afiodorov

So far really wasn't an issue - I put $5 there and forgot about it. If traffic explodes will probably offer bring your own key or add credits/ads. Also just providing MCP for your agent to use is an option.

She was not offended but thought I could benefit from therapy. She didn’t share my opinion - she said it’d not bother her if AI could eventually solve problems for her.

I later realised that my motivation depended heavily on believing I was making a contribution that would otherwise go unmade. The prospect of AI doing that work undermined my motivation, but it needn’t undermine hers. I was trying to explain why I was struggling to continue, though I can see how calling the work “pointless” came across as dismissive.

I used to be a PhD student more than a decade ago, and I published a paper containing a solution to an open problem. Yet shortly after my first publication I became increasingly disillusioned, because I started to think that within my lifetime AI would reach and eventually surpass my ability to solve such problems—and that we only had a decade or two left.

So I started saying that it only made sense to focus on problems whose solutions would be useful immediately. I even emailed my supervisor about it, arguing that our efforts were “pointless” in the sense that AI-related problems were much more pertinent and had to be prioritised.

My supervisor thought I was bonkers. I still have the email, though. Quoting myself from April 2015:

> By 2030-2040 we will have enough computing power to simulate a human brain neuron by neuron. Once we manage to create a human intelligence we will be one little step away from super intelligence: just set the intelligence to modify itself and see the exponential growth in action. Our human intelligence is bounded by a number of biological factors (e.g. size of a skull) and even the smart human who has ever lived will appear to be a primitive ant to a supper intelligence (machine intelligence will also have perfect motivation). There is plenty of literature on this if you are interested in discussing this further. > > What does it have to do with research in pure maths? I can say that research in pure maths which won't come handy in the next 60 years is just wasted effort. The super intelligence will be able to do maths way better than humans. I believe a lot of current efforts should go into researching of artificial intelligence (or areas to do with AI) instead rather than the pure maths. I want to be proven wrong but most mathematicians I interact with are too narrow-minded to counter me and they just laugh about even contemplating the above. Frankly I am myself so perplexed that I take the above seriously, but I do and it's hurting my motivation.

I'm quite curious what my supervisor thinks of that email now.

I prefer getting rid of old devices that needing to store old cables ad-infinitum.

The running costs are very low. Since posting it today we burned 30 cents in DeepSeek inference. Postgres instance though costs me $40 a month on Railway; mostly due to RAM usage during to HNSW incremental update.

Daily updates I do on my m4 mac air: takes about 5 minutes to process roughly 10k fresh comments. Historic backfill was done on an Nvidia GPU rented on vast.ai for a few dollars. If I recall correctly took about an hour or so. It’s mentioned in the README.md on GitHub.

Apparently Persian and Russian are close. Which is surprising to say the least. I know people keep getting confused about how Portuguese from Portugal and Russian sound close yet the Persian is new to me.

I've found that building my side projects to be "scalable" is a practical side effect of choosing the most cost-effective hosting.

When a project has little to no traffic, the on-demand pricing of serverless is unbeatable. A static site on S3 or a backend on Lambda with DynamoDB will cost nothing under the AWS free tier. A dedicated server, even a cheap one, is an immediate and fixed $8-10/month liability.

The cost to run a monolith on a VPS only becomes competitive once you have enough users to burn through the very generous free tiers, which for many side projects is a long way off. The primary driver here is minimizing cost and operational overhead from day one.