whatevertrevor

"Smart" accounting by not counting design, planning, procurement timelines would explain it, that makes sense.

If that's the case, it's saddening to see details like this hyped up to borderline fraudulent levels.

> Groq built the region's largest inference cluster in eight days in December 2024. From that Dammam facility, GroqCloud serves "nearly four billion people regionally adjacent to the KSA." This isn't API access. This is critical AI infrastructure for a nation-state, funded by the Public Investment Fund, processing inference workloads at national scale.

Maybe I'm just completely out of touch, and hardware has never been my expertise, but does it take O(days) and not O(years) to build data centers these days? I know Grok DCs in Memphis were built under a year cutting many corners and using plenty loopholes, but even by those standards, bringing up a full data center in just over a week sounds impossible without some insane construction automation to me.

I totally get that, I am ESL too, and I have a similar approach for English-based word games.

And yeah that often results in mild disappointment or frustration instead of an "Aha!" moment. Actual puzzle video games fair better for me at that aspect, as they avoid the inevitable subjectivity of natural language.

I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general.

Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.

In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".

Haha, I know what you mean! Though in fairness, Wyna Liu isn't beyond throwing in a "mostly works" category from time to time...

Wild tangent incoming...

One instance that recently bothered me with an NYT puzzle was the crossword clue (3 letters): "Chromebooks, but not MacBooks". The answer was "PCs" which doesn't make sense to me under any level of categorization for PC.

If we go narrow/historic, then it means x86 IBM PC derivatives which eliminates a lot of chromebooks.

If we use the "home computer" interpretation, then I think it's unreasonable to except Macbooks from the PC umbrella.

If we go literal, well then everything is a PC, including smartphones, tablets, smart devices. The only reasonable test seems to be "Can it play Doom?". :D

Using PC in a "every consumer computing device but Mac" probably made sense in the 80s/90s, now it seems to dilute the term to the point of confusion. I have personally never thought of a Chromebook as a PC, given that it ships with an OS incapable of many things people generally associate with PC activities.

I've played enough NYT connections that this was immediate for me, at the expense of the promised "Aha!" moment. :D

Another +1 comment under it is far more likely to make more people mute the issue if anything. Spamming "google pls fix" just adds to the noise at this point.

Would be hard to get in Canada without provincial health cards, if I had to guess.

I can believe it, if only based on the times I've heard Danielle Smith speak.

Definitely, I don't think official channels recognized aerosolized transmission until way too late, and even when they did it was very low key and non-committal.

I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.

Right, but if memory serves me correctly droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months while the WHO was oscillating like a pendulum on its masking recommendations.

There is so much complexity in interactions of systems that is easy to miss.

Saying that one can understand a modern CPU by understanding how a transistor works is kinda akin to saying you can understand the operation of a country by understanding a human from it. It's a necessary step, probably, but definitely not sufficient.

It also reminds me of a pet peeve in software development where it's tempting to think you understand the system from the unit tests of each component, while all the interesting stuff happens when different components interact with each other in novel ways.

But you see, the destruction of your house is (protecting) nature.

I'm being facetious, and agree with your point. But I'd go further to say protecting nature is too vague a goal so as to not qualify as a reasonable basis to make laws on top of.

That's not to say there's nothing in nature worth protecting. We should strive to make those things explicit (by having the ugly debates they'll undeniably ellicit), instead of having a game of vague moral grandstanding.

I for one think Pandas get too much care and attention. A species too lazy to reproduce doesn't deserve the resources we pour into them. :D

I don't think the general hatred of corporate personhood stems from the logical or taxonomic absurdity of it. Rather, I sense it comes from the perceived effects of it, that in their eyes allow corporations to get away without paying their "fair share".

I think it's an instrument of convenience that has predictably resulted in a lot of legal tech-debt, which is largely inevitable because of how slow we are at adapting laws to our lived realities.

I might be that guy soon. I really don't like Bitwarden's extensions, they have clunky UX, are slow and often don't even respect my settings. Autofill is a crapshoot, especially on Android. And they have performance issues with the Firefox and Chrome(-based) extensions so it's not even platform specific.

I don't know about online forums, but all my IRL friends have a lot more balanced takes on AI than this forum. And honestly it extends beyond this forum to the wider internet. Online, the discourse seems extremely polarized: either it's all a pyramid scheme or stories about how development jobs are already defunct and AI can supervise AI etc.

> Oh, the FIRE community.

I think you may be confused, I'm not part of the FIRE community. I'm only taking the statement that "doing meaningful things is not financially sensible" to its logical conclusion, not endorsing any position.

> If you trained yourself to live looking at the money you need to save to retire, your brain will most likely be wired to that behavior, and breaking free from that will be utterly difficult. On top of that, people with the FIRE mindset have probably by default already a strong (innate? taught?) bias towards enjoying optimizing their life and making it the end goal.

So many assumptions and claims without any supporting evidence:

- "FIRE people" train themselves to live looking at money only.

