markerz

Speech-to-text models are a lot less open than text-generation models. There's a lot less competition in the space. I can also see this space being enterprise heavy, and could command more dollar premiums. I noticed this when shopping for a STT model for a vibe-coded transcription app. You'd need to pay to get the good ones that support diarisation. There's okay ones that support simple transcription that are open. The good ones charge a premium.

This game is quite interestingly fun despite how basic it is.

Well there’s https://disconnect.blog/peter-thiels-influence-over-a-networ... and https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/1lrc27y/how_do_tolkie...

The models are likely to check certain places. So either their training overrepresents it or the models were RLHF'ed to go there. I don't think it's that far away from checking StackOverflow for some bug, or reading Wikipedia for some trivia.

Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.

Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.

What about companies purchasing enterprise contracts? Most contracts are minimum 12 months. At a minimum, to secure enteprise requirements like zero-data retention, you'll need to lock into a single provider.

These price reductions are mostly targeted towards self-serve customers on individual or small team plans, where individual choice matters and the friction of changing models/providers is low.

So Next.JS actually pre-fetches links when they move into the viewport or you hover over it. It's interesting, but then you get wasted battery on mobile while on bad networks. The world is full of tradeoffs. Tech workers tend to want to consume more battery and data to be faster. Other people want to do less work.

https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/prefetching#hover-trigger...

In my view, websites should not take seconds to load with gigabit fiber. Whatever happened to "mobile first"?

Yeah. I've never done that. I can see the value in it, though.

Personally, I do a Kagi search, or I make an LLM do it for me.

I highly prefer word-of-mouth recommendations like Reddit, HackerNews, or Lobsters. It's quite easy to browse threads where people mention hating some package and switching to something else. It's also a lot easier to see gamified posts (astroturfing), whereas it's really hard to judge projects on GitHub. So many forks are distractions, and stars mean so little. As such, I highly value a personal blog post.

Similarly, I look at what the projects I find link to. They'll often be "inspired by" another project, or a rewrite in a different language. It's a great way to see how different creators consider trade-offs between different projects.

I only browse someone's GitHub when I see an insightful blog post, and I want to learn more about the author and what they work on. Usually I close that tab within 10 seconds cause I can't be bothered to figure out which of their 100 repos is interesting.

My best analogy is that GitHub is the TripAdvisor/Yelp/Google Reviews of finding a good restaurant. Those platforms have been gamified aggressively. The signal is low, and you can't flatten judgement of a restaurant into a 1-5 star scale. Your best bet is to find opinions tied to real people that aren't tied to points.

I had a Japanese teacher a few years ago who explained that Japan's ramen is the US's "burger and fries". It's calorie-rich processed food that's available everywhere. They are prepared in advance, served very quickly (usually within a few minutes), and people finish their meals within 15 minutes. It's far closer to "fast food" than most Westerners realize. The average ramen outside Japan is far more elevated than within Japan.

Are we using GitHub differently? I don’t understand how the social network part of GitHub has to do with having your code discoverable and to discover.

I’ve never stumbled upon a project by browsing GitHub casually. It’s always through finding the product first and trying to find the source code. If the source code is on some other website, I’ll probably figure it out, but it’s be a new muscle. Same with making an issue or a PR. The barrier is higher but not so high that I wouldn’t complain about a bug.

If anything, I find the social tools on GitHub like PR reviews, issue management, and notifications to be terrible for their job. Perfectly fine for a 1 person project and absolutely awful for a team.

In my world, most multilingual speakers are children of immigrant families, and that transcends socio-economic boundaries. Plenty of immigrants were already wealthy before coming to the SF Bay Area, where we import highly educated, specialized workers. On the other hand, we also import physical laborers who are also generally multilingual but not in the same social class.

Some of these immigrants are very well supported with a strong social network, while others struggle with isolation.

I’m a particular fan of the ai-for-brains emoji in Slack

https://slackmojis.com/emojis/63197-ai-for-brains

I suspect it’s by construction, looks like they’re offering every permutation of treat choice twice.

Below, I filtered for A vs E, the top two choices. Notice how they switch left and right hand each time:

A/E :: A

E/A :: A

A/E :: E

E/A :: E

A/E :: E

There’s a few polls that have shown most people use AI, but they also dislike it. I’m in that boat, where my company pays for my subscription, and I use it to be productive. But I don’t really feel good about it.

https://gizmodo.com/people-hate-ai-even-more-than-they-hate-...

There are plenty of providers of open models that offer very affordable rates. Generally, I recommend looking at OpenRouter since they track various metrics for the various providers.

The loss with age is super commin, and all in the same direction (people hear more flat but guess more sharp).

> Like, do you even understand what you're saying?

That comment is unnecessary and has the effect of making people feel bad.

I think the rationale is that wages are stagnant in comparison to investments (stocks) and costs (inflation). So there's decreased incentive to focus on wages as a form of income, and more incentive to focus on investments.

