chadash

The crazy thing is we often cite an Apple Tax, but in this case, I think they actually have a cheaper product.

We do have some idea. Kimi K2 is a relatively high performing open source model. People have it running at 24 tokens/second on a pair of Mac Studios, which costs 20k. This setup requires less than a KW of power, so the $0.8-0.15 being spent there is negligible compared to a developer. This might be the cheapest setup to run locally, but it's almost certain that the cost per token is far cheaper with specialized hardware at scale.

In other words, a near-frontier model is running at a cost that a (somewhat wealthy) hobbyist can afford. And it's hard to imagine that the hardware costs don't come down quite a bit. I don't doubt that tokens are heavily subsidized but I think this might be overblown [1].

[1] training models is still extraordinarily expensive and that is certainly being subsidized, but you can amortize that cost over a lot of inference, especially once we reach a plateau for ideas and stop running training runs as frequently.

Being Apple is just a structural disadvantage. Everyone knows that open claw is not secure, and it’s not like I blame the solo developer. He is just trying to get a new tool to market. But imagine that this got deployed by Apple and now all of your friends, parents and grandparents have it and implicitly trust it because Apple released it. Having it occasionally drain some bank accounts isn’t going to cut it.

This is not to say Apple isn’t behind. But OpenClaw is doing stuff that even the AI labs aren’t comfortable touching yet.

> Cost: $1,000 Case 1 (90%): OpenAI goes bankrupt. Return: $0 Case 2 (9%): OpenAI becomes a big successful company and goes 10x. Return: $1,000 + 5% interest = $1,050 Case 3 (1%): OpenAI becomes the big new thing and goes 100x. Return: $1,000 + 5% interest = $1,050

The actual math is that if OpenAI succeeds, then there's a nod and a wink that JPM will land the lead role in the IPO or any mergers/acquisitions, which translates into huge fees.

There is definitely ageism in tech, but 39 isn't old. I'd be happy to take a look at your resume and provide advice if you give me a way to contact you. But it sounds like the issue isn't your resume... indeed you are getting lots of interviews, so maybe it's something you are doing in the interview process. Do you have a sense of where things go wrong? Are you often getting to the final stage before hearing no?

Well, they certainly _might_ be functioning in ten years from now. Conservatively, you get 5 years of use out of this, which isn't bad for $15-20, depending on your use case.

[1] https://www.lifehealth.com/top-25-us-companies-ranked-by-pro...

The second one is more important than the first one. If you don't build the right product, it doesn't matter how well it scales or how it has amazing test coverage or wonderful documentation. To that end, I think that too many managers (and companies) do too much shielding of engineers from customers. If you are just given a figma mockup and told "build this", it's easy to get bogged down for a week with the details of building a search bar at the bottom of the page only to realize that the stakeholders would have been OK with a dropdown select. Better to understand the problem you are solving and the only way to really do this is to have some kind of interaction with customers. As an engineering manager, I try to encourage engineers to get on sales calls and see product demos. When you see it from a high level, you a) almost always notice things that need fixing or can be improved and b) see where the piece that you are working on fits into the larger picture.

That said, I find that many engineers don't want to get on customer calls, and usually there's room for those engineers in an organization as well. For example, "build a new video conferencing service for artists to collaborate" would be a very challenging problem (I think) that is not well defined and therefore requires deep customer understanding. "Make Google searches run with 10% fewer CPU milliseconds" is arguably a much harder problem to solve, but it's so well defined that it really doesn't need customer understanding (setting aside the initial decision about whether it makes sense to work on).

Word to the wise... as of Python 3.7, the regular dictionary data structure guarantees order. Declaring an OrderedDict can still be worthwhile for readability (to let code reviewers/maintainers know that order is important) but I don't know of any other reason to use it anymore.

I don't think competing with ElasticSearch is mentioned anywhere within the license. If team 1 uses ElasticSearch and team 2 is developing RAG (without using ES), then that's not an issue (but only if using the most recent version of ES, since the license for the code that I fork today has no bearing on future code that ES hasn't written yet).

Personally, I do wish that there was more broad acceptance of the Elastic License. Who wants to put in years building a business and then have a competitor with better distribution take your code and compete directly with you? For me, the reasons to want open-source code are:

* If a vendor goes under, I can self-host

* If a vendor raises prices too much, I can self-host

* If there's a bug in the code that affects me too much, I can fix it

* If there's a feature I really need, I can add it

The Elastic License allows for all of the above. Seems fair to me.

Now, maybe there'd be some novel use case that would come up if everyone (or let's say 80%+) had 2gbps internet, but it's hard to imagine that that's the big constraint for much. Maybe something like virtual/augmented reality could do more heavy processing in the cloud in that case (assuming low enough latency)?

This is a bit misleading. DAs have latitude about what to prosecute and if they don't think they can win, they dont have to bring it to court.

But very few people actually execute on ideas that they have. And even fewer successfully execute. This is why I like the advice from the book "The Lean Startup": if you think an idea is valuable, call up a product manager at the biggest player in the space and try to get them to steal your idea from you... the short answer is that they won't, because any successful company is flooded with good ideas and they have to be picky about which ones they pursue [1].

That said, people vastly underestimate the size of the market for many things and they assume that some competitor might keep them from taking off. Think of the tire market: how many people can give a good explanation of the difference between Michelin and Goodyear? Maybe 1% of people? Yet, but companies are huge. Now go to almost any other market (save for a few with network effects) and you'll find at least several competitors in the space. And if no one is competing in a space, sometimes that's a bad sign, not a good one if you are considering it.

[1] There are some ideas that are obvious, and they might already be pursuing, such as using LLMs to automate some aspect of customer service. That doesn't count as a stolen idea. Also, don't take this to the extreme. Obviously some ideas are valuable, but they tend to be things that require very deep expertise.

I played with the Geico example, and it seems to do a good job on the happy path there. But I tried another one where it struggled... I want to get me car rental prices from https://www.costcotravel.com/. I gave it airport + time of pickup and dropoff, but it struggled to hit the "rental car" tab. It got caught up on hitting the Rental Car button at the top, which brings up a popup that it doesn't seem to read.

When I put in https://www.costcotravel.com/Rental-Cars, it entered JFK into the pickup location, but then failed to click the popup.

Selling to the public sector is a skill in itself. It isn't usually the best product that wins at this... it's the company that knows the most about selling to the public sector.

The same is true in law. Just because you have 10,000 hours of training doesn't mean you aren't billing by the hour.

This is why there are many many doctor and attorney millionaires and very few doctor/attorney billionaires.