johnvanommen

I vote for number 2.

> Organizing and iteration on thoughts is not trivial or easy, but it is very important!

Two of the silliest things that helped me in my career:

* I worked at fast food restaurants in high school. This instills a near pavlovian response to client requests; if at the age of sixteen you can deal with someone who's mad because there isn't enough cheese on their pizza, it goes a long way in the real world.

* My first I.T. job was in an office where the vast majority of the people who worked there had never used a computer at all. Just to stay employed, I had to resist the urge to explain things in a complex way. When I'm trying to sell an idea to a group of people, I do my best NOT to ignore the people in the room who may not understand that idea well. I think that engineers often have a bad habit of getting into engineering arguments with management in the room, where they take things to a level of complexity where management may not understand what's being talked about. Bringing things back down a few levels goes a long way towards getting management to sign off IMHO. Unfortunately, it's a double edged sword, and it can fall flat when management is especially well informed. Classic information asymmetry.

> Indeed, Gemini really is incredible at image analysis. Yesterday I pointed it at some sloppy handwritten notes and asked it to add up the numbers in the right column, and it did it no problem. I've also used it to find out what TV show or actor is on screen, and various other things. It's quite impressive.

I do not know if it works as well as Gemini, but Salesforce (of all places) has a model that does something similar.

What's "neat" about the Salesforce one is that you can run it locally and just iterate it over as many images as you feel like.

For instance, it should be possible to take a movie, pull a hundred images out of the h265 file, have the salesforce model evaluate what is happening at that moment in the movie, and then use that to create an index.

That's just ONE use for it, and I can think of dozens.

On a 5090 it was able to generate text descriptions of a folder full of approximately 500 images in under a minute. (Anecdotal evidence, admittedly.)

https://huggingface.co/Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-base

I just looked up some articles on it here, and it looks like it's fairly old, so YMMV.

> A lot of industries got bitten by greed and the sudden deflation of demand and huge unsold inventory post COVID.

I’m betting that the world is about to hit a wall of inflation.

https://i.ibb.co/s9Mm8w2r/IMG-0743.jpg

This is a graph I made.

It shows:

* the inflation rate from 1971 until 1991

* the inflation rate from the start of COVID 19 until today.

Does anyone notice anything interesting about the graph?

> You assume demand for AI stays flat.

RAM has become an asset class, like real estate, or orange juice, or cattle, or collectible cars.

It’s wild to see.

I don’t know if there is an options market or a futures market for RAM.

But it seems inevitable.

Imagine the United States hoarding RAM the way that nations of old hoarded gold.

> I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.

* when interest rates are declining, that’s a feature not a defect

* when interest rates are rising, that’s a defect not a feature

Southwest Airlines built its business on these kinds of bets.

> If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

Leave a bad review where their social marketing team will see it.

> Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours for cancellation

I moved into a new home. I kept the old one for a few weeks extra. Needed time to move out.

I signed up for CenturyLink at my new home.

After six weeks, I tried to turn off internet at my old house.

* I can’t.

* CenturyLink wouldn’t let me cancel, without waiting on hold for an hour or more

* I work overnight

* CenturyLink is open when I’m asleep

So I’m paying for two plans with the same company. Thanks CenturyLink.

I keep trying to convince people that English majors and Philosophy majors will benefit the most from LLMs. English majors in particular, have been trained to be VERY exact in how they word things.

That awareness of how to structure the English language, it will benefit those who use LLMs.

Then again, maybe someone will just make a LLM that’s built to turn poor English and poor reasoning into excellent English and excellent reasoning. Maybe this is just a technical puzzle that needs solving.

Yes, this will definitely renew interest in Stadia type products.

What if this is the lowest that prices will ever be?

I believe msrp is $2000 right?

Possibly the best deal there is

I really need to shut up, or bite the bullet and by one.

If you graph the tokens per second on the 5090, your jaw will hit the floor at how cheap it is

Nine years after Google's seminal paper lit the fuse on AI, a total lack of manufacturing foresight has trapped over a trillion dollars of incoming capital in a hardware bottleneck.

The entire sector is now facing a critical RAM starvation crisis where memory manufacturers are actively slow-rolling supply just to keep prices high and avoid running out entirely.

This has created an unprecedented supply-and-demand distortion where desperate companies are getting rejected even at a 5x markup, and mission-critical SKUs are skyrocketing to 10x and 20x their baseline value.