I've definitely felt this personally, as my income shifts towards investments, my will to work for a wage has decreased. That shift has increased because I've accured more investments, but also because investments have grown kind of ridiculously compared to my wage.

If Strava is sharing or reselling users GPS locations to third parties without user consent, yes.

Took me a bit of digging but I found this screenshot of fox-news.in: https://urlscan.io/result/50f1da5b-5b1f-417c-91b8-8690638a6e...

That URL is linked from https://assets.recordedfuture.com/insikt-report-pdfs/2023/ta...

Which is linked from https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/russian-influence-ne...

I have a wife. I love my wife. My wife loves me. I cannot return my wife’s love for me at the same amount or manner. She loves me more than I can ever love her. She loves me in ways I can never.

It’s very poetically written and sounds very loving. My simple translation loses a lot of beauty.

> they attract birds that that poo on vehicles

I think this is a tree density problem. Most cities have a small number of trees, and they’re almost always over cars. These are trees that line streets and parking lots. Without trees, birds just have telephone poles and wires, which are also over the cars.

In San Francisco, we have a lot of trees on most of our streets, and many parks small and big, all full of trees. This means birds spread themselves out everywhere, not just over cars.

I think the true barrier to getting more trees is that individuals tend not to want to pay for and maintain trees. This includes caring for the tree, trimming it when it gets bigger, and cleaning the pollen, leaves, fruits, and branches that fall.

Cocaine (the powder) is extracted from the coca leaf, which indigenous South Americans have chewed for over 8000 years. While the synthetic drug is insanely addictive, the natural form is still commonly used as a mild stimulant, probably safer than caffeine in coffee. So yes?

Surely, they don't spend $500 per month, though, as the quote implies.

re: the phone number

Businesses really underestimate how much having a human representative helps customers feel connected to a business. I see it in corporate sales (B2B) where accounts are pretty much tied to the account manager. When the manager leaves, the companies refuse to renew because the account was only good because of the manager.

I think of my favorite businesses I regularly visit and they all have a memorable face to them. I feel more than a consumer. They help me understand the product and guide my decision making. They tell me when my order doesn’t make sense. And they refer me to other places they recommend. Or they tell me my problem is real and a mess, but assure me they’ll fix it.

You don’t get that with AI chat bots.

LLMs will always have the tool call overhead, which I find to be quite expensive (seconds) on most models. Directly using vector databases without the LLM interface gets you a lot of the semantic search ability without the multi-second latency, which is pretty nice for querying documents on a website. E.G. finding relevant pages on a documentation website, showing related pages, etc. Can be applied to GitHub Issues to deduplicate issues, or show existing issues that could match what the user is about to report. There are plenty of places where “cheap and fast” is better and an LLM interface just gets in the way. I think this is a lot of the unsqueezed juice in our industry.

> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction. If a company requires 13 people to sign off on a hire, it… implies a fear of making mistakes… The company with 13 rounds was fishing for a reason to say "no”

I realized this at my current job. The decisive interview decision and feedback impressed me. Once on the inside, I could see how the “bias for action” and push for decisiveness permeated the whole company. PRs get approved timely. Meetings push for a conclusion. When someone complains about being stuck, neighbors will offer advice or even a helping hand. I’m so much more productive here than anywhere previously, and I owe it to the culture. They WANT people to succeed. But success comes with risk of failure, so the culture needs to accommodate some failure to allow people to safely take risks.

I’m my interview, I misunderstood the question and presented a solution. The interviewer tried to correct me but I didn’t understand what my mistake was. They encouraged me to just go for it. I eventually realized what they meant, I corrected myself and all of it was a stronger yes signal for them. I push forward, see mistakes, pivot fast, and iterate quickly on feedback.

Interviewers are often unsupportive or looking for a reason to say no. It screams that they’re not really “desparate to hire” and in-fact, may be difficult to work with.

The problem with LLMs using full-text-search is they’re very slow compared to a vector search query. I will admit the results are impressive but often it’s because I kick off an agent query and step away for 5 minutes.

On the other hand, generating and regenerating embeddings for all your documents can be time consuming and costly, depending on how often you need to reindex

Health care software with HIPPA compliance? Or SOC2? It’s not the same but it’s a high degree of regulation.

For those unfamiliar, personhood status for environmental protection is real (beyond what the original blog mentioned)

NYTimes: In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’ https://archive.is/H5fq8

Nat Geo: This Canadian river is now legally a person. It’s not the only one. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/these-rive...

I wonder how our mental model of nature will evolve over the next decades. For example, in the early 1900's, the United States had more laws protecting animals from overwork than it did for children. That feels unfathomable in today's United States, where animals are treated more as property than people. Perhaps something similar will happen, where we will understand everything as a "legal entity" that has protections.

While I think I understand your point, there’s probably a few ways to look at this.

One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.

Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.