VBprogrammer

And yet you couldn't even capture and hold a shitty backwater like Afghanistan.

The last US military action widely regarded as a success was the first Gulf war but, I didn't know about you, but I like my successful military actions to come without a part II.

I wouldn't be surprised if that was closer to the truth. A heck of a lot of boring software runs on the JVM. That said, it's a slightly different niche from command line tools.

I think Rust has hit critical mass. It's now basically the default choice for something you want to perform well but want to be reasonably secure. For example, uv in the python ecosystem.

If someone hasn't written a blog titled "Should we be worried about Cloudflare?" yet, I think it would be a good subject to explore. I find the idea that they could decide one day to ban you from all of their network pretty worrying. And if they did, how much fingerprinting are they doing and would the bad extend far beyond just a random IP address.

I'm not really sure how this fits with Amazon's corporate culture. I thought all of the dead wood good pip'ed out of there on an ongoing basis.

If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?

I honestly wonder if there is safety in the herd here. If you have a dedicated server in a rack somewhere that goes down and takes your site with it. Or even the whole data center has connectivity issues. As far as the customer is concerned, you screwed up.

If you are on AWS and AWS goes down, that's covered in the news as a bunch of billion dollar companies were also down. Customer probably gives you a pass.

Yeah, but not just that. I don't expect my mum to go find some high end consumer GPU and install it on a home server in order to run her own local LLM. I expect that people will be throwing chat interfaces running remixed versions of open weight models out on the internet so fast that it's impossible for anyone to monitise it in a reasonable way.

I also wonder whether, similar to bitcoin mining, these things end up on specialist ASICS and before we know it a medium tier mobile phone is running your own local models.

I don't think that AGI is necessary for LLMs to be revolutionary. I personally use various AI products more than I use Google search these days. Google became the biggest company in the world based on selling advertising on its search engine.

I vaguely remember someone winning a noble prize for economics for coming up with ways to apply cut/choose in financial transactions but I couldn't find it in a quick Google. It may have been nearly 20 years ago though.

Yeah, the incentives there are obviously misaligned. I wonder if there is a potential way of making advertising click through tracking following the "I cut the cake, you chose the slice" model.

Some countries have property taxes where you declare the value and the government retains the right to purchase the property for that value for example.

My first thought was to make the advertising cost driven by revenue on the site. But that just reverses the incentive.

I've had good results with doing similar. My spelling and grammar have always been a challenge and, even when I put the effort into checking something, I get blind to things like repeating words or phases when I try to restructure sentences.

I sometimes also ask for justification of why I should change something which I hope, longer term, rubs off and helps me improve on my own.

I think, if you take jacquesm's posting history here, into consideration it was probably a joke. Maybe not his best work but I don't think he was serious.

I'll do that! Although I have to say you've made me chuckle. I can totally imagine some pithy arcade game poking fun at how our industry is quickly moving from writing code to middle management of a group of AI agents.

It's right behind our office in Holborn. I walk past it often but somehow haven't quite built up the bravery to walk in. Despite having seen most of Tim's work on YouTube...

We used to use it for coding interviews during COVID. It never struck me as anything special and I'm not convinced saddling it with AI improvements it's prospects. In fact it might make them worse given it's general applicability to learning which will surely be surpressed by the worries of an AI takeover.

Something which I only realised by watching a London Underground driver who was vlogging for a while (before he was asked to stop) is that, yes, the frequency of the trains is the main metric for customers.

However, once things go off schedule it can have pretty acute consequences for drivers and operational staff. The timetables are built around having drivers at specific places at specific times who will have required breaks at certain times and a maximum allowable working time. The rolling stock itself needs to be where it's needed as well, it's easy for it to get bunched up behind a track circuit failure etc.

"Have you heard the phrase "You're not Google, you're not Facebook, and you're not Netflix"? The TL;DR; is those tech giants that have 1M+ concurrent users. They have a hard requirement for no downtime."

Actually, one of the more interesting parts of the Google SRE book was that they don't try to aim for 0 downtime. They consider the background error rate of any network request and optimising much beyond this is counter productive.

Even for individual services they make a point of not trying to make them perfectly available, as this means downstream services are less likely to build in adequate provision for failure.

I really hope you are right here, and to be honest it does reflect my limited experience with where I've used AI so far.

But I'm also not ready to bet the farm on it. Seriously considering taking our savings and equity out of our house in a London adjacent area, and moving to a lower cost of living area, so that we're practically debt free. At that point we can survive on a full time minimum wage job, anything more than that is a bonus.

I was watching a video the other day which happened to mention that sodium lasers are used to create artificial stars, used for calibration of adaptive optics in ground based telescopes. This works because one particular layer of the upper atmosphere is rich in sodium due to impact with sodium rich debris.

Obviously it requires a more scientific analysis but it does seem to me that burning a lot of shit on the atmosphere might be problematic.

I've been playing with Llama 3.2-3B this weekend and, while I haven't spent enough time with it to figure out the limitations, it's definitely good enough to be useful. That's running at "as fast as I can read" on a £100 Intel Arc GPU. I'm tempted to buy a Arc770 (£250ish) to see if I can run the OpenAI open weights models...

I think it's reasonably likely that these massive investments turn to dust when they get squeezed by the commoditization of LLMs.

Personally it's the ownership of the company I work for and the desire to retain most international travel privileges.

The majority of the population is running a $300 laptop from Amazon. They certainly aren't popping used car money every 2-3 years like the real enthusiasts are.

I mean it's obvious to anyone who isn't an idiot that we shouldn't. However, populist parties banging the drum on this are looking likely to be at least the second biggest party in the next general election (and that comes with some wishful thinking given the recent polls). Labour's approach seems to be to validate their scaremongering but to claim they can deal with it without going full on Third Reich...

Completely agree. I'm not too bothered Digital ID cards, I was mildly annoyed by the idea of actual ID cards (manly the cost) but as a free digital app, I don't have many objections. I've seen it from colleagues in Denmark. If they manage to build in some zero knowledge proof of age I might even support it.

But how this is supposed to stop immigration, illegal or otherwise, is beyond me.

I think "explained" is a reasonable term for this. If I remember correctly there where books of the form "The Linux Source Code Explained".

Certainly I can't get on board with reverse engineered.

I don't love Tesla (though I would like an electric car). I don't think it's unlikely that someone driving could have hit that or caused an even worse accident trying to avoid it.

However, I'm sure a human driver in the loop would have reacted. The driver sitting there watching a machine do it's thing 99% of the time and being expected to step in to save that situation though is a horrific misreading of human nature.

I can't speak for the rest of Europe but, as a Brit, I find this kind of overbearing and inauthentic type of service somewhere between cringe and outright annoying. Especially when it's accompanied by a lack of competency, for example missing items or not doing what they said they'd do.

At best I'd say it's ok to use it sparingly, in places where it really does make an improvement in readability. I've seen people use it just to align the right hand side of a list of assignments, even when there is no tabular nature to what they are assigning.

By length constraint I meant that one of the fields grows longer than originally planned rather than bypassing the linter.

Those kind of tables improve readability right until someone hits a length constraint and had to either touch every line in order to fix the alignment, causing weird conflicts in VCS, or ignore the alignment and it's slow decay into a mess begins.