3,104 karma · joined June 10, 2021
Like just a few years ago it became impossible to run 32bit windows which effectively killed all OS software updates for hardware older than ~2005. Most application software followed.
On the Linux they just dropped support for the 486 and older versions of the kernel will likely still get security updates for a while.
Fortunately this kind of refactor is a lot easier nowadays with LLMs, but the QA is not improved and often what takes the longest.
You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.
Half of the point of an stdlib is that it is a single shared lib so you don't run into the all-too-common problem of having multiple versions of the same lib in your program. Either you bundle all the stdlib multiple times OR you need to rely heavily on complex dead-code-removal which increases startup time (and still have a lot of duplicated binary blob from different versions peer dependencies).
This is why stdlibs almost never _actually_ remove stuff or make breaking changes, because that would make existing programs not compile on the new version of the compiler. This is why in Java you can still call Date methods that resemble the ones present in Javascript (.getYear(), .getMonth(), etc). They were deprecated in JDK1.1 (1997) and still available, today. The alternative is to go through a python3 moment at some point.
Semver the stdlib makes it not that much better than using 3rd party packages.
But to be honest I doubt most people who use AI for PR descriptions even bother changing anything.
I was very lucky to be able to be engaged in that sort of environment, but at least 50% of my class was not.
It is unfortunate but it has a weird side-effect, the system really promotes ambitious people and endurance. Most of my "top-tier" uni class was middle class, the rich kids couldn't/wouldn't keep up. But that 50% of my high-school class really get the shaft in that system, but the ones that survived it were highly regarded in the job market by the degree alone.
I think you can create git plugins to show diffs in different formats for certain file-types (or even open a 3rd party tool to let you visualize it), but it is a lot of work. Most productivity tools don't have anything of the sort.
If you just care about storing the file git LFS + manual text-changelog per binary file works well, but it is annoying to get everyone on your team to work in this workflow (heck, getting everyone and all automation scripts to install LFS is already a pain).
When the LLM can verify its own output by running static analysis they produce better results. They also seem to understand type definitions and avoid going to the source which, in theory, should reduce context size.
I have had to do a last-minute fix on a build because a developer added emojis to success messages
a fire emoji
on software for handling industrial machinery that can explode
our QA department was not happy about that let me say that...
I remember the days where I had to manually put the Spring .jar files into my project. No way I am doing that for 100s of dependencies.
I fully expect I will be switching every couple of years to a new one. And even if I don't, they will be very different then than they are today.
Before I would waste so much time engaging on video games / internet-browsing / TV-youtube / etc and just not enjoying the time I spent. It felt very meaningless, like why even bother working? I have (had) savings to go take several years of sabbatical if I wanted.
When I actually boot up a video game today I actually enjoy it. And that is all on top of normal stuff you hear about having kids.
My grandparents came to Brazil right after WW1 way before the Nazis came to power. High ranking Nazis fled to south america because there were a lot of germans living there already. Nearly all german people who moved to south america did it way before WW2.
I just run into this stuff a lot living in Europe.
1) +95% of the population live on the coast very far away from the Amazon. Most of the population has not been there. Most of the coast has a very different jungle biome called Mata Atlantica and the countryside close to the coast is not that different from temperate forest of Europe. That is what most all Brazilians are used to. There is a significant population in the arid northeast though and the cold south as well (which is even more similar to europe).
2) Manaus is the biggest city in the Amazon and it is huge developed place (and has been for decades). You are not in the middle of the jungle if you land in the airport. The countryside around the city is jungle though.
3) Brazilian people do not necessarily like or are used to tacos and spicy food. Mexico is _really_ far away from Brazil.
But on some other stuff I tend to agree, their sofas are pretty bad in my opinion. The beds are okay, but even the non-cheap ones aren't "great".
I think raw flops per watt come mostly from fab process, not architecture. This was my original point, fab process is not getting better at a linear (much less exponential) scale anymore.
GPUs have been getting physically bigger with huge heatsinks and fans to support those bigger dies power consumption. Just compare the TDPs:
2020 RTX 3090: 350W
2022 RTX 4090: 450W
2025 RTX 5090: 575W
Bigger dies means lower capex of course, but the similar opex (maybe slightly lower as there is less physical hardware to maintain).
I seen some specialized hardware like google's TPUs. Not sure how they compare on performance per watt with GPUs though. Regardless the manufacturing processes are still the same (EUV) which is the thing that hasn't been improving. A fully optimized specialized hardware can at most deliver a single-time linear improvement (that could be very significant, for example 30% is still huge of course) and then little compared to normal GPUs.
I don't think renewable power generation is going to massively reduce costs for data centers, especially considering power transmission hasn't meaningfully reduced in cost. If anything the only thing that I think will have significant impact for data centers would be dedicated nuclear power plants physically located right next to the data center.
In fact I expect power generation to get more expensive as demand can increase faster than supply can be established. I imagine setting up new solar farms and transmission lines to be significantly harder (as in, takes longer time due to approvals and so on) than new data centers (which requires a single large location and I assume less approvals).
As soon as I switch to a model that doesn't fully fit into vram it tanks to <10tk/s which makes it unusable for me for most tasks.
For example make an essay about something where you don't actively engage with the LLM after the initial prompt. So mostly one-shot prompts.
As it is, it seems the improvements are about making the hardware cheaper (as in capex, not opex).
This is just feels from me from what I hear on the news and see on the products though.
When I tried to run llama.cpp directly I was getting max 9tk/s on qwen3.5-9B, then I tried LM Studio with the same model and got 77tk/s. I haven't figured out yet how to get MTP working properly in either.
I am from Brazil and before the recent soy-growing deforestation of the amazon the #1 cause of deforestation was furniture-making. My parents have a really old dinner table made from high grade wood, is it is a pain in the ass to move and it has a ton of scuffs we can't be bothered to fix. Once my parents move we will probably throw it away. It lasted 40 years (with a big varnish rework around 25 years in) but the trees used to make it will never come back, my ikea table has been with us for around 8 years and still works fine.
Particle board tech has come a long way and it is much better than it used to be, IKEA particle board is consistently "okay" to "great", but other manufacturers it is not guaranteed. The only thing it lacks (by design) is the weight, particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture, which is both good and bad depending on the situation (some types of furniture you want to be heavy).
Even in that space there is still plenty of hand-crafted solutions or customization to the enterprise-system that might as well be hand-crafted solutions.