mrngld

This has been an interesting thing for me to watch as it's such a case of people having widely different experiences. I'm sure people that didn't grow up on a keyboard like me can probably talk quicker than they type, but even aside from me being a fairly good typist my speech is held up by being a bit more halting, a bit more of backtracking on word choice, sometimes not quite the same 'voice' of writing as I'm aiming for, all of which obliterates any speed advantage it'd have for me.

But happy to see people get more options.

This reminds me of Eternity's End by Jeffrey Carver and the implants they had. Released in 2000 but the more time goes on the more the neural implant technology is coming about. To be fair I think Enders Game had similar tech to detect subvocal speech like this product.

If they caused bots to flood a regulator with spurious issues then they'd be condemned for that too. Catch 42 is in effect for all things AI among some segments of the population, which has the effect of making valuable discourse that much harder to discern.

Like my other comment, this might be a public-vs-private sector misconception. I can't help but notice my own employers IT and design departments, which both lean pretty right, openly use Codex to help with about everything. One group is even training their own model at the moment. And our marketing team, which is solid blue? They're the only team in the company allowed to use both Claude and ChatGPT because they claimed, repeatedly and loudly, that both were critical to their jobs because Claude was better at design (they say) and Chat for everything else (again, their claim, not mine).

No one wants a data center in their back yard, but in the private sector I think adoption isn't as political as some make it on Hacker News.

You can't use mathematics without understanding it?

Let's say GPT-23 Astra grinds away for a full month one day and out pops a warp drive. Our best physicists ask it to explain. The resulting stream of text is essentially incomprehensible. But, they build a scale model at its direction to test and sure enough it does the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.

Are you saying we shouldn't hop aboard the USS Enterprise and check out Alpha Centauri because we don't understand the math?

I think what's really happening here is that there's an ivory-tower academic class that feels entitled to make their living at public expense thinking about and writing about their topic of interest, and along comes a new tool that's changing that dynamic up. Meanwhile, in the real world, the value remains with people who can take whatever the tool of the day is and do useful things with it. Which, I think, is why despite all the talk the only professional job losses blamed on AI appear to largely be companies that had a failed strategy of some sort or another and used AI as a boogeyman to do the layoff that they needed to do anyway. To people living in the private sector this isn't seen as a dangerous invader, LLM's are productivity multipliers.

Tempting to think that, but that logistical miracle machine that thus far no one has been able to fully replicate is expensive. Their global operating margin ex-AWS (which is a whole different beast) was 6.8% in Q2. (AWS was 39%)

That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.

Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.

I can't remember what YT channel recently did it, but they compared name brand batteries, third party batteries and knock-off batteries (equivalent to Temu) for some power tools.

The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.

The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.

Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.

I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.

Your local homeowners association would like a word.

I use a Raspberry Pi, not a VPS -- as others state, Codex/Claude Code alongside things like Cloudflare and Tailscale make self hosting far easier.

People have commented a lot already, but one thing I do that I haven't seen others already doing yet is I run a news summarization pipeline with Miniflux and Flatnotes.

All my feeds are in one of two categories; Summarize and NoSummarize. Once a day, a script fires at everything unread in the Summarize category, pulls the full text from Miniflux (or calls a scraping service if it appears to only have an article stub), groups similar articles to together with a 60 to 80 word summary, and for everything not grouped together it gives each article a 20 word or so summary. Just enough for me to know if it warrants a full read or not. Then it takes that a posts the digest to a markdown file in a Flatnotes folder. Flatnotes I expose via Tailscale Funnel so I can read it anywhere, including on my work laptop if I'm at the office.

Why Miniflux and Flatnotes and not other options? Mostly because those two are about as lightweight as it gets with still pleasing interfaces and basic features.

I saw all the Netbird recs here so looked into it briefly. Depends I guess on what you use Tailscale for. Tailscale Funnel is easy and stable. Self-hosted on Netbird is ... a bit more involved.

Definitely a place for both services, IMO.

Yes, seriously, my intro to linux as a kid was seeing the slick Red Hat boxed media on the shelves at CompUSA.

