andy_ppp

China may well save the world with green energy but I’m skeptical to assume we should just trust them to share their best intelligence with us freely, it’s a totally different think to sharing their best intelligence.

And this is why software consultancies always recommend a “Digital Transformation Project” to hire as many remote people as possible, all being paid peanuts and charged out at $1500+ per day, the added bonus being the project will take an infinite amount of time!

I struggle to believe people above me where I work refer to these leaches as “our partners” it seems mad to me.

How much of the carbon stays in the animal eating the bloom? I would think while it's tricky to calculate assuming them being eaten is bad might not be true. Of course we might end up making farting whales and adding loads of methane to the atmosphere knowing our luck...

Whenever we try playing god it seems we generally mess things up a few times so we'd need to monitor the actual outcomes in reduced CO2 in the atmosphere over several decades. It seems extremely high risk to assume there won't be unintended consequences...

There is no drive, it’s all orbital slingshots with current technology. None of the other stuff people are talking about here exists…

Probably more likely that we work out how to fold spacetime than we get there in anything like a high enough percentage of the speed of light - the fastest object we ever made travelled at something like ~0.064% * C so we are looking at ~750 years with current technology and presumably we'd need to switch on the probe in 3/4 of a millennium and figure out how to slow it down and get it into some sort of orbit around the planet.

750 years is hard for me to get excited about even as a vampire.

No, I’m saying we live in a horrible world but complaining about the marine life killed here is like worrying about plastic shopping bags.. I’d really rather we didn’t kill animals tbh, but when it comes to growing our food we have little choice right now.

Wait until you hear about industrialised farming, even mass production of crops are killing plenty of animals…

The article opens with a discussion about how AI investments are forcing up the price of computer hardware, so it’s not off topic at all.

I don’t believe point 1 at all, or the skill atrophy point of 2. and the billionaires think AI will indeed make them richer otherwise there would be no investment in these companies would there?

They haven’t even come close to taxing billionaires. Europe has loads of problems with bureaucracy and a lack of dynamism, I’m not persuaded a tax on billionaires is actually workable and suspect we will try WW3 instead…

1000% I honestly believe this is why the US is such an economic powerhouse - the rich there deploy capital in a way that assumes optimistic win-win outcomes when they invest in startups! In the UK the investors are trying to get much higher percentages at half the valuation and it’s terrible for everyone even the investors to have people with 25% the upside of US companies.

Not true, that was WW2 and high taxation on the rich that created the middle class. The Industrial Revolution was 1750 onwards so maybe you’re okay with it taking nearly 200 years to get a good settlement for working people but I am not!

If you look at most of the world, Nigeria or India say you’ll see disgraceful levels of poverty and a small number of people who are ultra wealthy. This is where we are heading in the west if we can’t prevent the rich from inflating and buying all the assets you will own nothing and rent everything from them.

I love AI and have built many projects with PyTorch and use LLMs daily for all my work and am building a startup in my spare time here: https://veloa.com/

Being concerned about how AI will concentrate power doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s extremely useful.

The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being redesigned around things billionaires want and what could be better for them than agents who replace all the white collar workers. You might think you’re safe from this, I don’t.

It’s worth remembering that during the industrial revolution in Britain, the fastest growing country the world had ever seen, most people were in abject poverty. This tech revolution might end up being worse.

What is the general consensus on Martin Fowler - I worked with Thought Works and they were obsessed with overcomplicating everything, but maybe that is just agency in general?

I think it goes without saying that the biggest fight we have as developers is keeping things as simple as possible when most external factors encourage complexity, especially LLMs.

The A(G)I can tell us if and how it needs to be regulated :-/

I can understand the desire to be concerned about the climate systems that keep earth habitable for humans starting to break down might come with some extreme views. It seems almost thinking we can continue as normal given the predictions of climate scientists are now coming true, is the extreme views. I worry that these climate scientists might have under egged their estimates due to a “sensible mindset” rather than following the data and we could be in for a horrifying next 30-50 years.

Has nobody heard about this theory yet? https://youtu.be/RqDAMeqvUgo

Can't wait for the inevitable bailout and US tax dollars to pay for this!

The LLMs may have seen larger codebases in Rust, helping them to cope better.

It’s almost impossible to be in a situation where your taxes end up this wrong you’re accused of fraud. I honestly do not believe my accountant does anything better than AI or AI generated code that does calculations to see what you should be paying.

I'm still amazed my company is paying £10k per month for AWS when they could have one or two servers on Hetzner do the whole thing.

No ORMs try to make the concept of SQL hidden, in Elixir you will not get very far if you don’t understand the SQL you’re trying to write. So I’d probably say nothing is really being hidden from you - as little magic as possible.

https://ecto.hexdocs.pm/Ecto.Query.html

This is to prevent Chinese labs distilling Claude again right? And free advertising again?

This is one of numerous things Elixir and Phoenix get right with the database layer, which on the surface looks like an ORM but is in fact a set of clever functions that write SQL using Elixir macros, as well as a system for validation and minimal changes to data being passed to said SQL.

I’m surprised more languages don’t copy this because it’s exactly what I want rather than loads of complexity that eventually always breaks down.

Can we just make Opus 4.8 ish models cheaper, they do exactly what I want for 99% of problems certainly in web app development. I’m not sure what Palantir/Salesforce/agencies will do, really upset for these leaches!

The usual game plan of getting the technology they want to copy by offering cheap and highly skilled Chinese labour and access to the Chinese market by building the machines there is not available to them, so the likelihood is this will take longer and be more difficult than other implementations. There's hundreds of other technologies needed other than the lasers and the mirrors and the software and the experience running these machines at scale. I think to make more than a handful of GPUs they will be behind for at least 5 years.

This doesn't mean they will always be behind though.

If I was ASML I would have an AI generated honeypot of techniques that are plausible but incorrect for China to go after on this and make sure you get hacked by them.

Honestly you're still looking at (from my understanding) ~3 minutes prefill (TTFT) even with architectural improvements and so on with a 32k context window (against a large model). How is this going to be competitive with Nvidia and all of the tricks massive scale get's you to parallelise context across many machines?

Both have the Euro so they have lower interest rates and can consequently borrow more than us. Which would you rather borrow, 137% of GDP (in the case of Italy) at 3% or 100% of GDP at 5%?

I’m part of the problem!

I looked recently and a new Macbook 128gb ram was £5500 which was expensive for me but I could consider it! Now it’s £7000 which is absolutely ridiculous. AI is useful but it’s sucking everything out of the economy and destroying it at the same time…