state_less

I thought I made it clear, I'm not against data center build outs per se, a community might decide it's worth it to build one. If a community decides to go ahead with it, make it clear and open for the public to bid on it so the residents get the best deal available (e.g. reduced power bills, reduced property taxes, water usage limits, noise/light polution limits, whathaveyou...). These massive data centers are a new kind of business that most communities don't have much experience with, and I doubt they've had time to codify the rules. It sounds like the states are starting to add some more rules about transparency, which seems like a step in the right direction for making better deals for all involved.

Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.

In another life, I would do things like measure the cost in developer time of bugs making it into developer repos vs. the cost in time of running tests in CI to catch such bugs, so evidence based decision making. It was mostly ignored, and at first I was surprised. A multi million dollar organization of people making negative EV plays, which I chalked up to the political pressures being more important than the wastage. More on that later.

As far as estimates go, I've also struggled with the industries cult(ural) rituals. I tried to put forward a Gaussian based approach that took into account not only the estimate of time, but the expected uncertainty, which is still probably off the mark, but at least attempts to measure some of the variance. But again, the politics and the rigidity of the clergy that has built around software development blocked it.

On the bright side, all this has helped me in my own development and when I think about software development and estimating projects. I know that outcomes become more chaotic as the number of pieces and steps compound in a project (i.e. the projects normal curve widens). You may not even get the project at all as defined at the outset, so my normals approach is still not quite the right tool.

I think this kind of thinking can be helpful when working solo or in a small group who are exposed to market forces. But for solo and small groups, the challenge isn't so much about the estimates, it's about how you're going to fight a battalion of mercenaries hired by big VC money and Big Tech. They can often afford to be inefficient, dump in the market, because their strategy is built around market control. These aren't practices small players can afford, so you need to get creative, and try to avoid these market participant kill boxes. And this is why, coming back to my earlier point, that often times, inefficient practices and politics plays a big role. Their trying to marshal a large number of troops into position and can afford to lose a few battles in order to win the war. The big money plays by a different set of rules, so don't worry if their doing it wrong. Just recognize your in the army soldier!

We had an Asian store across from the middle school where I hung out and we played Street Fighter for hours after school. The second generation Hmong that came out of the Vietnam war would would hang out and play. We all loved it! I'd often play Ken and they'd play Ryu, haha, we love our avatars. Sometimes I gave them a run for their money, sometimes they taught me new techniques, like a new sequence of moves.

Some of the other kids on my street went to private schools and I think they missed out on some of the lessons/bonding I got from interacting with a variety of people in public school. It's good to get out into social setting and mix it up with folks.

That electric train is a nice image. India has plenty of opportunity to take advantage of cheap solar power and push cargo around the state with it. They are adding more electric vehicles by the day, which will help places like Delhi become more breathable, though the last time I was there, farmers were still burning the fields, causing a lot of air pollution in Delhi during the burns. The manufacturing base is improving, so you can buy relatively cheap vehicles.

Your money goes further in India. Their tax collection is pretty weak, so they print money to fund government spending which usually means higher inflation than we're used to in the US, but they're starting to get a better return on their infra spending as the country is lifted up via the use of the most recent tech (trains, smartphones, fiber, solar, battery, etc...).

It's been fun watching the country and region develop over the years. They still have a ways to go, and in some ways I think I'll miss the old chaotic India. You don't find cows wearing decorative garlands in downtown Chicago or New York. I bet whatever India transforms into, it'll hold some of it's unique charm. That's my hope anyway.

>>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.

>They kind of are though?

Splitting[1] is a psychological phenomena that you'll find often once you learn to recognize it. Google can both be doing great research, and run a significant influence operation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.

I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!

I'm almost there, but the mobile operating systems (compatible with the phones i have) are a snag at the moment.

When I'm on my bike, it's difficult. I will ride no handed and change a track, but it's more dangerous than it needs to be.

I might switch back to my iOS device, but what I'd really like to do is replace the Andriod OS on this Motorola with a community oriented open source OS. Then I could start working on piping the mic audio to my own STT model and execute commands on the phone.

My Android phone comes hobbled unless I give it all my data to be used for training data (or whatever). I just asked, "Ok Google, play youtube music." And it responded with, "I cannot play music, including YouTube Music, as that tool is currently disabled based on your preferences. I can help you search for information about artists or songs on YouTube, though. By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity."

I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple command to play some music to work.

"Oh no it's GPT, a Generative Pretrained Transformer shaped into chat responses."

Chatgpt is a proprietary eponym[1], like kleenex, or Google for search. That's a relatively strong attractor based on their first mover status. I nevertheless use tissues, and search engines like brave search, sometimes duckduckgo, and claude or openrouter for my LLM models.

I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.

The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.

1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.

There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.

https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo

Yes, all else equal, we want lighter motors in vehicles.

I'm always interested to hear about the latest in lighter and possibly more powerful and torque-y e-bike motors.

For radios, the general idea of building radios to a spec and having them certified to be sold in country works pretty well most of the time. It might be nice to have a phone with plenty of flexibility on the radio, but I think most folks would be happy just to connect and send work-a-day packets OTA unencumbered by additional restrictions.