It is a macroeconomic squeeze at a staggering scale, and the massive venture scale opportunity lies in capturing the value created by this memory gatekeeper.

From the perspective of an armchair economist, the winners will be the investors who invest in RAM wisely. The losers will likely be cash strapped SAAS companies. They’re almost completely dependent on a fleet of servers in the hyperscalers, and they’re leasing those servers and services. That leaves small SAAS companies exposed to incoming inflation in the cost of hosting.

I really don’t want to give anyone ideas, but doesn’t this make the Nvidia 5090 an unbelievably good deal right now?

The VRAM in the 5090 is only made by one country in the world.

The 50xx series is special, because its ram is so dependent on a single commodity. It’s not like a 4090 or a 3090; their VRAM chips have been around for years.

If there’s a shortage or interruption in DDR7 VRAM, it seems like every GPU that requires it would explode in value.

I hope I don’t regret posting this because I’d really like to buy one myself…

If you wanted to brute force it, it might be possible to have it generate a hundred outputs and then include a second pass to automatically select the generated model that most accurately resembles the expected output.

Basically leverage the randomness to create many variations, then select the most accurate variation automatically.

Terribly wasteful of time and processing power, but so is using GPU time to make pretty pictures randomly.

> So I would really appreciate a good AI/LLM tool that I can feed my sketch and parameters and it can save me hours of searching web and watching tutorials on how to extrude a circle over a curve

I think this is possible, but the ‘trick’ would be translating your instructions in English into some kind of language that the CAD software understands.

I’m on a bunch of 3D printing forums, and everyone tries to describe what the finished product would LOOK like. They end up making PICTURES when what they really want is a STL file.

Two dimensions are easier to visualize then three, so let’s put it this way:

If you wanted to turn “English” into “a 2D image that’s dimensionally accurate”, you’d want to translate from “English” to “SVG.”

SVG is dimensionally accurate. JPG isn’t. The file format itself has no concept of “dimensions” only “pixels.”

> So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.

Ouch. Great point.

Car emissions are far lower now. I lived in CA when the air was grey in July.

That ended a long time ago. A modern Honda generates something like 1% as much pollution as a car from the eighties.

> CA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited

A big one is a lack of pipelines.

As I understand it, California sits on so much oil, nobody has built a pipeline.

Building an energy pipeline in California is like bringing sand to the beach. The energy is already there.

Anyone who lives in an apartment or condo will have a difficult time charging an EV in CA.

> One of the explanations I've heard is that a lot of traders were caught out by how quickly the economy rebounded from COVID-19, so they're overcompensating by underreacting to the current situation.

Yikes.

The reason Covid wasn’t as bad as it could be was WFH.

There’s no equivalent for oil. You can’t grow food at scale without fertilizer.

> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.

I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.

Within 18 months I was unemployed.

There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.

But it all came back, and more.

> Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.

That's basically where I landed. The idea being that making art is something I should do if I'm just trying to relax. Once the hobby starts looking like a second job, I know it's too much.

> To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.

That's EXACTLY how I used to feel about creativity. I was an art major who didn't make it, and I found that expressing myself via my hobbies was good for the soul.

Then I almost died and completely lost interest in making art!

Facing my own mortality, I realized that the time I invest into my wife, kids and family will have a larger positive contribution on the world, I think.

I know that sounds like a Hallmark Card.

At the same time, I've often wondered what my life would look like if I appreciated my family MORE and my hobbies LESS when I was younger.

That is a heck of a graph

> The US media has completely fooled the public into thinking their town is a violent hellhole, and that a trip to the grocery store is endangering their lives.

I used to live in both Seattle and Portland.

I took my family to Portland last year and wanted to show them the Ground Kontrol Arcade.

Before I even parked the rental car, some vagrant on a BMX bike threatened to murder us.

Right? It’s the obvious question:

why are they using software to detect software?

I can detect AI written prose in less than five seconds; I would expect a trained teacher to be able to do that as well.

Great summary.

Art Bell is another one:

He was on at one in the morning, and a big chunk of his audience was calling in to the show drunk or high. 99% of the audience knew it was fake.

And twenty years later, the conspiracy stories live on, via YouTube, but without the CONTEXT that the Art Bell show was broadcasting to a VERY niche audience.

> Society owes them care for bringing them into it, and if society defaults on this debt then society ends.

Society owes you nothing.

Your premise is false.