jcgrillo

Isn't that just like.. what Microsoft has always been? Browser wars, Tay, bad behavior around open source software.. This is how they roll. They're being their best selves.

No, it doesn't. It used to be when the airline lost your bag they would get it to you no matter what. They own their mistake, and make it right to the best of their ability. In the most egregious case I can recall, delivering skis and poles 4hr+ from the airport into a remote mountain village ca. 2003. This is how you build trust in your brand--when you fuck up, you take ownership and make it right. You don't just shrug it off and throw a gift card on the floor like "take it or leave it idgaf".

> My belief in a smooth roll-out is reinforced by those who would probably oppose AVs also not believing it's real. Once the first factory mass manufacturing AVs breaks ground, any limited local opposition can be preëmpted.

I'm having trouble parsing this. If I understand correctly, you're taking skepticism that AV's work as somehow reinforcement that they do work? I have no idea what "limited local opposition can be preempted" means either.. I guess to me it seems the problems are pretty real? Like, police departments are struggling to figure out how to deal with all the Waymos that just randomly tweak out and block traffic, or violate the rules of the road. This is what happens when a bunch of silicon valley con artists try to sell some half-baked plan--it's all about forcing it down everyone's throats and making it "uncool" to be opposed to it for any reason at all. Not merely fake it til you make it, but gaslight everyone into believing anyone who doesn't play along with the fantasy is wrong. Is that what you mean by "preempting local opposition"? Because that's super fucked up.

> Driving is a silly job when you think about it.

OK, so, literally everything that makes your life good you owe to these "silly" workers. Truck drivers make your life possible. You should probably think about that for a bit. Yes, it's a hard job. It's not a particularly fun one. It's dangerous. But it's absolutely necessary because despite the fantasists' and charlatans' claims it absolutely cannot be automated. For all we know, it may never be. That's not to say there's no reason to try--I would love to see road transport be made safer. But there's no clear path from where we are right now to that future, and to claim it's "obvious" or "inevitable" is simply to lie.

I guess once they demonstrate it working smoothly and profitably in cities like Boston, NY, Detroit, etc. I'll be more concerned? Given that it doesn't really even work too well in places with good signage, lane markings, etc--not to mention no weather--I'm not worried yet. And frankly I'm done with "the future". If it doesn't deliver results now, it's not real. Until it's real, it's nothing to get alarmed about.

I've been to san francisco before, it doesn't even snow there

I'm not too worried about it. Yeah, it's bad that people don't understand how labor organizing works. It's bad they're not willing to stand up to shitty employers and take a little risk to make life better. But in this particular case the fear is totally illusory. It's just another silicon valley conman selling some warped "dream" that probably won't actually materialize[1]. "Autonomous Vehicles" are nowhere near production ready, and they're not going to be any time soon. Wake me up when a serious truck or car manufacturer starts rolling them out en masse, then I might start to get worried about it. Until then, it's just about the same category as flying cars--sure, we have these hexacopter contraptions which can (barely) lift a single person for 20min. Not interesting.

[1] Here's how you know:

  “Our goal is not to make money out of this data,” Naga said. “We want to democratize it.”

Look closer, it really isn't good research

I got a well used HP Z840 with 256GB ECC DDR4 and twin Xeons ca. 2014. Then I slapped 2 AMD V640 32GB passively cooled GPUs in it with some 3D printed fan shrouds and 2 1U 15k rpm fans each. They just fit! I needed to order a quad 8pin power cable, the standard configuration has 3 6pin cables--but there's unused pins on the GPU power rail, and there are aftermarket suppliers.

72 Xeon cores

256GB ECC DDR4

64GB VRAM

$2200 total

I run it on a 20A 240V outlet to make sure the power supply can deliver enough watts, but so far it's working pretty well. The eWaste LLM rig is probably not as good value for money as a new machine, but it gets the job done cheaper (for now).

EDIT: IIRC this approach gets me more VRAM bandwidth than Strix Halo at the cost of less addressable GBs (but a lot more total system RAM), but I figured with CPU offloading that might make up for it?

ALSO EDIT: Note you can get a 128GB Strix Halo motherboard minus power supply, fans, case, etc from Framework for $2200.. that could work if you have some parts lying around.

There's an obvious answer... just set up the camera in the conference room where you're running the demo.

Won't the mirrors themselves be unable to get updates from Canonical, though? Or do they distribute them some other way?

This is the message that somehow the tech industry is constitutionally incapable of absorbing. The "innovation impulse" is cancer. I have no idea why tech managers keep harping on about "innovating", it's so bizarre.

Yeah it isn't great. I have stuck with Ubuntu because I have some peculiar hardware which is well supported. I have learned to live with it.

> (1) ...getting paid for doing what a company wants you to do...?

At my previous company, when the thing they thought they wanted me to do (which was not the thing they actually wanted... but whatever) diverged from my values I quit. You can just do things.

> (2) Do you think all this AI generated code is useless?

