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jamesblonde

4,744 karma · joined October 13, 2013

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jamesblonde··on It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge
This just confirms to me that the devs who are furthest from users (platform and security folks) are still in denial about AI for coding. The idea that they continue to react to security and privacy threats by relying on hand-crafted code is ostrich-like denial of the reality of daily security breaches at much larger, better resourced companies.

AI is a tool - like a compiler or a pen-testing tool or maybe like an uber-tool that can do all those things and more. It's not hard. 24 hours - put your best pentester against GLM-5.3 abliterated (host locally, so there's no data leakage to LLM providers). You know who will win and it won't even be close.

jamesblonde··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
This is the beginning of a flight to perceived quality in all things digital and monetary. Fear of losing your money is among the most potent basal human instincts.
jamesblonde··on We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
I have access to a server with 4 x h200 cards - 540 GB in total memory, but it appears I have to go to 4bit or 3bit even to serve it. Any idea if that is feasible/desirable (we have restrictions that we can't use a chinese model!).
jamesblonde··on Solar panels that plug into your wall
Is this Germany - is there a subsidy included here?
jamesblonde··on How big is a Git commit?
Git was designed with assumptions about local file storage which make it challenge when storing data in a distributed file system. We built our distributed filesystem, HopsFS, to store data in S3. To support high performance git in FUSE, our writes hit remote NVMe disk(s) and asynchronously sync to S3 (you can replicate on NVMes or just do failure recovery). Previously, we used remote NVMe disks as a write-through cache, but that doesn't work with git, S3 latency is too high.
jamesblonde··on Mistral Large 4
That was my point - it needs to invest its capital in Europe. That will solve its ails.
jamesblonde··on Mistral Large 4
As Rutger Bergman says about inequality: "it's taxes, taxes, taxes..."

For Europe, it's "capital, capital, capital".

jamesblonde··on 118M Queries per Second on Neki
In 2015, MySQL Cluster (NDB Cluster engine) benchmarked 200m transactions/second on commodity hardware [ref]. It was read-committed transactions, not snapshot isolation, but still impressive. NDB has now become RonDB, but is still based on a non-blocking 2-phase commit protocol and is GPL-v2.

RonDB now has support for infiniband, so ought to blow through the 1B ops/sec. For reference, that is 1 GHz of transactions/sec.

[ref] https://www.slideshare.net/frazerClement/200-million-qps-on-...

jamesblonde··on A Preview of DuckDB v2.0
DuckDB's sweet spot is for 'smallish' lakehouses. So, ingestion should not be via duckdb, but rather something like Python/DLTHub for small scale or Spark for large scale or Kafka/Debezium/Flink for streaming data.
jamesblonde··on Qwen 3.8 27B
For the full weights, unoptimized on vLLM with 2 Nvidia 6000 RTX 48GBs connected by NVLink, i only get 14 tokens/sec with open-code. For batched operations, it climbs to 55 tokens/sec.

For FP8, on a single Nvidia 6000 RTX 48GB, i get 13 tokens/sec on a single GPU and 46 tokens/sec batched.

jamesblonde··on CATL Secures 2GWh Sodium-Ion Storage Deal with Solarpro for Eastern Europe
Sodium-ion batteries are only starting, their price floor in a few years will make solar energy unmatched in price for energy production.

This is the first proof point that the technology is viable - a customer is stumping up big cash.

jamesblonde··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
Fifa is a reflection of the world. All members (nations) get a vote. Most countries are corrupt. Thank go there is still a bastion of democracy/fairness left in Uefa.
jamesblonde··on Netflix Simplified Batch Compute with Kueue
Yes, coding agents have reduced the skills/knowledge required to operate workloads on virtualized hardware. K8S and its ecosystem has changed so that it now provides 90% of what you need from the public cloud providers. Big changes that make 8-15X savings by running your own workloads. I think it will be the big players who move first, as they have most to save and have the resources to make it happen.
jamesblonde··on Netflix Simplified Batch Compute with Kueue
It certainly feels like Netflix is now a k8s shop. And it probably only a matter of time until they start repatriating workloads to optimize for costs. Then the world will sit up and notice.
jamesblonde··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
It took me 5 years to get the boat - a 22ft daycruiser with toilet. That was 15 years ago, haven't looked back. Got a daycruiser from the UK. Drove there, bought a trailer there, drove it home. Arbitrage during the financial crisis - half the price of the same boat in Sweden at the time.
jamesblonde··on A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent
The name of the agent is 'finn' - is that a reference to Intercom's Fin agent?
jamesblonde··on European AI. A playbook to own it
I lead a European owned and operated Data/AI company, Hopsworks. We are the only competitor to Databricks/Snowflake/etc based-in and from Europe. We can still compete, as we have a deep research/industry background (ex-MySQL and KTH folks). Crossing the chasm is harder from here. Even if you build a great product (we are best at real-time AI) - we had a paper at SIGMOD 2024 where we showed higher thoughput/lower latency by a factor of 4-40X Databricks, AWS Sagemaker, and GCP vertex - we lack the echo chamber. (Try the mental exercise where Databricks' peers acknowledge massive over-performance through a peer-reviewed paper and imagine how much noise it would generate). Still, we can replace our competitor at their largest European customer, Zalando, for real-time AI. But it's a much harder slog than it should be due to the 10X lower round sizes (due to 10X smaller VC fund sizes). European pension funds place way more money in US VC funds than in EU VC funds - that is self-defeating.
jamesblonde··on S3 Files
How could they release something that doesn't support atomic rename and has no prospect of supporting atomic rename? Lots of workloads will crash and burn on this layer.
jamesblonde··on S3 Files
Files can be immutable if you have mutable metadata - but S3 does not have mutable metadata, so you can't rename a directory without a full copy of all its contents.

