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TrainedMonkey

4,710 karma · joined August 29, 2013

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TrainedMonkey··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Not familiar with the issue, but that has to be $1m minimum order, correct? And you would get a production run in 1-10k. How many revs does that include?

My understanding is that Shenzhen dominance so far is from 3 pillars - low minimum order size, low per-part price, and fast response. They can do that because they have lot of highly trained labor that work mad hours. So to compete you would need to leverage a lot of automation... which would be a lot less flexible and very rocky at the start. Would love to get a correction from someone more familiar with the situation.

TrainedMonkey··on New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
TrainedMonkey··on Why Micron Is Suddenly Ditching 4F² DRAM as Rivals Double Down
> Why not hold your cards until afterwards?

It's a public company that is beholden to the shareholders. They have to explain what they are doing. But I agree with you, seems sus. Even if you can make more money by scaling the old tech today, that does not justify dropping the future innovation. Especially because by all accounts they are swimming in cash... Unless they are telling the truth and 4f extra complexity does not justify extra cost. I really have no context to evaluate that.

TrainedMonkey··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
On the surface that seems like a responsible thing to do
TrainedMonkey··on New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing
Unfortunately I've had. I've had two different scanwatch models and ended up buying ~3 chargers each for of them. Just thinking abut USB-C and how much less different chargers types I have makes me really happy.
TrainedMonkey··on BIPM decides to stop adding leap seconds to UTC
I concur that this is probably a good thing, but UTC without leap seconds already exists. That is TAI and some applications that care about long term persistent and self-consistent telemetry use that.
TrainedMonkey··on Call Center Jobs Are Declining, but 14,000 Calls Show Humans Still Outperform AI
Some, maybe most, humans outperform AI. I've had some calls where I would have preferred an AI that could not understand me to an agent whom I could not understand AND who could barely understand me.
TrainedMonkey··on New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing
I do not care for Withings software or subscriptions, but their hardware is so nice.
TrainedMonkey··on Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts
Given the speed, intensity, and potential payoff of the AI race I am surprised anyone expects anything else. Anthropic is currently winning and if OpenAI needs to let skynet cook for a bit to catch up, well that is just the cost of doing business. This is capitalist system working as expected.
TrainedMonkey··on Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256
NV1 is the chopped liver, Riva 128 was commercially successful so it's foie gras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1

TrainedMonkey··on How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet
Much better that nearest post office. Take it to the nearest whole foods and don't even bother with the box.
TrainedMonkey··on Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif monospace font
It is almost like there is a cool new technology that makes shipping projects faster.
TrainedMonkey··on OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled
It is rarely a challenge to turn $100 into $50.
TrainedMonkey··on OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled
Obviously not the same thing as lying, but Anthropic had also been juicing the revenues with making smart models incredibly verbose. In August my org 3x more in API credits vs July. In September the spend returned to July levels partially because they made models less verbose, but mostly because we've changed how we are using them.
TrainedMonkey··on Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
Speaking of ants having a survival instinct, ant death spirals are a thing. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
TrainedMonkey··on Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields
Higher rates means USG will need to print more money to pay for $40TN debt which will increase inflation which will force higher rates.
TrainedMonkey··on Europe's "Less" Is Doing More Than Anyone Gives It Credit For
I am getting more and more peeved by using GDP as a single number. Cost of existing, aka housing and healthy food, skyrocketed compared to median income. But hey, the tech got cheaper.
TrainedMonkey··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
In my experience Astra writes python code modifying the filesystem and then uses nix build to execute those python scripts without asking me for permission.
TrainedMonkey··on Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses
Grok confidently said it can be done by the end of the year when Elon asked so it must be true.
TrainedMonkey··on Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
Apple used to have principled UX before designers got to innovation. There might be an argument that new UIs are better for people with no prior experience... if they did not completely change them once a decade or so.
TrainedMonkey··on If a Tesla Cybercab fleet were profitable, Tesla wouldn't sell you one
I see this as liability shifting exercise first, scalability tool second, and Elon's desire to deliver on his 2016 promise third.

The scalability point is compound. We are talking charging, storage, and cleaning infra as well as regulatory burdens. Scaling that is hard and local, so it does make sense to outsource that. I believe the deal is really raw because of the risks involved, but Elon does have a decent track record of delivering on investment. Some of these entities will be able to perform regulatory capture and become a decent cash cow.

TrainedMonkey··on The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
Do you think we will ever need more than 47 of them agents?
TrainedMonkey··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
> But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish.

As the old saying goes what Intel giveth the Microsoft taketh away.

TrainedMonkey··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.
TrainedMonkey··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
Worry not, Pelicans on bicycles had been ranking pretty high on your favorite search engine for a while. I struggle to imagine a world in which it was not already scraped and turned into training data by at least one provider:

1. Models need to be good at the questions we ask them, not the questions we could ask them.

2. The questions, at least partially, are correlated with information people consume.

3. People mostly consume viral content.

4. Ergo you should scrape viral content for training data.

TrainedMonkey··on A dock that wakes up reliably
The author does not call it out, but I think the point is that it's not only the dock. I've been struggling with MBP wakeup issues for a while. We have a whole zoo of various apple devices attached to a number of docks. All of the monitors are Odyssey Neo G9. TL:DR an issue with MBP port, MBP to Dock link, Dock, Dock to Monitor link, or the monitor itself could cause the unplugging dance.

In addition, it takes some time for Apple to squash bugs after releasing new hardware or software. M5s used to be unreliable with Anker TB4 until 1-2 months ago.

TrainedMonkey··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Be honest now, it would take at least a few months for the rest of us.
TrainedMonkey··on Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem
My understanding is that, if confirmed, this demonstrates that AI can find novel solutions. This is a strong counterpoint to generative-AI-is-strictly-limited-to-training-data.
TrainedMonkey··on AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
It's almost like it is based on the training data and regimen that is largely the same between versions.
TrainedMonkey··on Warranty Void If Regenerated
I really enjoyed fantasy part of many small farmers. It felt rustic. However based on my understanding the modern world is moving towards megacorps and economies of scale.
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