Almost universally, yes. Especially in organizations that historically haven't been particularly careful about hiring and have a huge number of young, inexperienced people. There are exceptions but they're rare enough that throwing that particular baby out with the bathwater isn't a big loss.

Yeah, it's basically the opposite of how "product-led growth" SaaS works. Generally pay-as-you-go pricing is expensive at scale, but attractive initially. So you start on a pay-as-you-go plan, but as you scale you end up transitioning off pay-as-you-go to a negotiated commit. I.e. you call sales and sign a contract. Anthropic basically flips that around backwards.

If it were 10x productive you'd be able to measure it indirectly, you'd be unable to avoid measuring it. So the initial claims were clearly lies. The research question is:

  Is it >1.0x productive?

I agree that's very hard to measure. But given what this shit costs, it had better be answerable, and the multiple had better justify the cost.

AI token austerity when

just now:

  $ snap refresh
  error: unable to contact snap store

Surely wheel bearings too. And you have to do a safety every year to check for rust perforation (at least in the U.S. states that still do that).

I agree that continuity (and therefore infinity) are really useful tools. But it may also be useful to develop mathematical formalism that hews more closely to that which we can actually observe. Or not! But if nobody investigates we'll never know.

Yes. If a company is running vibeslopped compilers to build their production artifacts I absolutely want to know which one it is, so I can protect myself from their software.

> utterly stupid

That's completely uncalled for.

EDIT: What exactly do you mean by:

> most likely reviewed.

Let's say every line was actually reviewed. That's still nowhere near good enough. The changes are being reviewed by the wrong people. Not the maintainers of the project, just some random folks who have inherited a vibecoded fork.

If you walk up to me and shove a camera in my face I'll get very loud and very angry with you very quickly. That's kind of paradoxical, if you intended the camera to make you feel safer. I don't think I'm in the minority.

Your employer allows/encourages this? Do you run that stuff in production? Would you mind telling us where you work so we can avoid using their products? It is just not possible to trust the software that emerges from the process you've described.

This is an excellent point. LLMs might merely be exposing and amplifying behaviors that were always there. This can be an opportunity, in that shining light on it may allow us to cleanse ourselves of it. It's fundamentally about integrity, and sadly it's becoming clearer how few possess it (if it ever wasn't!). But maybe we'll get better at measuring integrity, and make hiring/collaboration decisions based on it.

> It very well could be an infinite number of atoms and then what?

Where I get stuck with this is how might we measure that? Continuous measurements and infinite measurements are not something we can make. We fit continuous theories to discrete measurements--and the good ones fit really well!--but until we can measure it how can we actually know? I concluded we just can't, and we have to be OK with that.

Maybe an exceptional one will realize the task's futility and invent infinity as a way to rationalize giving up

LLMs are in this case enabling bad behavior, but open source software has always been vulnerable to this. Similarly, people who use LLMs to do this kind of thing are the kind of people who would have done it without LLMs but for the large effort it would have taken. We're just learning now how large that group is.

This is a good thing, it's an opportunity to make open source development processes robust to this kind of sabotage.

> There is a big difference between “infinity doesn’t exist” and “infinity doesn’t exist physically”.

Is there? I think one could make a decent case for "nothing exists which doesn't exist physically[1]".

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

EDIT: you could even probably claim "nothing exists which isn't physically measureable" which may or may not be a stronger claim depending on your point of view.

EDIT AGAIN: rate limited by this dogshit website :D but I'll respond to this comment here:

> Which is exactly why I mentioned rejection of zero, negative numbers, etc. You can reject them, but doing so just throws away useful tools without gaining anything in return.

Yeah! I fully agree. I can see no obvious benefit to rejecting these powerful tools. However, important discoveries often happen in non-obvious directions, and exploring unexplored territory is generally worthwhile. So the fact that it doesn't seem immediately useful doesn't mean it's not worth trying!

All indications seem to be that things are only lost, not gained. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hew closer to how things actually are. But if that's how reality actually is, then developing a rigorous understanding of it can only be a good thing, right?

> Yes, they could on indefinitely

Only if they live forever, which they won't. They can only count so fast, and there are only so many of them. Even if every atom in the observable universe was counting at, idk, 1GHz, that's still a finite number. The universe is not (as far as we know for certain) infinitely old. Time may extend infinitely into the future, or it may not. We don't know. So far as we know for sure everything is in fact finite.

In school I developed a strong hunch that continuity and infinity are "convenient delusions" we have that allow us to process the otherwise horrific complexity of the world. Experiencing time, sound, or visual motion as continuous, rather than discrete signal inputs is so much simpler. Similarly, the mathematical tricks and shortcuts we can use on well behaved continuous functions are both "unreasonably effective" and... probably not grounded in actual reality[1]? But damn are they convenient.

[1] EDIT: the reasoning is simple, if naive: the largest quantities we can measure are not, in fact, infinitely large, and the smallest ones we can measure are not, in fact, infinitesimally small. So until you show me an infinitesimal or an infinity, you're just making them up!