rescbr

Weird. I have seen it asking the harness to do `find ~ -type f | grep` to try and find my agent configuration .json file when I asked it to add a MCP server. Stupid, but they weren't sending the files back home. This was with older models though. Newer ones are a bit smarter than that.

Now, where are the people afraid of the Chinese AI companies, who claim they are going to copy their very precious code...?

How so?

I assume they can spy on anything, that's why I refuse to do any kind of BYOD that requires MDM enrollment. It's also one IT mistake away from wiping out my personal data from my own property.

Company's Outlook, Teams, MS Authenticator and Slack on my personal phone? Ehhhh fine.

The second IT requires a profile it's the second I'm uninstalling anything company related from my phone. They can give me a company phone, or I will only access work related things from their laptop.

Happened twice to me, one time I got a company phone, the other, computer only.

And then some colleagues even paid out-of-pocket to upgrade their Android phones once IT dictated their OS were out of support. No way.

My first phone that had a (rear) camera 20 years ago also had a chrome-plated mirror thing to help us take selfies. I guess nobody called them selfies then.

I guess point and shoot cameras also had those mirrors back then.

Glad to know that kids rediscovered camera selfies.

Nah, I live in a major city between two airports, under an airplane departure and a heli route. I can't really launch rockets or balloons from my home.

When I was at uni I didn't have the funds for this hobby unfortunately.

You can use a FPGA, like this 2013 project: http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPS/Main.htm

Or go old school (1991-1992): https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/navsats/theory.html

So yeah, this regulation is absolutely an inconvenient measure.

That's why I said "inching towards", not that it already is.

See how people are being treated in ICE detention camps. See how protests are getting violent with law enforcement officers donning military gear. Your mass media is built for consumption and conformity, not reality. The fact that news channels can say whatever lies they want on commentary programs, washing their hands without any reprisal is telling. You don't need to censor the media if the media is already self-censoring and self-serving due to the fact that it is owned by oligarchs.

What outsiders see is history repeating itself.

And I'm definitely concerned that the US could revoke/not renew my visitor visa based on online posts like this one.

I've been to Beijing International Airport on a layover, and at least the Chinese are on your face about being surveilled. Giant cameras everywhere, to access wifi you had to scan your passport, the Great Firewall is a reality etc.

Meanwhile lots of my personal data is hosted in the US via Google and Apple and I have absolutely no doubt that if some American authority decided to trawl around my files they absolutely could if they follow the (American) due process.

> Why do you think it's better that a country that turns its citizens into a pulp for criticizing the government, and censors most media to control its citizens' thoughts, reach SI before one that is democratically elected and in which you can generally criticize the government?

Which country are you referring to? As an outsider who is neither American or Chinese, day by day it seems like the US is inching towards the same path as the criticized one.

You can keep the radiators in place when using mini-split heat pumps..

Of course not, those are clearly scams. On marketplaces, no matter the country, caveat emptor, as always.

My problem with buying SSDs on AliE is with reasonably priced products that use NAND chips with no consideration for their quality grade. Vendors are not transparent.

NVMe SSDs are usually better in this regard, but SATA SSDs became a nightmare to purchase.

Solar panels + cooling + heating heat pump is the most logical combination as we are past the point of no return on global warming.

And there's no need to be like the Americans that cool down to 18°C when the outside is > 35°C: simply decreasing the indoor temperature to saner numbers like 26°C is enough, it's summer after all. Less energy usage and it is enough for the body to be happy.

Having cabled my apartment with Cat 6 definitely made me prefer fiber, it would have been a breeze instead of pulling thick cables from my office to other rooms. Cat 6 also shouldn’t be bent or you risk it going out of spec, and modern fiber nowadays have bend radius comparable to (or even smaller than) Cat 6.

I see how sloppy some FTTH installs are and they all work fine, and this is for light that travels for long distances.

The only advantage copper has is PoE.

> With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative

American companies, you mean.

Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.

The problem with these drives is that you can't ensure the grade of the NAND chips. They could be A+ grade with great endurance but they could also be bottom of the barrel.