Did you see the 'thrift store' part of his comment? I do the same thing as him, and depending on the location around town, an ISO on a DVD can be as little as 50 cents, and a modern Linux ISO on bluray, including 4K (though rare I see those) are rarely over maybe $3.

That's not what any benchmarks that look at cost per task or similar says in terms of cost. The Chinese models, generally speaking, might be cheaper per token but need a lot more tokens to get there.

Most of the comments so far are pushing or pulling the clock in whatever direction their personal preference is. Call me crazy but the time should be a constant, unchanging reference.

If it's dark in your location earlier in the evening, don't mess with the clock. Agree as a local society that instead of working 800 to 1700 at some point in the calendar most people transition to 700 to 1600, if that's a local issue.

Edit: Or negotiate that with your boss. Most of my team works 8 to 5, I work 7 to 4, as long as its consistent no one cares. Obviously retail employees can't do that, but customer-facing people are working past dark no matter what if it's an afternoon shift.

The avalanche of lawsuits that every NGO that hadn't been paid off would file within minutes that'd extract the same toll in terms of years, plus potentially even higher legal fees.

I appreciated the dust removal, briefly tried to run a little side business scanning prints (as glossy prints is all most people have left) and slides with a mirrorless camera + macro lens and dust was one of the issues.

The other was reflections. The camera with its 80MP resolution RAW was great in general, not hard to get better results than an Epson V600 could. The slides were easy, I rigged up a little black box to keep stray light out and backlit with it with a clean source of light, but reflections on glossy prints killed the whole operation. My last idea was taking the photo at an angle so the picture would be angled toward something featureless (and preferably black) and then correcting the perspective in post, but that had the potential to introduce focus issues (my DoF with my setup was roughly 1/32") and maybe slight (probably imperceptible?) differences in resolution across the image. Tried polarizing gels over the light and lens and that reduced the problem but didn't eliminate it.

Some people on YouTube claim to pull off this feat but I think they're either tolerating slight reflections or engaging in magic.

I for one am content to be digital from the start with my images.

Edit: Oh, and keeping prints flat was another engineering undertaking. Glass introduces all kinds of variables, including megatons of dust. I settled on a DIY vacuum box system of sorts with a shop vac, lots of little holes drilled into a box to create some suction to hold a piece flat.

I worked for a small manufacturing company some years back, and depending on what you're doing it's easy to rack up some huge file storage usage and big databases without being in the business of video, photography or music. The database that only ran our manufacturing, not inclusive of HR, accounting, etc., was about 1TB. The design files that went to the plant (most of which were just text, you could open them with Notepad) were another 3 or 4 TB worth. Maybe another 1TB or so for various collateral bits of data related to jobs, mostly PDFs.

The company has, I'm sure, probably tripled all that by now. In their case it compressed really well, but still.

All that to say, YMMV, significantly.

NetDynamics shares some promo codes every so often, they have a data center in Utah as well as the EU. I wouldn't call it super low latency -- but backup generally doesn't need to be. I've used both at various times for a personal off site backup target.

But for commercial use, IDK, you'd want to dig into the details of their system. Not exactly S3 levels of resilience, but perhaps enough for some people, I leave it to others to judge.

No, that became a norm in management thinking back when HR was just a back-office role processing time sheets and punch-cards.

Even today, the primary concern when I'm talking to other managers dealing with job applications from family members (including kids) and even friends of existing employees is "How does the existing employee react if it doesn't work out and we have to fire their spouse/kid/best friend?"

Better to avoid that drama entirely. (edit: EASIER to avoid that drama, I should say, but perhaps not always better)

And if you don't think management isn't at least 60% drama control between team members you've never been in management of a diverse set of people, which is why the best engineer, the best electrician, etc doesn't necessarily make the best manager, etc. Different skill sets, different universe of concerns.

That's not how economics works. Everyone pretty much everywhere throughout history has worked, they've worked because if you don't work it eventually means you starve, so people in less wealthy countries didn't just start working since 1990. And yet, since 1990 the number living in extreme poverty globally fell from 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million, the big majority of those in sub-Sahara Africa.

https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty

Random citation, I think the situation is actually a little better than they do, but that'll do since they present some data in an easy to read way.

