2,154 karma · joined August 14, 2020
6.1 Sol is not a “frontier model” and does not command the pricing of one. The reason it exists is because of competition from non-frontier models that are “good enough”.
In fact, you kind of made the same argument. As “good enough” models commoditized, the use cases requiring frontier models and frontier model pricing will shrink.
And, even if performance is not as good, many will prefer open models.
The other place they are amazing is in working with legacy code bases. I mean, the kind the dev team always wants to throw away. First, even if you do want to throw it away, you can first find out what it does and realize it does more than you think it does. You can also create integrations to more modern components which can be used to extend it. You can also create a pretty decent test suite if you do not have one. And, once the behaviour has good test coverage, you can re-write it into something more modern. You can even completely change the architecture while ensuring compatible external behaviour. Remember, this is all in place of “throw it away and start over from scratch, only to discover that the scope is much larger than expected”.
The design of Ladybird follows the web standards closely as well. It is going to be quite different from older engines. And the code is quite organized, if your concern is AI slop from layers and layers of AI added features. I do not think that is how they are using it at all.
My biggest gripe with Ladybird is that they adopted some pretty large components written by Google. You cannot really use Skia and say that you do not rely on Google as an example.
Not relying on Google was their big selling point, since every other browser is Google-dependent.
And the software ecosystem was already in place (even though everything had to be rewritten).
Where NeXT went wrong is in being astronomically expensive, which drove its addressable market to nothing. This is the exact same mistake Jobs made with the Lisa. The significantly inferior Apple II platform was far more successful.
I ran it for years on Linux.
There are many CPU architectures, even some that became quite popular, that have gone extinct. Some lasted less than 30 years in total.
x86 has lasted decades but, as it relies on only one to two companies, it is not guaranteed to do so.
But the biggest risk going forward is geopolitical. You may completely lose access to a technology even if it continues to be available elsewhere. If you are in Europe, technology from the US in particular may be a concern. I think that is the main motivation for this project.
My point would be that it has already been demonstrated that you can lose access to ARM technology as a consequence of US sanctions.
ARM is not a sufficiently independent ISA to guarantee sovereignty.
With RISC-V, you may lose access to a specific core, chip, or supply chain. But your ecosystem can pivot to an alternative. Long-term, you have the option of complete in-sourcing.
So, even working with Chinese chips and boards today can be progress, as long as more domestic RVA23 options can be expected to arrive later.
Get in your car, drive up to a few hundred miles. Dive home. Repeat. Never stop for fuel ever. That is what EV life is like for many people. I think most people.
My electricity costs 40% less from 11 pm to 7 am and 30% more from 4 pm to 9 pm.
A hydro dam can also be thought of as a battery. When you are not using it, the dam fills up (charges).
My utility buys inexpensive excess power from the NA grid when electricity is cheap and drains the dams when third-party electricity is expensive. Adding other renewables to the mix plays a similar role. The pricing incentives shrink peak demand as you suggest.
One of the reasons residential solar is a tough sell for me is that electricity is relatively inexpensive and likely to stay that way.
And if you want to run them on Wayland, Worg will do that for you. https://github.com/jmalcolm137/Worg
I realized the other day that I had a $30 a month Claude subscription. So, I fired it up all excited and tried Opus 5.5 on a codebase I was already in with DS. After about 30 minutes I hit a 5 hour limit. The next day I tried again and the same thing happened. And it felt much slower to boot. I was super disappointed.
Add to that the fact that the AI itself is going to be more or less a commodity as well and you wonder where all the profits are meant to come from.
LLM makes may make more money before their tech really works than after.
In other words, it is far more profitable to milk the enthusiasm of AI investors than it is to try to make money directly with the AI.
This should tell you everything you need to know about AI valuations.
I do not imagine that things divide so clearly along these lines.
Adding unit tests, increasing modularity, reducing duplication, and the like are all things you can tell the LLM to do explicitly. And it is happy to do it.
And you can have coding standards as part of your design criteria. Set and document these early in the project and audit the code at least enough to see they are being enforced.
I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.