I had two KingSpec SSDs sourced from AliExpress that failed too soon: one used YMTC and the other used Intel chips. Both failed within 1 to 2 years.

I have another one which is 5 years old by now.

For me it works fine outside of afternoons Beijing time on weekdays.

Z.ai legacy Pro coding plan which will last me until the end of the year + maki.sh as the agent.

OpenCode works fine, i just find it very resource intensive for no good reason.

I understand your point (and definitely want the same), but I do have an almost-AliExpress-LLM-in-a-box: it's an Thunderbolt eGPU dock (that I got from AliE, and it is USB-C...) with a RTX 4060 Ti with 16 GB of VRAM (bought locally for gaming before the price boom)

It's been awesome for embeddings and document OCR!

3D printing a case for it is on my todo list.

> The most interesting thing I've learned so far is how clustered startup activity is in a handful of areas.

They are clustered like any other white collar company in the city, around the various historical business districts, and IMHO they could be thought as mirrors of the founder's personality to choose where they want to base their office: old downtown with cheap rents on decadent/retrofit old buildings; Paulista Avenue and Jardins with great public transportation, culture access and eclectic food; Pinheiros as the upscale cool foodie district which is now gentrified as fuck and losing its soul; Faria Lima as the core financial district; and Vila Olímpia southwards as the Faria Lima wannabe with AAA buildings but not as expensive as renting in the middle of Faria Lima.

If they need to divert inference resources to train models, this counts as a compute deficit to me.

I'm using GLM-5.2 daily for my own stuff, and during Chinese business hours, specially on their afternoon, it's a festival of rate limits.

The whole AI industry was built upon stealing IP.

The extreme of this is to make IP laws irrelevant and that everything should be in the public domain.

Which maybe is not a bad outcome for humanity as a collective after all.

While people fly to the US to buy Macs at a lower price and bring them back in their backpacks, I guess I'll be flying to HK to buy a Chinese GPU rather sooner than later...

> Any passionate engineer will recognize this - if you grind 10,000 hours you will find the solution to most problems, the problem is most people lack the motivation to even start, and are too risk averse to play hacker.

This. I'd love to spend my whole day hacking stuff, but I need to pay my bills.

Now with AI tooling my late night/weekend hobby hacking stuff is at least getting done. I'm definitely progressing with things that I began 2 years ago and I had to stop as other life priorities took over.

Currently they are the ones who are publishing stuff in the open. The American discourse is to close this market.

I'm not Chinese or American. If China exports their AI technology and the US doesn't, I know who's going to be my supplier and I'd be very happy to pay them.

If they block access to their own citizens, to be frank, I could care less.

If their Party has their own version for what happened in the Tiananmen Square, so be it. They want to do business while the US is being hostile to everybody else.

> people tend to be pretty slow to update their networking assumptions, so this is still pretty common.

My ISP doesn't do CGNAT in FTTH deployments, but I'm paying extra for a static IPv4 allocation anyway since I was increasingly getting hit with captchas every time my IPv4 rotated to flagged IPs that were trashed by my fellow subscribers with poor infosec practices - i.e. 99.9% of residential subscribers.

Once I got a static allocation, captchas are getting easy to pass.

> making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.

So giving another win to China?

Maki is awesome. Thanks! I'm using it on my X220 and it flies in comparison to OpenCode et al.

I very much prefer Outlook's indexing compared to Sharepoint's shitty UI and search capabilities.

I do think the discount is believable, but we don't know the line items AWS applied a discount/removed charges.

The developer said the agent deployed multiple CloudFormation templates, I'd bet that AWS waived the charges for the unused resources - like EC2 instances that were idle most of the time, very high margin SKUs, etc.

Now, for 100 Gbps of egress (which didn't actually happen) - and this is grounded speculation - I don't think that AWS would give a discount that is greater than CloudFront rates.

100 Gbps is A LOT of data.

I’d say to use a payphone if you need to do that, but then my age is showing, as this is not possible anymore.