- This wires their brain to that behaviour (left unclear what this actually means in terms of concrete behaviour).

- Breaking free from this behaviour is difficult.

- People with this mindset have a bias towards enjoying optimizing their life, to the point this is their end goal.

- (Implied) This makes their life some combination of sad/bad/meaningless.

I don't really want to even argue against this because the burden of proof for providing any supporting evidence is yours, not mine. I'm not particularly interested in constructing some overarching psychoanalytic theories for a large category of people who I've never even interacted with, but you do you.

> There's so much in life that makes no financial sense that creates meaning. The moment you start having to think sensibly from a financial perspective, is when so many of these things no longer make sense.

I get the sentiment, but it implies the opposite of your conclusion.

Since so many things make no sense from a financial point of view, the only sensible strategy is to break free of the financial constraints as soon as possible. Money cannot buy you happiness, but it can buy you the freedom to pursue it.

Retire early to give yourself the best cushion (and best possible chance) to pursue meaningful things, without the everlooming sword of making ends meet. The added benefit of life experience to filter out pursuits that only look meaningful on the surface, is a nice side-effect of this strategy.

I am getting better at it, and I am trying. It's the potential framing of this as a character trait worth scoffing at I wanted to push back against. Even though it is a learned skill for a lot of people in practice, and some are genuinely fighting an uphill battle there.

Yup, when the data breach happens the headlines aren't going to be "Random well meaning researchers caught in data breach exposing user data". They're going to be: "5 million Facebook logins hacked in massive data breach", and you'd be hard pressed to find actual information on how the leak happened, just like the gmail story from a few days ago.

That still sounds like assigning blame and a vague call to "change lifestyle", instead of concrete action plans for energy, manufacturing, transportation and agricultural sectors. That is where the bulk of emissions are, not some billionaire's yacht or private jet.

I do this a lot, sorry. My ADHD brain really wants to take an active part in the conversation or else I'm likely to get distracted by my own thoughts and zone out for the next couple sentences. And then make you repeat them anyway, infuriating you in a different way.

Friends and family know this about me (more or less), so they treat it as what it is: an attempt to collaborate to reach a shared understanding.

With strangers and acquaintances, I know this can be irritating so I curb it at the expense of possibly zoning out.

I mention all this to offset the following assumption:

> A lot of people don't have the patience to unspool a thought or the instinct to ask a clarifying question instead of plowing ahead with their mistaken assumption.

It's not for a lack of patience or instinct or intelligence or <insert virtue or character trait of choice here>. Some of us find it genuinely hard to keep lots of context in working memory (due to a working memory deficit), without taking an active part in whatever demands it. And it's not for lack of trying.

Let me add my third way of doing this in vim:

    :%s/<CTRL-R><CTRL-W>/replacement/(gcn)

As you can guess <CTRL-W> invokes a special register that contains the "word" currently under the cursor.

"It would create panic" is a crutch that causes more destruction than it purportedly prevents. If you treat people like children, they behave like children.

There's no one stopping you from engaging in critical thought watching a YouTube video either. And some of the most interesting conversations I've had with my partner about the world and relationships have come after watching a TV show or playing a game together. Screens are just another medium folks.

> That's true for most mass market crap but that's a low bar because it's all just escapism in a different format.

Well one could make the same argument for other sources of media.

As far as SNR goes, I think you're overextended there too. A good science video on YouTube can communicate information through diagrams and animations that only textbooks even try, and animations often work better for me than long winded paragraphs of explaining something.

I think arguing whether one spends time reading a book vs watching a YouTube video is a silly exercise. The more important question is what book/video one is reading/watching.

So from the perspective the GP's point that books have a more than deserved reputation for being a better way to spend your time has some validity imo.

Remove the offending videos from your history, it helps.

I already have limited space for long term memory, bash commands are very far down the list of things I'd want to append to my long term storage.

I use ctrl-R with a fuzzy matching program, and let my terminal remember it for me.

And before it's asked: yes that means I'd have more trouble working in a different/someone else's environment. But as it barely ever happens for me, it's hardly an important enough scenario to optimize for.

To me, it's the opposite. I think the words used are not exactly well-thought-through, but what they seem to want to be saying is they want less bureaucratic overhead, smaller teams responsible for bigger projects and impact.

And wanting that is not automatically a bad thing. The fallacy of linearly scaling man-hour-output applies in both directions, otherwise it's illogical. We can't make fun of claims that 100 people can produce a product 10 times as fast as 10 people, but then turn around and automatically assume that layoffs lead to overburdened employees if the scope doesn't change, because now they'll have to do 10 times as much work.

Now they can, often in practice. But for that claim to hold more evidence is needed about the specifics of who is laid off and what projects have been culled, which we certainly don't seem to have here.

I know, I have one too. It's still energy negative because they're not 100% efficient and you're paying energy to run them in the first place.

Still worth it for better air quality.