MerrimanInd

Even with a free tier, having the gall to charge 20% more than Red Hat does for their enterprise Linux workstation license is pretty ballsy. And Red Hat is putting actual significant software engineering into their offerings to make Linux more commercially viable, I don't know what this ~10 person HW/SW company did to Fedora to add $240/yr of value.

I don't understand this at all and I've deployed Linux machines to workstations and factory environments.

It's an "all in one" in that it has compute and a keyboard. But the mouse isn't integrated (literally just a wired mouse you lug around with it) and no display. So you can't actually walk it right up to a bench and start using it like a laptop. It has built in storage for your "stuff" but again, it's not fully portable so what else are you going to be carrying with it? Is it supposed to be used by a developer or a technician? And if a technician, why portable and why a non-standard keyboard layout? I haven't even gotten to the Workbench software yet, which seems to be appealing to neither an engineer nor a technician and is a Linux OS that somehow costs more than Windows.

This is silly and it bothers me more than it probably should that they say this "is designed for offices, workshops, labs, and factories" when this doesn't seem like they've spent any time in those environments. I'm just gonna keep shipping Asus Nucs running NixOS to my technician workstations and let my engineers use laptops.

I'm not an AT Proto wizard (there's a lot of good text and video explainers out there) and I know that Tangled is building on it but also adding their own functionality. But from a high level, I register my 'knot' with my account on Tangled.org which is exposed through a public domain. In my case that's routed through a Cloudflare tunnel to a reverse proxy running on my server. Tangled is then running an "app view", which is basically an aggregate of a subset of AT proto activity. So my commits, PRs, releases, etc go into the app view which then points traffic back to my server. So the long and short of it is the app view is the missing piece of the AT proto system and you have to register your data with an app view provider, of which Bluesky is the most prominent. But there are open source app views, in fact the Tangled team just announced one called bobbin that's super resource light.

Additionally (and optionally for Tangled use), I'm also hosting my own PDS which is my personal data server. This is the home for my AT proto profile, which contains all of my AT proto activity like Bluesky comments and likes. Tangled does look at the PDS for identity but the code is in the parallel structure of the knot. I suspect this is cause AT proto wasn't built for code so the PDS isn't sufficient for an entire git repository but don't quote me on that.

Finally I'm running a spindle, which is just a CI runner, and that's registered with Tangled very similarly to how a self-hosted GitHub or Gitlab action runner would be.

I've always suspected that at least some of it is information laundering.

I used to work in engine development and calibration. There aren't many people who know how to do engine cal and it's incredibly important to get your engine emissions certified to sell in a market like the USA. The problem is that most people who know how to do it work for a car manufacturer (OEM). So when I had that on my LinkedIn I would get pretty regular messages from some consultancy or another offering hundreds of dollars per hour to chat with me about my expertise. Of course I couldn't go talk to a competitor but I'm sure a lot of engineers were happy to make a few hundred bucks chatting with some generic consultant who was writing a general industry report with anonymous data and background info.

Well the customer was usually a competitor or a foreign automaker exploring entering the US market. Everyone who could help them understand the timelines, cost, and process worked for their competitors. So the critical info got passed through consultancies into sanitized anonymized reports; laundering.

Note: I'm not sure whether talking to a consultancy would have violated my employment contract at the time but I never took the calls so I had no reason to look it up. I know that coworkers did and just called it a gray area. I pass no moral judgement one way or another.

I recently got a spindle and a knot set up on my home server (along with Tranquil PDS). A few rough edges that we got ironed out but it's cool to have all of that self-hosted on my own machine yet still part of the AT proto world! I'll be honest, I'm not putting anything critical on it yet but that's my lack of trust in my own home server setup not doubt in Tangled's infra!

A better web UI for the queued jobs on my spindle would be great btw!

One way to phrase that would be to say that you have a vested interest in supporting the idea that end user skill is more important than ingredients since you sell a means of improving end user skill. Not sure if that's a source or a conflict of interest. I'm not saying cooking a steak is easy or hard, I'm saying that you are not creating quality when you cook a steak; the maximum attainable quality is capped by the ingredient. It's like the "I made this" meme.

You're arguing against a strawman on your other points since I didn't make a generalization about all cooking and wouldn't have listed sourdough or brisket in the analogy.

But the point is that no matter how well you cook the steak you're not creating quality, you're just getting the most out of what you have. The cow and the farmer created that quality. I believe we lose sight of that because so much of the value chain is not visible to us and we hyper fixate on the fun part, becoming a better barista/chef.

I'm more of a coffee nerd than a steak aficionado but I've often made the comparison between those two. In both cases, the enthusiast considers their skill in making coffee/cooking steak to be a differentiator and they immerse themselves deeply into the process, skills, and tools. But for both coffee beans and steak the most important factor for a good end product is starting with high quality inputs. In other words, most of the work is being done by the farmers, the processors, and the quality of the raw stock (the cow or the coffee plant). Your job at the very end of that long value adding chain is to not ruin the hard work that others have put into it.

I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.

Zoo really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They got so many things about CAD right (new kernel, solid UI, programmatic language with either graphical or text editing) then they went and did this extremely online-only/SaaS model where they're rendering and streaming the 3D from their cloud. And last time I checked your design files live on their cloud.

That's just not an acceptable modality of software for complex hardware industries. I'm not going to launch a half-decade long engineering project on a subscription software where I rent access to my own design files and logic. You can't access CAD on a plane, in flaky WiFi, or at a remote test facility or site. Until they let me just buy and run their software on my team's computers it's a non-starter.

Climate change is another big problem that frontier AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI. The premise that a pure superintelligence could hand us a plan to beat climate change that's so good and airtight that A) it would definitely work and B) people would execute it.

But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change and yet they're under utilized because of a complicated and murky set of political, social, and systemic reasons. There are a huge numbers of problems for which very good solution plans have been detailed yet the gap is in execution.

The AGI-pilled must think one of two things; either there's an as-yet-undiscovered plan that's both world-changing yet trivial to implement or we'll all worship at the altar of the machine god with such fervor that even if it spits out a relatively obvious and iterative climate change plan the world will eagerly follow it. Both premises seem laughably unlikely to me.

20GB isn't enough for a 13B parameter model? I thought the 29-31B models could run on a 24GB GTX x090 card?

I'm currently shopping for a local LLM setup and between something like the Framework Desktop with 64-128GB of shared RAM or just adding a 3090 or 4090 to my homelab so I'm very curious what hardware is working well for others.

Looks like Azure might be the common denominator.