The standard of living went up because productivity and value creation went up significantly. That's the only way that happens.

You didn't compare apples to apples, housing in 1950 was radically different than housing in 2026. Homes today are significantly larger, better insulated, vastly more robust construction codes, more technology incorporated (not least of which is air conditioning, which was just starting to be a notable thing in the 50s, didn't become truly mainstream until the 70s).

Real estate is a very local thing, so I can't speak to your area, but 1950s equivalent homes in my area are still impressively cheap. Why? People aren't interested in a 900 to 1000sqft home with no central AC. There's cities in this country that will give a run down property like that to you for free if you agree to live in that little town for a certain number of years, or at least there used to be. Those things come and go.

Also, because that's not what they want, the neighborhood becomes a meth lab. But if people actually wanted those homes that issue would resolve itself.

The data doesn't all support this common misconception. Really, it's an intentional deception on the part of many people who know better.

That discusses 'superloads', I hadn't heard it called that before but it's accurate in the sense that things like self-propelled modular transporters (or towed equivalents) can move just about anything just about anywhere IF the road infrastructure all along the route is amenable to it.

Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.

If the argument is, in part, about footprint then enough solar and battery capacity to output 300MW around the clock with the same uptime/reliability as a nuclear plant is surely going to cover a lot more ground.

I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.

There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).

I've been a sub with Kagi for several years. Very happy with search. I'm about to step down from Ultimate to Pro tier. Their 'Quick' and 'Research' Kagi Assistant modes are kinda incredible, probably thanks to being fed good search results and to some extent whatever custom system prompt they've cooked up, but I can't quite justify it when I'm also paying OpenAI for a sub there. But $10/mo for top-tier search is easy to justify in the time it saves me.

I tried DDG many times but I think they use Bing on the backend, and, well, Bing doesn't suck just because Microsoft gimps the front end. Bing sucks because enormous indexes are hard. Kagi pulls from multiple sources so gets fundamentally different results.

I think legal jurisdiction matters in discerning these things. The EU or US both have courts that, despite anyones opinion, are regarded as having robust contract enforcement. If Fireworks is domiciled in either then claiming ZDR and instead training on the data would be an enormous financial footgun. There's reasons why companies on both sides of contracts, even those with little to no US or EU activity, agree to use US or EU courts for enforcement.

Hong Kong I think used to be a popular option as well, before the handover from the UK.

Being terminally 'online' can make people cynical about everything, but have to temper things with reality a bit too.

Codex had no problem developing a big plan for me, but I didn't ask it to proceed. Maybe you're right and it'd of got shy at some point along the way. Thanks for that other thread, I must've missed it. Definitely going to fire up Stars! this weekend one way or another.

Yep, I showed my little ones Odell Down Under in the browser at one point, they loved it. A certain amount of that old software I copied to .iso from my physical CD's, but not sure where I could grab something like Encarta 96. Legally.

Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.

Corrected title: My Childhood Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini

Depends on what level of intelligence you're wanting to use. A vanishingly small number of people can or would want to go to the hardware expense of running something like GLM 5.3 Flash, much less something like K3.

And if you want Astra/Fable/Opus frontier level, then there's no option at all.

But if you don't need that, or you don't need speed... That opens up the discussion. I've been impressed even with how Siri's been doing with the Apple Foundation Models in MacOS/iOS 27 given how small they are.

Edit: I can't even fully spec the M5 Ultra Mac Studio you'd need for GLM5.3 Flash since 512GB isn't available yet, but it's already at $9500 for 256GB RAM.

We've got the technology to drill deep bore holes, kilometers below where water will move on any time relevant to human existence, where we could stick what small amounts of dangerous material is left.

Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.

Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.

It's interesting that they're feeling emboldened enough these days to not hide who they are and what their agenda is. That general movement had a slow motion replay of the Bolshevik vs. Menshevik action, where the moderates (like Patrick Moore, Michael Shellenberger) got purged, and after quite a long time of having an established, comfortable monoculture now they're starting to no longer feel the need to create fake narratives around why nuclear or mines are bad, now they're just straight up saying they want civilization to collapse. (Which is what would happen, there's never going to be any such thing as an orderly impoverishment)

Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.