cm2187

I wonder how kids have managed to deal with that for two centuries…

MCP servers everywhere rather. You automate your life with a bot, the bot interacts with the world through MCP servers (or their successor). The MCP servers themselves may have been implemented by bots but AI to AI is unnecessary wasteful.

2026 programmers also look down on 2024 programmers, these guys didn't understand you can get an intern to vibe code the hole thing in a week and run it in kernel mode on half of the machines in the world the following week (after another mandatory reboot).

The video quotes sales of $2.5 trillion a year to payoff those investments. What workforce you divide it by is a bit up in the air, but let's use 500 millions, which is basically 100% of the workforce of US + Europe + some change. That gives you around $500 a month per employee (from hedge fund manager to flipping burgers at McDonald's).

And there will be competition. I see zero moat right now. The user specific part of the state of the model sits outside of the control of the model (it is basically my code base, or my prompts, all of which I can transfer to any competitor).

I work for a large company and for any LLM I use professionally, whether programmatically or via a UI, I get to pick from a dropdown from Gemini, Claude, OpenAI and the open weight ones. We ain't locked in.

The real question is not whether there will be a market for AI, it is obvious that there will be one (as it was obvious the Internet was a gigantic thing in the dotcom boom). It is rather whether the value will be in the models (and if so in which?) or the infrastructure or somewhere else.

Interesting thoughts from Dwarkesh Patel on the future of models [1]. In summary, no moat if a client can switch to a competitor from a dropdown when all models are similar-ish (so models are commodities), but to really compete with humans, AI needs to start "learning on the job", i.e. accumulating experience like an employee (as opposed to the training / inference approach where the model isn't learning after it is released). If your model does that, then you have vendor lock-in as you can't replace an experienced model with a competitor. Then the value is in the model.

As in the 90s, this could go in all sort of different directions, hard to make predictions. And remember the 90s: the value was in the browser (you had to purchase it, eg Netscape), then the browser came for free with the OS (no value in the browser), then the browser was the most important thing in the world as it was control over the default search engine, everyone thought portals was the most important thing to control, so ISPs had their own applications accessing the internet from their own portal, etc - none of those people were stupid.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iewm45atodE

Is this an AI generated video? The guy didn't blink an eye or moved the head more than one inch in 30 minutes!

But the point of ffmpeg is that it can consume pretty much any format. If you let end users upload videos, that is exactly what you need, it’s not desirable to have a very restrictive list of formats you will accept.

Targeted to what? ffmpeg? Ffmpeg is the OpenSSL of video transcoding, it is used absolutely everywhere. If there is a vulnerability in ffmpeg, any website that processes user supplied videos is vulnerable

Though there is one part I didn’t understand in that interview. They were complaining of being overwhelmed by AI submitted bug reports (fair), including for obscure codecs that must have been used by a couple of users at most. And therefore implying that securing those codecs is low priority/important.

I don’t understand that. To me the severity has nothing to do with how popular is a code path, but whether that code path is accessible to an attacker. If I upload a specially crafted .mkv with a little known codec on YouTube and they use ffmpeg to process it, and I compromise YouTube’s infrastructure that way, it’s a pretty big deal, no matter the popularity of that codec.

Yeah but unless you plan to take the machine away, isn’t man+machine what matters? If you had to develop everything in assembly (or worse), you probably had a much deeper understanding of computers than a modern developer. But the modern developer can setup in minutes what would have taken weeks. To me that’s the definition of progress.

But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive

It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down.

But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.

It is basically the same skillset than asking a good stackoverflow question. Provide enough context and state your problem clearly

But that defeats the purpose of having a boring glass building, or birds or modern bridges. The underpinning ideology is that europe should have no history, no culture and no identity, because suggesting anything else 1) will offend the hyper sensitivity of modern left ideologues who think that the said culture, history and identity is terrible and should only be condemned, apologised for, and buried, and 2) would be unwelcoming to immigrants as it would suggest somehow that there is a society they should adapt to rather than the other way round.

I remember a major French pro-european politician (Modem party) attempting to define Europe (in the context of integrating Turkey), as "the friends of democracy". When you can't (or rather refuse to) define your identity, the only thing left to represent it is birds, office buildings and bridges. Notre Damme de Paris or the Pantheon in Rome are just old embarrassing historical artefacts of an evil civilisation.

That's about to change, they are about to introduce a change that will require bios of all relatives, all social media accounts, email addresses, etc. Haven't looked at a US visa recently but it seems as invasive.

I fail to understand the distinction between an ESTA and a visa to be honest. You need to do the paperwork in advance, pay, provide all sort of personal information, and it can be denied, and if approved only for a limited amount of time. Given that both the EU and the UK have reciprocated, it is a fiction that there exists some visa free travel between these 3 zones. And the more hassle you create, the less tourism you will get.

I am not even sure about social class. In any case these old cemeteries are preserved probably more as historical artefacts, like an old Roman wall would be in London, rather than out of respect for the dead.

Most cemeteries in Europe have been destroyed to make space for urbanisation. The underground of Paris is full of bones from those cemetaries (catacombs of Paris). It's fairly common as outside of a few aristocratic families, people keep a very short memory of their ancestry. I have a very vague knowledge of who my ancestors were back to the mid XIX century and nothing prior. Hard to have any emotional attachment to people you never heard about. So if no one cares, better to build a parking lot!

Can't help thinking of this old Ikea commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nix6tC3vvjs

A curiosity is one thing. But where is the wow factor you get when you enter Rome’s pantheon?

The Eiffel Tower dates from the XIX century. Pre the shift to originality. Which XX century building in Paris is objectively beautiful? The tour Montparnasse? The Centre Pompidou? Or Jussieu’s campus? Even the Opera Bastille is pretty lame, not outright ugly but lame.

They could do large arches too, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Maxentius

I am glad the pantheon still stands. But the real question is are there really any modern structure that will be worth preserving for 2000 years. Architects have long abandoned aiming for beauty to aim for originality. Originality doesn’t last. Humans in 2000 years will only wonder why on earth our society could manufacture atom level micro ships but couldn’t come with a single structure worth preserving.

This is more expensive than a streamdeck. The streamdeck has LCD keys you can customize dynamically.

Am I right to understand that it will do nothing to big cities, where you share the radio frequency with lots of users just like a wifi? What it the minimum radius where two satellites will not interfere with each others (chatgpt says 40-130km radius if not allocated more spectrum)?

If that understanding is correct it means the addressable market is countryside and transportation (planes/ships/RV). Which necessarily makes starlink at most a fairly modest size ISP in terms of valuation?

You mean as opposed to Gemini's "subtle" woke push with diverse nazi soldiers?

Snapshots don’t protect you from malware. I bet 99% of home users use the same credentials on all their machines, once a malware compromised one, the others are compromised within seconds.

[edit] also snapshots aren’t really workable for large files. Remux a movie file and now it occupies twice the space.

Fire, malware, accidental deletions, capricious RAID controller (pre-ZFS). And that’s only the stuff that happened to me. Add power surge, theft, correlation in SSD failures (eg power on counter overflow firmware bug), damaging the array while moving, etc.

For home usage, if you have backups raidz1 is fine (just do an incremental backup at the first sign of trouble). If you don’t have backups, then you probably shouldn’t be running a NAS in the first place.

Terrible title. Nothing to do with automating excel. From what I can tell it seems to be about ingesting spreadsheets into panda (and incredibly narrow use of Excel) and working outside of Excel.