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benced

1,173 karma · joined May 7, 2022

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benced··on New iPad mini
I doubt the display is hardware locked. Apple is too good at protecting its margin to do that.
benced··on Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe
These are fridges in supermarkets, not home fridges. I think a supermarket capable of administering many fridges can put their big boy pants on and handle the potential downsides of controllability.
benced··on Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries
Yours is incorrect though :). Advertising brings tremendous consumer subsidies (most trivially: Google and Facebook are free). It would be convenient for your POV if there was no tradeoff though so I understand why you would prefer to pretend.
benced··on Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery
I'm not pro-Israel by any means but foreign adversary is a bit much.
benced··on Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery
Companies wasting their money is the company's problem and it's really unclear to me why the government should give a single damn.
benced··on Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market
If you could afford a computer at pre-AI prices (which is presumably what you're complaining about? If you couldn't afford a computer before, AI hasn't changed that for you), you have enough money to put where your mouth is.
benced··on Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market
You can short them and make a lot of money (to buy RAM with?) if you feel this way and are correct.
benced··on Sonnet 5.5
Luna is the main exception to this. It's such a cheap model and the tokens come so fast.
benced··on Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries
This will make the world much poorer. You might think that's worth it but it's true.
benced··on Mother convicted of: her 5 yo walks short way to pond alone in Virginia
This is potentially stupider than the claimed crime.
benced··on Stripe Clinches over $7B Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter
All the model companies except kind of Anthropic (and even they half-assedly do) implement the OpenAI API. It's not an open standard but, like the S3 API, it effectively is.

And, to answer your question, no. The existence of a common API makes it trivial to change zero code and send requests to a different model.

benced··on So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂
This seems trivial: if you could add enough plants to your room to reduce CO2, we could easily do the same thing at planet-scale and global warming wouldn't be an issue.
benced··on San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
The situation you're positing already basically exists with housing - who literally ask for proof of your income - and while housing goes up at unreasonable rates due to lack of construction, it clearly doesn't go up at the same rate (and _definitely_ not by the same raw amount) as income does.
benced··on San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
I suspect part of the reason this is playing well on this website is banning surveillance pricing is great for rich people. I don't have the time or inclination to coupon or aggressively cross-shop but I benefit a lot from the less well-off folks who do. The grocery store, without any ability to differentiate, has to assume that I might be one of those people and sell me a banana at the same price.
benced··on San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
I worry about corner cases like rural towns with only one grocery store (although I suspect that those are already gouging people?) but that isn't San Francisco.
benced··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
I would be mad if the syntax was constantly changing but I want the internal implementation to be moving as fast as possible while retaining success. I think that rate is higher than what humans alone can do.
benced··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
Python has so many footguns for server work and the world's worst typing system. It sounds like Golang is perfect for your use-case
benced··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
More gets done in the Bay Area than those places.
benced··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
GLM 5.2 (open-weights) is at or near Opus 4.7 level performance already. I think it's unlikely Anthropic will be able to durably charge us much more than the CapEx depreciation cost of GPUs + the OpEx of running them for non-frontier models (which Fable will be in 6 months to a year).
benced··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
The scary thing is the zig project prohibits LLM contributions - the world is going to move faster than them.
benced··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
I would guess the cost to do this with humans would be _at least_ $1.5M in compensation alone (I'm thinking three 500k/year Bay Area engineers) so this is already an order of magnitude cheaper.

Is it worth $165K? I'm less sure of that but it's honestly a moot point - this will get to 5 then 4 digits of cost pretty fast.

benced··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
> We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

God forbid an engineer express uncertainty.

benced··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
Not a compiler expert - shouldn't language verbosity and binary size be, at best, very loosely related?
benced··on I design with Claude more than Figma now
Anyone with knowledge of Indian regulatory culture would not take this as dispositive.
benced··on Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
It's pareto better, all else equal (which, fair, it may not be in this case) for a company to serve businesses from $1 and up than to only serve $5M and up.
benced··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
The headline is implying that AI mode is super unpopular with the very large number "28" and not the more accurate number of .16.
benced··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch.

Classic example of misleading with stats.

benced··on Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier
I meant the structural problem of the EU not having a tech industry (nor any similarly prominent 21st century industry).

Yes, it would be better for America and for the EU if America acted normal but I would not advise anyone to plan hoping on that.

benced··on Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier
It is very true that if your company is a political vehicle, having the powers that be enforce that all companies must be political vehicles is quite good for you. America certainly has its version of this in its defense companies. I would not say those are the American companies that make me most proud to be American though.
benced··on Stop Advertising in Your Commits
I think this is more of a corporate metrics tracking than advertising. Decision makers aren't seeing these ads in commits but they certainly are seeing a report from Anthropic that "75% of your commits last quarter are from Claude code".
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