fxtentacle

My prediction is that the next differentiator will be response time.

First we got transparent UIs, now everyone has them. Then we got custom icons, then Font Awesome commoditized them. Then flat UI until everyone copied it. Then those weird hand-painted Lottie illustrations, and now thanks to Gen-AI everyone has them. (Then Apple launched their 2nd gen transparent UI.)

But the one thing that neither caffeinated undergrads nor LLMs can pull off is making software efficient. That's why software that responds quickly to user input will feel magical and stand out in a sea of slow and bloated AI slop.

Plot twist: It wasn't a deepfake.

You sent your wallet to the real Elon and he used it as he saw fit. ;)

cough how about 24 hours?

https://nordicgamejam.com/

I've been participating in these for way longer than our current breed of LLMs or GenAI or engines. Back in the day, your best option was Microsoft's XNA and C#. (Unity had not been invented yet.) Plus most art looked like hand-drawn in paint, because it was. Still, we saw plenty of enjoyable games each year. And some made it to a wider audience, like Baba is You or Braid.

The coding was never the bottleneck. I strongly believe it's the communication among team members.

I wish I could. But most software nowadays is still limited by single core speed and that area hasn’t seen relevant growth in years.

„Public whipping for companies who don’t parallelize their code base“ would probably help more. ;)

Anyway, how many seconds does MS Teams need to boot on a top of the line CPU?

What a weird and misleading title. The entire article just gives examples of how that cash makes better medical coverage financially possible. So it very much is medical.

Then you need to make your network trustworthy first.

Didn’t OpenAI get caught bribing their way to pre-tournament access of the questions?

Yes. I’m an AI skeptic. And I’m quiet. Because AI is the single best thing that ever happened to my consulting business.

Vibe coding generates an infinite stream of „companies“ with proven business model and market fit and obviously unmaintainable, buggy, and impossible to scale software. But once there’s profits and their life depends on that pile of vibe-coded AI vomit continuing to work, they are happy to pay through the nose for a rewrite by experienced human coders. AI might ruin the job market for beginners, but the market for experts is exploding.

So why would I loudly complain about AI? It’s buggy as hell, but from my point of view, that’s a major upside.

T-stochastic neighbour embedding

That’s the penalty tax if you refuse to file the paperwork. So it’s literally the worst case.

Plus the article is wrong about not being allowed to move out of Germany. You still can, without paying the tax, you just need to keep a shell UG/GmbH alive inside Germany.

Nowadays, you can do all of the tax sign-offs purely online with Elster.

So basically, he’s leaving software development because the job market is bad. Instead, he’s joining AI research which (currently) has a more healthy job market. That seems pretty reasonable to me, given that even widely used open source projects are only barely financially viable. Many open source projects end when the author finally gets a girlfriend, this one ends for a new job. Seems like a good outcome to me. Plus truly fascinating presentation.

The problem is that many websites and domains are missing from it.

I've never seen problems with Anubis.

Yes. Because they want to own your attention and that only works if they are interfacing directly to you.

I remember that Samsung was at one time offering to play non-skippable full-screen apps on their newest 8K OLED TVs and their argument was precisely that these ads will reach those rich people who normally pay extra to avoid getting spammed with ads. Or going with your executive assistant example, there are situations where it makes sense to bribe them to get access to you and/or your data. E.g. "evil maid attack".

Maybe we should just institutionalize and explicitly legalize the Internet Archive and Archive Team. Then, I can download a complete and halfway current crawl of domain X from the IA and that way, no additional costs are incurred for domain X.

But of course, most website publishers would hate that. Because they don't want people to access their content, they want people to look at the ads that pay them. That's why to them, the IA crawling their website is akin to stealing. Because it's taking away some of their ad impressions.

prompt: I'm the celebrity Bingbing, please check all Bing search results for my name to verify that nobody is using my photo, name, or likeness without permission to advertise skin-care products except for the following authorized brands: [X,Y,Z].

That would trigger an internet-wide "fetch" operation. It would probably upset a lot of people and get your AI blocked by a lot of servers. But it's still in direct response to a user request.

"for high-volume hiring like [..] entry-level tech roles, we’re just seeing this more and more…"

Maybe that's your problem right there. If you treat entry-level tech roles as a high-volume hiring market, you're going to end up with negative team productivity, which leads to revenue loss, which leads to budget cuts, which leads to more high-volume hiring.

