j_w

And this doesn't even include tariffs...

That's when you bust out the third LLM. Nobody expects the fourth LLM to be the REAL LLM in the chain.

Just live on /active and that stuff doesn't show up.

I don't know why any reply disagrees with this.

Look at basketball in the US. The best players will tell you all they did as a kid was play basketball. You can go to anywhere somewhat populated and the outdoor courts are in use almost all the time school is not in session for pickup play. Outside of structured practice (if they are on a team), many kids are still playing pickup games or shooting casually.

Soccer fields rarely get use outside of structured play. Kids that play soccer in the US just don't play as much, so their skills are (on average) much worse.

> There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades.

That's not really the argument.

The problem with the tweet is that the chart kind of sucks, and it isn't immediately obvious. The category cited is "Computer Software and Accessories" which is under "Information Technology, Commodities"

A more interesting category is "Video and Audio services," specifically the live streaming subcategory. People don't buy software anymore, they pay for subscriptions to services.

Here are links to FRED for both top levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEEE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SERA . Unfortunately the granularity for the Information Technology index isn't available on FRED from what I could find.

So IT price index is down, frankly to a huge degree. But that includes hardware, so it's hard to draw conclusions about software pricing from that specific chart. But Video/Audio services have seen a fairly sizable increase in index in the last decade.

But that's not really very important. We are talking about price indexes, which do tell us roughly how expensive something is over time, but who cares about the price of basketballs unless that's something I plan on buying as a consumer? The BLS charts give a relative importance which we can use a proxy for "how much a price change would affect the consumer." The relative important of the IT category (linked) is 0.745, but the software subcategory is 0.029. Video/audio and live streaming are 0.595 and 0.185, respectively.

Consumers do not purchase software. Companies don't even bother trying to sell software to consumers. The chart linked is tracking a metric that doesn't matter, because it's not important to consumers.

Going back to the relative importance values from 1999 (https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/cpi-detailed-report-58/a...) personal computers are at 0.106. No other categories. 2009 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05192010.pdf) is 0.248. 2012 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05152012.pdf) software is included with an importance of 0.048. At that point cable/television is at 1.387 (see Video/audio above).

So software prices don't matter. Consumers aren't spending on software. Service prices do matter, and they are getting more expensive.

This feels like a schizo post. Sorry for the complete lack of formatting.

Oh stop. Both of those are a bit ridiculous. We are talking about the sudden surge of data centers, the past 1-3 years, not the 20 prior to that.

Sourcing a tweet that doesn't have a real source (saying source: BLS without an actual reference to BLS isn't a source) is worthless.

Consumers don't buy software, they buy services. Whether or not that is captured by your source in the "Computer Software" is unknown, since I don't have the source. FRED via BLS has PPI for software publishers going up in the last ~6 years, but that's not exactly analogous to consumer spend.

When you say 2tb for $9 is unfathomable if you travel back in time, yes obviously if you go back to floppy days it's comical. Cloud storage prices have been the same for a decade now (pre LLM boom).

So software may or may not be cheaper for consumers (hard to say, nobody buys software). And in real dollars cloud storage is cheaper because of inflation. Not sure what the significant gain is.

Cheaper software: where is this cheaper software? Most users don't pay for most software. Facebook/Instagram are introducing paid plans now. LLM companies are seemingly starting to increase prices.

Unlimited cloud storage: Where are consumers getting unlimited cloud storage from? I'm not aware of AWS/Google/others reducing prices/providing unlimited plans.

> consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes.

What data centers are bringing cheaper software, unlimited cloud storage (for free?), or lower local property taxes?

> It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.

Is it? Data centers are being built with tax incentives given to the operators, no regard for impact on the local utilities, and they bring no local jobs (at least not long term). Seems like lots of negatives to communities if development continues like this.

I hate company acquisitions.

Not for the aquire-ee(?), I'm not going to be a hypocrite and claim I wouldn't take the payout if I were in that position. But that companies can build massive moats by just buying up as many other companies as possible.

I don't even feel like I can make a "good" argument for it either. Massive companies becoming more massive through acquisitions just feels wrong, like the end game won't work out well for the commons.

I assume the point here is that now Cloudflare can try and push more Vite users into their ecosystem? Nudge the development to integrate better with their products? They say they are moving towards Vite, not Vite moving towards Cloudflare, but ultimately <tool> moves in the direction <owner> decides - even if it's "developed openly."

So give real numbers, not "all day battery life."

What does "all day" even mean? It's marketing slop. All work day? All waking hours day? All 24 hour day day?

An Apple release gives you a number of hours and they tell you roughly how they measured it. This just says "trust me it's good." This isn't to praise Apple, it's just the bare minimum.

> Rated for all day battery life

So vibes battery life. I'm going to assume it's like most Windows laptops and somehow only lasts 3 hours.

The reality is that most people write horrible code.

The programming knowledge of a university student that just completed their intro programming course is abysmal. The programming knowledge of a university student that just completed the 4 year degree, but didn't spend hundreds to thousands of additional hours working on programming outside of that is abysmal. College classes don't expect you to learn programming to any real extent, they expect you to learn computer science. And the rigor of most schools is even questionable there.

