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zacharyozer

286 karma · joined October 1, 2008

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/zozer; my proof: https://keybase.io/zozer/sigs/IdRD5GlkVdXIEa-PJDj3fcgcK3HHbCYOnnT_5jrYCBw ]
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zacharyozer··on Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+
> Earlier this year, Atallah described OpenRouter as the AI equivalent of Stripe.

Not sure I understand how this is strategically aligned for Stripe but certainly an interesting comparison.

zacharyozer··on A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs
> According to Dangel, it costs $2,600 to run Anthropic’s LLM Opus 4.6 through RULER 128, a test developed by Nvidia to assess a model’s ability to retrieve information from large data sets. And SubQ? “It cost us eight dollars,” he says.

> SubQ does seem to be able to handle a lot of text at once. The model has a context window (roughly akin to a working memory) up to 12 million tokens long. Most top models today have context windows one million tokens long. In a demo that Whedon ran for me, he asked SubQ to perform a task that required it to reason about information contained in 400 documents. It responded in seconds. When he gave Perplexity—a popular LLM-powered search engine—the same task, it failed to load all 400 documents.

zacharyozer··on Zulip 12.0 Released
Congrats on the release, and love the write up!

I’m increasingly thankful Zulip exists as an open source alternative to other collaborative platforms. In the age of agents, it feels like a huge advantage that folks can take a robust platform as a base and customize it to their needs (and hopefully contribute back)!

Also, thanks for sharing about your experiences with agent-based contributions, both internally and externally. Super fascinating.

Be well!

zacharyozer··on A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
Interesting baseline of how much AI can help with the profitability of a business:

> By the end of last year, Medvi had reached $401 million in annual sales and amassed 250,000 customers. It produced 16.2 percent in net profit, or $65 million, with spending going to the fees for telehealth platforms, marketing and then software. Hims, by contrast, had a net profit of 5.5 percent last year.

zacharyozer··on Every President Tries It. It Never Works
> Manufacturing job share has been dwindling in nearly all middle- and high-income countries. By one analysis, China lost more than 30 million of those jobs from 2011 to 2020, more than twice as many as the number of jobs that exist in the entire U.S. manufacturing sector. Yet total employment continued to grow, meaning the relative share of jobs in manufacturing fell even more sharply than the numbers alone would indicate.

> Manufacturing output, meanwhile, has risen, because workers now produce far more per hour using better and more sophisticated equipment. Today a given number of autoworkers can make, according to my calculations, three times as many cars in a year as they could 50 years ago.

> The problem is that consumers do not want three times as many cars. Even as people get richer, they increase their spending on manufactured goods only modestly, preferring instead to spend more on services like travel, health care and dining out. There are only so many cars a family can own, but that’s not the case for expensive vacations or fancy meals. As a result we have fewer people working in auto factories and more people working in luxury resorts and the like.

zacharyozer··on Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller
Congrats Steve! I haven't touched video since I was at JW Player a million years ago, but I always inspired by the simplicity of video.js (especially the theming).

Hope this new iteration is exceptionally successful.

zacharyozer··on A Word to the Wise: Don't Trust A.I. To File Your Taxes
Co-Author of TaxCalcBench here.

The advice is correct: don’t use AI to file your taxes!

But what the article misses is that the uplift we’ve seen across models is incredible. Don’t be surprised if next year the headline reads “A.I. newest trick: Filing your taxes”.

zacharyozer··on [dead]
Customers who book through Chase Travel will no longer receive 1.5 times as many points for Reserve accounts and 1.25 times as many points for Preferred accounts.
zacharyozer··on Anthropic Claude 3.5 can create icalendar files, so I did this
I did this last year with my kids various activities using ChatGPT and the results were just OK. I'm looking forward to trying this out with Claude this year!
zacharyozer··on Ask HN: Why are people paying so much for Vercel?
I just migrated our app from Vercel to AWS Amplify.

We’re updating everything to use SSO so we can do BeyondCorp-style auth on SaaS platforms. Vercel wanted to charge >$10k / year to get on their enterprise plan for SAML access, vs bill prior to that was ~$2.5k / year. The migration took ~30 mins and we expect our bill to drop to $500 / year. the toughest part was making sure we didn’t miss any build variables / secrets.

Is this as cheap as running base metal? No. But 30 mins to save $10k / year was worth it. And maybe the bigger point: what value are they really adding if it’s this easy to migrate off?

zacharyozer··on Inventions that came from Waterloo
I think the list I wanted / expected was, “10 things we’re really proud were invented at Waterloo (that you may or may not realize were invented here)”
zacharyozer··on WireGuard: Great protocol, but skip the Mac app
Had exactly the same experience. Definitely annoying, but more that anything else, I’m impressed that Rachel was able to turn it into cogent blog post.
zacharyozer··on Amazon S3 Batch Operations
Batch delete, batch delete, wherefore art thou batch delete?
zacharyozer··on MIT Career Development Handbook [pdf]
I used this extensively when I was a student (MIT '07). I sort of assumed all schools did something like this. I still reference the action verbs (page 31) when updating my resume.
zacharyozer··on SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
Having used Google Maps in a professional context for quite some time, I certainly welcome the competition. Their data is the gold standard, but their Enterprise licensing team is difficult to deal with. One example: We were sold a license that we were subsequently told was inadequate. We were then forced to use a 3rd party broker to negotiate a new deal, and even then the terms were unclear. Also strange because you get 75% discounts at each pricing tier, so we ended up in a tier that gave us "lots of room to grow".
zacharyozer··on Tap your iPhone to unlock your Mac
Does it log you out when you walk away?