It seems like a hardware security device could act similarly to the radio in that the general OS can ask for service (e.g. a signature), but not have access to the internals of the MCU. I don't see why these systems need to be opaque either, in fact it'd be nice to know what is running on the security enclave or LTE radio, even if folks aren't generally meant to access/modify the internals.

It'll be interesting to see how things develop. In my case, I am looking for more experimentation with the smartphone form factor. I'd like to see better options in the market.

I booted Slackware from a pile of floppies back then. I thought the Germans had a pretty good offering with SuSE at the time.

Look I get it, even back then, most folks felt Windows was the obvious choice (and still do) for their jobs and so on. Sometimes you have to make do with with the unappealing choice in front of you.

For a little more context, my cracked screen iPhone can still do banking or whatever, but I chose not to pony up $800-$1200 for a new iPhone and bought the cheaper $350 Motorolla. It works for me and I think I'm not entirely alone. There are probably some cracked phones, some handme down phones that folks could use for those situations where you really need to use the closed platform, but otherwise are free to use something more open.

Back in '99 Linux didn't run Excel/Word/Powerpoint or most games, but I ran it anyway. What others call showstoppers are for me inconveniences.

I have a motorolla edge 2024 that I'll load whatever open source phone OS will work well enough to place calls and browse the web. I'll keep another phone for the rare times some corporate/government overlord requires it. Many folks who refuse to use smartphones, similarly own a smartphone they rarely use for systems that require them.

My recommendation is to put as little time and energy into closed, locked down platforms as you can. Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.

> it's worth investing a lot of resources in sandboxing.

I tend to agree. There’s an opportunity to make it easy to have Claude be able to test out workflows/software within Debian, RPM, Windows, etc… container and VM sandboxes. This could be helpful for users that want to release code on multiple platforms and help their own training and testing, which they seem to be heavily invested in given all the “How Am I doing?” prompts we’re getting.

At least we can be assured our capitalistic system will distribute the wealth to those who most deserve it.

To be fair, it isn't $1000-2000 extra, it's the new laptop/pc you just bought that is powerful enough (now, or in the near future) to run these open weight models.

That's great to hear. I was mostly impressed with Qwen3 coder on my 4090, but am hobbled by the small memory footprint of the single card. What motherboard are you using with your 3090s? Like the others, I too am curious about those esp32s and what software you run on them.

Keep up the good hacking - it's been fun to play with this stuff!

Interesting, the pacing seemed very slow when conversing in english, but when I spoke to it in spanish, it sounded much faster. It's really impressive that these models are going to be able to do real time translation and much more.

The Chinese are going to end up owning the AI market if the American labs don't start competing on open weights. Americans may end up in a situation where they have some $1000-2000 device at home with an open Chinese model running on it, if they care about privacy or owning their data. What a turn of events!

So we're celebrating the real numbers, but maybe we should hoist up the illusory numbers? Back in the day, they thought that some numbers were "imaginary" numbers (e.g. sqrt(-1)) and nowadays, engineers use those imaginary numbers all the time and they feel as real as the reals.

So, here's to math keeping our imagination limber and extending our ideas of what's real.

That's interesting! I'm supposing you've been really afraid before, and you'll know it's quite an agitated state to be in. So normally, without fear, folks will be more at peace, more at ease.

As far as sociopaths and egomaniacs go, my experience is that they are usually quite fearful, though they try to mask it with compensating measures. You might feel bad for them if they weren't so often spoiling other peoples fun with their antics.

Have you considered who you would be without your fear?

What if you had nothing to fear and nothing to doubt?

Here's a few general observations.

Your LLM (CC) doesn't have your whole codebase in context, so it can run off and make changes without considering that some remote area of the codebase are (subtly?) depending on the part that claude just changed. This can be mitigated to some degree depending on the language and tests in place.

The LLM (CC) might identify a bug in the codebase, fix it, and then figure, "Well, my work here is done." and just leave it as is without considering ramifications or that the same sort of bug might be found elsewhere.

I could go on, but my point is to simply validate the issues people will be having, while also acknowledging those seeing the value of an LLM like CC. It does provides useful work (e.g. large tedious refactors, prototyping, tracking down a variety of bugs, and so on...).

Who makes the markets in India? Is it the big Indian banks, or do these multinational trading firms act as market makers? If so, how do they distinguish between their trading and market making activities? It seems like it'd be relatively easy to rig a market (control the price) with enough capital and management over the trading.

What does SpaceX have to do with the Musk/Trump spat? Shouldn't those SpaceX contracts be based on how well the country is served by them and at what price.

Trump needs to take his lumps on his BBB. That bill is full of pork for billionaires and cuts funding for poor folks. It should come as no surprise that people don't like it.

Too little inequality means there is nothing to strive for, the ambitious won’t have much reward to work for.

Too much inequality means too few participants in the economic decision making process which leads to instability (i.e. the mad king phenomenon). We are getting closer to the point of instability now, as we reach higher levels of inequality.

Reminds me of the last lines of the diamond sutra.

> So you should view this fleeting world—

A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.