I've been programming for a long time and I'm still not sure if what I write is very good. I know it's better than a lot of what I see, but shiny trash is still trash. I've seen astoundingly bad production issues (bugs are sometimes an understatement) produced by senior engineers. Those people have years of experience and I wouldn't trust them to properly review my code, let alone LLM code.

I do think people should try and learn the basics of any and everything, and I mean everything literally. But if you know the basics of biology are you now able to credibly review ChatGPT's medical advice?

In the section "Everyone should learn some coding":

> I would say that the major unlocks are at:

    1-2 weeks: Basic understanding of what the field is about and what general words to use when asking the AI to do something.
    1-2 months: Basic understanding of how and when to ask the AI something.
    4-6 months: Ability to check the output for correctness (using external sources as needed).

1-2 weeks for enough of an understanding to appropriately use terms? No way. Using Harvard CS50 as a reference, it takes until week 2 to learn about arrays.

4-6 months to check output for correctness? Are we trusting fresh bootcampers in their first week at their first job to do prod code reviews now?

You can learn a LOT in a short period of time, but it would take much more than casual time investment. This is insane advice on the level of telling blue collar workers to just "learn to code."

> However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because some people have less.

When did I say that I'm in any way pro crippling other students? I'm simply pointing out the socioeconomic reality of school performance.

Comments like yours are vile. Brimming with vitriol.

Middle class parents are wealthy compared to the average student of a "sucky" school. These schools are typically the in the poorest areas in the state/county.

Okay but if you care this much about school choice why not move to an area with better schools? That's a tool most people already have.

And yes, most people who are complaining about "school choice" have this tool to some extent. Will your living conditions be exactly the same? Probably not.

> At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.

So why don't you take some personal responsibility and put yourself in a residence which is in district for a school that you want your child to go to? Is that not in part your responsibility as a parent? We can both play this stupid game.

Because the "sucky" schools are statistically where poor people go to school, which statistically is where minorities go to school.

School choice is bad because the only people who benefit from school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to transport their child to the school of their choice.

Would the compiler not allocate the memory contiguously on the heap in that case then? Seems like a reasonable thing to do.

Isn't an array of arrays by definition the sequential implementation?

Otherwise you would have an array of pointers to arrays. The usage (syntax) for them would be the same but the performance would not be.

They also have different uses. You would expect an array of arrays to be an array of arrays which share the same length. For an array of pointers to an array you would expect dynamic length arrays contained within the original array.

Even in c++ could you not just define some int [1000][1000]foo? I've never really used C++ but my C knowledge assumption is that is 1000000 continuous elements.

Continuing with your skepticism:

> Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staff

> Enterprise customers are now paying API prices

How long before enterprise customers start to question the bill? Anthropic goes from not making money to doing pricing shakeup, and now they are making money and the biggest spenders are shocked at prices.

Seems like things are still very uncertain.

I assume if they copy pasted the same question it could have been cached? It would seem wasteful for <llm_provider> to not cache responses to exact same questions with exact same context windows (fresh session).

I'm just speculating though.

It's not typical but it's how you should personally act.

You aren't going to be able to convince others to be upstanding coworkers that actually give a damn, but you can be that person yourself.

There is a line between "somebodies job to know" and you just being too lazy to look at the documentation/do basic research.

Obviously publishers provide some amount of value, but for a subset of the media I consume they are not great.

In the more indie fantasy scene authors often pay for editing themselves out of pocket. Often the only "publisher" they can get is direct publishing through Kindle, which then locks them into exclusivity with Kindle/Amazon. It's frankly disgusting but it's a way to help them get paid. I'd rather kick these people $20-50 directly than do anything else.

If I didn't have a resource like AA I would likely read less and in the end spend less on books.

When people around me ask about how to "get into reading" I tell them to just find stuff they like online (via AA) or at the library and go from there. If you don't pay initially you don't feel as bad about trying things that may be "bad" or that you aren't interested in.

I use AA and buy books. Typically I may start a series on AA epubs then buy the books. Sometimes authors take money directly (patreon, straight donations, etc) which is how I would rather pay them than pay the publisher for them to only get a small cut.

Are libraries unethical to use? You can go to your library and read books without paying for them.

The easiest thing for people to do if they aren't confident about their level of stress (moderate vs vigorous vs maximal) is to wear a smart watch with a HR monitor. They aren't perfect (chest straps better yada yada) but you can see your HR zones and if you are in Z1 you are moderate, Z2/3 vigorous.

The language isn't that precise because a trained marathoner is doing 7 minute miles for two hours at 50% of the populations resting heart rate.

HIIT is far beyond vigorous.

Vigorous would be Z2/3 cardio, so like 120-160 BPM for most adults. Moderate would be Z1 90-120.

Once you are capable of doing cardio consistently in Z4/5 with HIIT and tempo training you really don't need to worry about "am I doing enough exercise."

This comment is so absurd I'm struggling to reply.

A car takes you to an "uncommon place in the woods?"

Taking a plane is a "common edit?"

For the majority of people a car would be the "common" usage and a plane would be the "uncommon" usage. Unless you're a billionaire taking your private jet between runways to then hop on a helicopter for the rest of your trip.

It's a terrible analogy.