Immutable files can be solved by chunking them, allowing files to be opened and appended to - we do this in HopsFS. However, random writes are typically not supported in scaleout metadata file systems - but rarely used by POSIX clients, thankfully.

jamesblonde··on S3 Files
We have advanced to building S3 stores with claude code - impressive:

https://github.com/fractalbits-labs/fractalbits-main/graphs/...

jamesblonde··on S3 Files
S3 Files was launched today without support for atomic rename. This is not something you can bolt on. Can you imagine running Claude Code on your S3 Files and it just wants to do a little house cleaning, renaming a directory and suddenly a full copy is needed for every file in that directory?

The hardest part in building a distributed filesystem is atomic rename. It's always rename. Scalable metadata file systems, like Collosus/Tectonic/ADLSv2/HopsFS, are either designed around how to make rename work at scale* or how work around it at higher levels in the stack.

* https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/scalable-metadata-the-new-bree...

jamesblonde··on The revenge of the data scientist
I say this quite a lot to data scientists who are now building agents:

1. think of the context data as training data for your requests (the LLM performs in-context learning based on your provided context data)

2. think of evals as test data to evaluate the performance of your agents. Collect them from agent traces and label them manually. If you want to "train" a LLM to act as a judge to label traces, then again, you will need lots of good quality examples (training data) as the LLM-as-a-Judge does in-context learning as well.

From my book - https://www.amazon.com/Building-Machine-Learning-Systems-Fea...

jamesblonde··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
There has been a lot of proposals to dam up massive unpopulated sea-facing valleys in Mayo and Donegal and use pumped hydro with seawater. Was a bit topic 15 years ago, but never happened. All that happened was the silvermines pump hydro plant that seems behind schedule.

Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland

jamesblonde··on LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
The reference in the text to Anthropic’s “Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models” is related to RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback).

Claude code uses primarily different "pathways" in Anthropic LLMs that were not post-trained with RLHF, but rather with RLVF (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards).

So, his point about code being produced to please the user isn't valid from where I am sitting.

jamesblonde··on Nobody ever got fired for using a struct
Here is an article I wrote this week with a section on Feldera - how it uses its incremental compute engine to compute "rolling aggregates" (the most important real-time feature for detecting changes in user behavior/pricing/anamalies).

https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/rolling-aggregations-for-real-...

jamesblonde··on Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play
Another headline would be: Founder saves 10X operational costs by investing time (and with Claude's help) to migrate off AWS.
jamesblonde··on European Tech Alternatives
They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.
jamesblonde··on TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
That, too, and materialize. Feldera is my favourite, though.
jamesblonde··on TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
I gave a talk at PyData Berlin on how to build your own TikTok recommendation algorithm. The TikTok personalized recommendation engine is the world's most valuable AI. It's TikTok's differentiation. It updates recommendations within 1 second of you clicking - at human perceivable latency. If your AI recommender has poor feature freshness, it will be perceived as slow, not intelligent - no matter how good the recommendations are.

TikTok's recommender is partly built on European Technology (Apache Flink for real-time feature computation), along with Kafka, and distributed model training infrastructure. The Monolith paper is misleading that the 'online training' is key. It is not. It is that your clicks are made available as features for predicitons in less than 1 second. You need a per-event stream processing architecture for this (like Flink - Feldera would be my modern choice as an incremental streaming engine).

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skZ1HcF7AsM

* Monolith paper - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663

jamesblonde··on Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud
it's whitewashing. The US Cloud Act means they can still take the data.
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