ericd

Oh yeah, for sure, they're nice. Just mean that it's also just a real utilitarian benefit for those without technical aptitude.

Yep, for someone with ~zero technical aptitude, I'd happily pay the premium for decreasing the number of things that can go wrong. Things getting unplugged accidentally account for a lot of tech support.

I'd say Snow Leopard was peak.

I think the only real solution to this is to switch to an OS with a backing org that has optimization for power users as a first-class goal. I've been liking Omarchy and NixOS for that. I say this as a Mac user since 1989.

It's a nice thought, but the strategic implications make it very hairy, and international trust isn't going in the right direction for that. But within large countries like the US with very varied climates, it seems like we really should.

Maybe you're thinking of B Corp? That's just a certification from some group. Public Benefit Corporation, on the other hand, changes directors' fiduciary responsibilities. For example, earlier this year, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled that PBC directors are not obligated to maximize shareholder value when selling control of their company.

I highly recommend Eric Ries' new book Incorruptible if you want to learn more about this stuff. In there he tells the story of the Vectura Group, a pharma company that was developing treatments for asthma and other respiratory diseases. It was looking at a sale, and it had a couple offers, the one from Phillip Morris slightly edged out the other, and because of fiduciary duty, even though many involved viscerally hated the idea of going to Phillip Morris, as the cause of many of the ailments they sought to cure, they sold to them.

Yeah, a copy of office I bought bricking myself, even while constantly keeping office autoupdate running was my last straw with them. Fortunately, LibreOffice seems to be mostly good enough now.

Good thing LLMs are really good at translation tasks?

Right, I didn't get into this to make money, I got into this to make things. This stuff is amazing for that.

After it bulldozes the problem, can you not then use the LLM to help you understand the solution, bit by bit?

I like "meat proxy".

>The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth

Nah, it’s more like the top 5% hold half. The top 0.1% are at ~13%.

Also fyi, ours run it on their Raspi 400 via dosbox, they love it too. The DOS games library is full of educational-ish gems (they really like Lemmings and The Settlers, too).

Hm so you're saying all the SaaS runners should put "Lifetime, paid monthly" in small print under their price? Bam, goodbye churn.

In nvfp4, it's about 300 gigs once you offload n-grams, 491 without offloading, you can run it pretty well on 4x DGX Sparks, which last I checked was about $20k. So, it's definitely runnable.

Or you can just use any of the neoclouds' shared hosting. The thing for them to be freaked out is that these models are getting good enough very quickly, and all the shared hosting providers can run them for a tiny fraction of what the frontier model companies charge.

I think those proposals are usually scoped to science/tech PhDs, I guess to avoid that scenario, but I only have a headline-level knowledge of the bills. I don't know if it's that insane at most labs? But my first/second hand knowledge is a decade out of date at this point.

What does it mean to "break a lot of PhD programs"? Research is competitive, and hard work. Yeah, there are easier options, but in the long run, the countries with the people willing to work their butts off academically are going to outperform ours if we can't get their best to come here and work their butts off here.

>Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.

There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.

To follow up on this, US PhD programs are not generally packed with US citizens, they're frequently the cream skimmed from the rest of the world. For many subspecialties, there's just not going to be enough US citizens to do all the cutting edge work that could/should be done.

We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.

You could theoretically run these (slowly) if they were open weight. ~$10k of DDR4 is enough to hold them. The data itself costs ~0 to replicate.

This seems to imply that training will ever be done? But yeah, I think the idea is that the appetite for thinking-on-tap will be enormous.

Even for smaller models, I think they’ve found that training an enormous, inefficient model and then distilling it internally to something much more efficient to serve is the way to go.

There's way more anxiety here than is necessary. If you don't want to optimize, then it's pretty simple right now, just use Opus 5.5 or GPT 6.1 Sol. If you want to quickly test out the alternatives and see if the decreased ability in long horizon tasks is offset by the decrease in costs, toss a few bucks into your favorite neocloud (Fireworks was fine last time I tried them) and give GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4.1 a spin, and see if they're good enough. OhMyPi makes it trivial to swap models without swapping your harness.

Everyone has a great researcher piped to their desk now. You can have it follow the Twitter zeitgeist for you, you don't have to do it yourself.

It's running a normal central home heat pump/air conditioner for one hour, or eight hours of playing on a gaming PC. Yeah, the propaganda around datacenter resource usage has massively outrun the truth, which makes me think there are some very interested parties pushing behind the scenes.

I think that’s more the norm in stability, where the economy when not a lot is happening/changing/improving, and so the economy is focused on efficiency as a method of competition. We are squarely not in efficiency mode right now, we’re in explore as fast as possible mode, as a lot of old underlying assumptions have changed, and there’s a huge amount of work to be done in reworking everything for the new assumptions. That means lots of opportunities, lots of money flying around, and bean counters getting outcompeted by people who’re focused on doing new things. Being too conservative does not serve you well in this regime. My two cents, anyway, I don’t think overall massive job losses are on the menu anytime soon, but massive job displacement/swapping, very likely.

I mean, it's a good deal for the boss, but I also wouldn't want to waste two years of my life doing something I could do in a couple months or weeks, would you? That's not a good use of my life, regardless of whether someone's willing to pay me.

Yes, but I think with bafflingly huge numbers, it's a useful reference point. ~the value of all the stuff and services made in Australia for the year!

California rate payers are being forced to essentially pay for fire insurance for CA residents who live in tinderbox areas, by way of PG&E rates, and burying lines that serve widely dispersed populations. That's the big difference. The vast majority of US residents have much lower utility rates.

Well of course. Wars tend to destroy wealth quite efficiently.

Yeah, fair. We’ll see!

I don’t think they’re getting enough press on this to justify this level of investment. But I could definitely be wrong.

That's usually in hindsight? And I said it wasn't obviously insane to them, not that it would pencil out in the end.

Can also just be an asymmetric bet - relatively small outlay with low chance of working, but massive upside if it does, such that it's still positive expected value.

But mostly, I think all these armchair quarterbacks should not have very strong opinions about something that they almost certainly don't know much about compared to the people who build these. The person I responded to cited a random blog that ran some numbers, and includes such gems as "In space, a broken fan or a fried motherboard is a crisis." Just... lol