Can anyone recommend an alternative that doesn't train on user data?

Glad you posted this as I remember hearing about this situation some years ago but couldn't remember where.

I was active in history and civics events in high school and I remember going to DC for a civics competition, and Justice David Souter spoke at it.

I was a teenager at the time, it was the 90s, and I don't think I took much of anything too seriously, but I remember being kind of in awe of him. He talked about the importance of civic education which to this day that remains one of my core beliefs as an American.

A lot has changed for the worse since then, and it feels like we've only gotten further from the idea that the purpose of education is, more than anything else, to teach us to be better citizens and participants in our democracy.

I really enjoyed The Wager by David Grann about this story. Grann was also the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, which was made into the movie of the same name by Martin Scorsese, and Scorsese is now making The Wager into a film, although I don't think they've even settled on a release year yet.

I'm an American. I struggle almost every day with what feels like a betrayal of our republic by so many voters and leaders, and none of the explanations for why it has happened, even when taken together, are wholly satisfying.

It has shaken my faith in democracy, but at the same time, there's nothing else, so I have no choice but to try to fight for it in what ways I can.

In case you are unaware, this shares a name with the audiobook seller Libro.fm.

When I had one, I found the ergonomics to be particularly bad because of how small the screen was. It was noticeably worse for my neck.

I loved the portability. It was so light and small that I could carry it with me almost without thinking about it. If your use case is to be "plugged in" to an external monitor most of the time, but you need the ability to pop open a laptop for brief periods while on the go, then I think this size is a good fit. If, on the other hand, you regularly engage in extended laptop use sessions away from a home or office, I would prefer something larger in spite of the inferior luggability. The 11-in is, in my opinion, too small for the "regularly work from a coffee shop" set.

I had one for a while. Usually I would have IntelliJ, a terminal, and a browser all fullscreen and I'd 3-finger swipe between them. It worked reasonably well.

I believe the above is just referring to diversity of engines. If 99% of everyone uses Chromium then there’s no incentive to support open standards that work across all browsers.

Oh, wow, the SpaceX team inside the FAA actually pushed to have the contract, already awarded to Verizon, canceled and given instead to Starlink.

No attempt whatever there to avoid the obvious conflict of interest.

In home economics though, you are cooking real food, right?

A lot of people were conditioned to rely on food delivery when it was cheap. Pre-pandemic, restaurant food was much less expensive, delivery apps had low or no fees, and the options for tipping were much lower.

Now, of course, restaurant prices have skyrocketed, apps all charge significant fees and the tip expectation is around 20% (and don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is to base tipping on food cost when none of the tip goes to anyone involved preparing the food and a 10lb bag of mashed potatoes is cheaper than a 1/2 oz container of caviar).

But people now expect their meals to be brought to their door and have a lot of resistance to going out to get it or, god forbid, preparing it for themselves.

I really want to like the more recent devices from Boox. The display tech is just about there with their "Super Refresh." It works well enough for most apps where you are scrolling. Problem is that the software is pretty buggy and can become randomly unresponsive to touch input, which can be pretty frustrating. This has been true on the Tab Ultra, the Tab Mini C, and the Palma 2.

Still, Boox tablets are the closest to what I've been looking for: an eInk device with enough flexibility that I can read more than just books on it.

I believe that is the previous generation. Their naming is confusing.

I know that there is the saying that goes something like “a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich,” but at least there is an acknowledgment there that being publically accused of a crime can come with a pretty high cost to the accused, and that is worth some process.

I served in a grand jury in NY and it was overall a pretty positive experience. Yes, the standard is lower and at times it can feel like a rubber stamp, but we did refuse to indict in two cases where we decided the DA failed to get us to “more likely than not.”

Note that these tools don't work if you have laminated side windows, which many cars now do!

What has been your workout routine?

One thing that it seems we are just starting to talk about with these drugs is the associated muscle and bone density loss. I'm concerned that this generation of GLP-1 early adopters will wind up more frail and suffer a lower quality of life in old age as a result.

This is Facebook/Meta we are talking about though. Not every new advancement, but it is entirely fair to treat them with a whole lot of skepticism.

Another thing that has happened is that there are a lot of hotels are operating as migration shelters. I've heard something like 15% of hotel rooms aren't on the market for that reason, and those rooms would have skewed toward the more affordable end of the spectrum.

Also, regarding rents not going down. According to the MNS report for Manhattan [1], non-doorman studios are down ~1.2% from last year, and non-doorman one-bedrooms are up only ~.6%. Those are exactly the types of units that were commonly being set up as full-time Airbnbs. Also, Airbnbs were especially concentrated in neighborhoods that did see large drops in rents, like EV and Soho, so maybe it did have an impact.

1. https://www.mns.com/manhattan_rental_market_report

Perhaps, but isn't the Suez Canal the only reasonable way to ship bulk goods between Europe and Asia? Doesn't China depend heavily on access to the European markets that these attacks disrupt? I would think that that would outweigh their other interests here.