atomicnumber3

counterpoint: I have smart coding at this very second, and I am running it on 128GB of ddr4 with a 16GB gpu. (Qwen 3.8 Flash Next).

I expect to continue to have this, and more, as smaller models become even more capable. I also expect hardware prices to resume going down once the supply crunch ends.

I see no need to stop owning things or change my expectations around ownership, nor will I accept something like that.

So we get to fight sexism AND bring back cool anachronistic language? I'm in.

Unsloth studio, on a server that I built in 2024 that was, at the time, ludicrously oversized, but is now just ok-sized to run the q4 quant of qwen flash next. (128GB ram, 16GB vram).

I really want to build something less scuffed, but, yknow. So I'm making do atm.

"trillion dollar businesses, built on commodities"

Which ones? I'm looking at the list of companies with > $1T market cap and none of them have commoditized markets. Instead, they all have huge network effects (Apple), enormous legacy lockin (Broadcom), a religious monarchy (...), or are some of the only people on the planet who can do what they do (nvidia, tsmc).

Mind you, there's lots of _billion_ dollar businesses in commoditized or partially commoditized markets. But Anthropic as a billion dollar business is sunk.

I know I'm just one person, but I absolutely detest all of the rhetoric coming from these companies and what it means for software freedom - the FSF kind. I ABHOR the idea that free software developers have to either use the hosted (controlled) service, or go way slower than proprietary software devs.

So I'm doing what I can - I only use local models for 100% of my personal coding. (And their capability is amazing! Qwen 3.8 Flash Next leaves me wanting for nothing at this point.)

And I know open weights aren't enough. I'm ready to support open training if/when we get around to that. I hope once hardware prices ease, we can see homelabbers building small AI hosts (small by homelab standards yknow. So let's say 512GB host ram and 1-2 32GB cards, though i hope we also start to see AI cards with lots of vram but less compute cores). Then maybe we can do folding@home style distributed training.

In a time when software freedom is perhaps more threatened than ever, I'm happy to see that information still WANTS to be free, perhaps even more than ever. Look at how easy it is to distill claude! Despite, presumably, anthropic working very hard to prevent it.

I'm done waiting 6 months. Just let me know the night before when I don't have to come in to work tomorrow.

>explains why the Chinese

I think it's less that they want to encourage deflationary economics - because I think this has a tremendous chance of backfiring given that is not how massive productivity/efficiency gains have turned out in the past.

I think they genuinely want to prevent the rise of yet ANOTHER Western bigtech monolith in Anthropic and/or OpenAI. They want to make sure they have no moat. That keeps the value out of the nascent bigtech and instead in people who can run the models.

People who live longer support their offspring better and they're more likely to survive - providing selective pressure for living longer.

I agree, but Nintendo greatly damaged opposition efforts to timelining by... endorsing one. In an artbook, of all places.

If we're going for a "better for society" angle, I have so many other things that are far more impactful for society and less damaging to the individuals that we will never get around to messing with evicting pensioners so younger families can use their spot to get to school.

IME, local models (so far) cannot do anything resembling "vibe coding" or what I call "high ambiguity prompting."

Ex:

Won't be good at it: "make a web app where you can download files with background jobs"

Much better at: "make a new dbmate migration to create a table with this schema, then write REST-style CRUD methods for it: [pseudocode table definition, you can gesture at types and indexes]"

So, they don't demo oneshots as well, but for actual "LLM-augmented software engineering tasks" they do super well.

I tire of all of this discourse at this point because people who don't need to hear it are reading it and nodding, and the people who DO need to hear it are busy making everything worse, earning leadership accolades (or are the ones handing them out), and are completely closed to any criticism or input.

Anyone with intellectual curiosity and any sense of subtlety or balance is operating in a separate reality from people who are so AI-pilled and very proud of it and there's basically no possible cross talk (usually because the AI-pilled people are the ones who own all the shares).

I say this as someone who really likes LLMs and what roles they'll play in software engineering in the future (and already are, right now).

I can't wait until the AI craze is in the same spot that the crypto craze is currently. People are still using and building with crypto, but the sale of ape PNGs has mostly stopped, and now if I have a problem that a blockchain could solve, I could actually talk about it instead of accidentally picking up a battle standard in the middle of a trench war.

I had wine from the niagara peninsula - it was either cabernet or a cab/merlot red blend. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoy most dry reds (which is a lot). It wasn't exactly the rival of France's appellations (high bar) but still very good.

I consider 99% of my "defense of the architecture" strategy to be teaching my team why the architecture is important, how to think about it, and invite they commentary on it as we own and evolve it together. And of course if they are doing something and want input or are uncertain, then my door is open.

If PRs are a notable part of my architecture defense, I'm going to work on investing in the team instead of reviewing PRs.

If only one person knows the code, then PR time isn't going to save you.

I'm tech lead and I basically don't review PRs, and I tell people this, with a caveat - if you can tell me what you specifically want me to review, for what specific purpose, I'm happy to!

So "can you review this bit for race conditions" is great, love it. This forces people to actually think about what in their code they should be suspicious of, if anything.

"Can you review this" [link to PR] is getting a rubber stamp because humans have never been good enough at "just spotting bugs" to make this worth it and now any LLM is better than a human.

And for the purpose of understanding - PR time is too late. I have not reviewed a PR ("for real") in a long time and yet I could tell you how every system my people have built works down to a very fine level of detail. And it's because _we talk to each other!_ We don't just chill in the same slack channel and code independently, we all value each others brains and want each others inputs because we know it will improve our product and we value what perspectives others will bring.

Trying to learn via PR is a sad substitute for real collaboration and teamwork.