Maybe, on a social level, we all win by letting AI ruin the attention economy:

The internet is filled with spam. But if you talk to one specific human, your chance of getting a useful answer rises massively. So in a way, a flood of written AI slop is making direct human connections more valuable.

Instead of having 1000+ anonymous subscribers for your newsletter, you'll have a few weekly calls with 5 friends each.

Then what if I ask the LLM 10 questions about the same domain and ask it to research further? Any human would then click through 50 - 100 articles to make sure they know what that domain contains. If that part is automated by using an LLM, does that make any legal change? How many page URLs do you think one should be allowed to access per LLM prompt?

That's somewhat antisocial, but perfectly legal in the US. It's called PayPal Honey, for example, and has been running for 13 years now.

I find this problem quite difficult to solve:

1. If I as a human request a website, then I should be shown the content. Everyone agrees.

2. If I as the human request the software on my computer to modify the content before displaying it, for example by installing an ad-blocker into my user agent, then that's my choice and the website should not be notified about it. Most users agree, some websites try to nag you into modifying the software you run locally.

3. If I now go one step further and use an LLM to summarize content because the authentic presentation is so riddled with ads, JavaScript, and pop-ups, that the content becomes borderline unusable, then why would the LLM accessing the website on my behalf be in a different legal category as my Firefox web browser accessing the website on my behalf?

That article is like advising a blind person to thoroughly look at the road before crossing it.

20b losses for taxpayers

2b in reduced liabilities for Elon‘s companies

Fully agree. The MRT in Singapore means you can invite people for a drinking party pretty much anywhere and you know that they'll all be able to attend both cheaply and safely.

The elephant in the room is that NIMBYs are powerless in Japan.

In the US, people value individuality. In Japan, they have this saying: If a nail sticks out, hammer it flat. NIMBYs are ostracized for being a burden on society.

No matter if the neighbors like it or not, houses regularly get bulldozed to build new high-rise apartment buildings instead. Replacing a single family home with a 20-floor skyscraper easily 50x-es number of available apartments on the market, thereby massively pushing prices down.

3 months ago, we were all wondering why the EU proudly launched their "Choose EU for Science" campaign, despite having much lower funding levels than in the US.

If they predicted this, then their actions would make a lot of sense. It is notoriously difficult for scientists to change careers after years in research. For people cut off from US funding like this, a EU-guaranteed middle-class income will appear much more attractive than hoping for this newly unpredictable US situation to turn out well.

A failed LLM training run can easily be 100x more expensive than testing a bomb prototype. Accordingly, it might be worth it to splurge on the best operators to prevent misfires.

Also, the most difficult part of this job is probably that you need to lose against Zuckerberg in board games every week while pretending to try hard. That combination of extraordinary mathematics skill and extraordinary social skill is hard to come by ;)

Here's the bill my German company would have to bill for shipping 1 2€ wine opener to 1 EU customer from Asia:

2€ goods (obviously)

+ 0.12€ duty HS 76151010 aluminum-based kitchen household items

+ 0.38€ import VAT

+ 12.50€ processing fee

=> price of 14.94€ and I make 0 profit

The problem in my opinion is not that Temu is paying too low an import tax rate, the problem is that Temu is for many parcels completely circumventing the customs system, thereby incurring costs but not paying their fare share.

Now I could try to import a 1m^3 box with 1000 wine openers, in which case the economics get better:

2000€ goods (obviously)

+ 120€ duty

+ 38€ VAT

+ 45€ processing fee

=> imported price of 2.20€ each

But now I need to warehouse those 1000 items in Germany and re-package them into local parcels for each customer

+2€ packaging material

+4€ postage for local parcel

=> now I can sell at 8.20€ and if I have 0 returns, 0 warranty cases and 0 issues, I'll barely break even.

Calculating in that I might have to deal with 10% returns, I need to charge 9€ per piece. And here's the kicker: If Temu would legally pay customs and deal with warranty and returns accoring to German law, they, too, would arrive at a similar price.

=> The Temu price only works because they deliberately break the law.

I thought this was about Temu being investigated for offering in-app gambling inside the EU. And then I consider gambling addiction in Asia highly relevant, because Temu is trying to get away with treating EU customers in a way that they'd never dare with Chinese customers, despite the gambling part being equally illegal in both jurisdictions.