audunw

> has to pull in a whole programing language stack just for it

That’s implying a lot more than I think is the case for Zig.

Zig itself is a very lean and independent executable. It’s just one binary. Statically linked on Linux I believe. It’s even moving toward removing LLVM dependence.

I don’t know of any other language that aims to be as portable as Zig, including C itself. Of course, not all of those goals have been realised yet, but at this stage I don’t think there’s much preventing portability from Zig’s part itself, other than more architectures supported in its own compiler backend. And I suppose a 1.0 release would make it easier to get the compiler more widely distributed.

LLVM codegen is optional, and LLVM is being turned into a runtime dependency.

Zig has its own compiler backend. With limited arch support of course. Only used in debug modes for now.

I think the most interesting part is they rely on WASM for bootstrapping so all you need to make to bootstrap Zig anywhere is a WASM interpreter (if I understand correctly).

Germany has been spending a lot recently to build new power generation. Of course it’s expensive.

France is now on ancient fully depreciated nuclear reactors that are soon in dire need of replacement. Of course it’s cheap. But they have huge investments ahead of them to replace, upgrade, refurbish, etc. They have identified that that need to expand renewable energy to 50% of power generation, at least.

We’ve also seen recently that Germany has had to save France during hot summers when their reactors have had to shut down.

What’s the lesson from France? Build lots of nuclear all at once many decades ago when labor was cheap and then stop investing and letting your infrastructure rot, and you’ll have cheap power for some limited time? Is that something anyone can or should copy today? No.

Now, even VALCOE (value-adjusted LCOE) of wind and solar is coming down well below all other fossil and nuclear alternatives. So how can you say betting on renewables was the wrong at this time? It has been expensive to transition but long term it’s drastically cheaper than everything else. And we haven’t even started getting the benefits of how repowering old renewable power plants is significantly cheaper than building new ones.

Uh, why does that need a stronger term than just “AI”?

I don’t feel like the goal posts have moved at all. I think most of us have a pretty good and stable intuition of what AGI should be. Like, just a generally intelligent robot for instance? Nothing too fancy. Just use one of those robot dogs. Don’t have to be smarter than a dog either. But you should be able to put an artificial brain in it and have something that can act about as intelligently as a dog, in a stable way, over the course of 10 years.

Hell, to make the bar even easier: could make it a believable NPC dog in a game.

We’ve pushed AI as close to edge of AGI as I could imagine. It’s hard not to think we’ll find some algorithm that pushes us over the edge fairly soon. But until we actually get there, let’s not exaggerate.

I mean, when we do get an AI algorithm that can actually learn like a human/animal intelligence.. what would we call it if we’ve already used “AGI”? “Very General Artificial Intelligence”?

I’m almost more inclined to start using “ASI” first. Even if our LLMs are not general in the way I’m thinking of, they’re clearly superior to an average human on every aspect they’ve been trained on. They’re also much faster. We can probably soon say “if you can train an AI on something it will be better than any human”.

I think it’s fairly simple: they’re forced into this situation by being late and worse in terms of capabilities. They’re not far behind, but as long as they’re behind they’ve needed to give people some reason to try and use their models. Cost is one factor. But it probably wasn’t enough. Being open has given them a lot of attention. Free marketing. Good will.

Put another way: if they were not cheaper and open, they would simply not be competitive. They would already be dead.

I don’t think this ends well for the Chinese labs. This is going pretty much like I thought. Western labs is just copying their improvements (I don’t think publishing the techniques matter here.. they’d just hire to gain the knowledge or figure it out themselves), and they have access to more GPUs and have better branding, so in the end where can the Chinese labs compete? Even lower cost? Open weights? I’m not sure open is a sustainable way to compete either. Eventually there will be some fully open source AI models that cuts out that avenue of competition as well.

I’m using Zed, but I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone yet. They claim 1.0 but in reality it’s still beta software. It is fundamentally broken in how it deals with the file system so the project panel and git panel can easily miss changes, and it’s still not clear if they’ll even address it.

At least it seems the next release might fix the bug where the git panel will jump to a different repo when you click on a file in it. They should seriously have fixed basic stuff like that before releasing 1.0. But they got in lots of cosmetic changes to the markdown viewer.. they really need to consider their priorities

What the West is doing is forcing China into a situation which is impossible to sustain when their economic dividend runs out. Especially considering these investments are fuelled by an extremely high level of debt.

And it’s not a given that they’ll catch up. I think it’s fair to say that their development of jet engines is on track to be obsolete before they’re competitive.

They may in principle have established the technologies to be self sustained but that’s only relevant and sustainable if they develop an economy based on domestic consumption rather than exports. Which they are struggling with as well.

Apple threw plenty of shit at the wall when Jobs ran the ship. The hockey puck mouse and the Mac Cube was under Jobs. The first Apple TV. That was pretty much what the Vision Pro is: a side project to test the waters and get some experience with a new format. It’s just that the Vision Pro by its nature is a much more expensive and ambitious side project.

All the three product you mentioned is exactly the kind of things Steve Jobs did. Don’t make him into this mythological flawless visionary.

There’s a huge difference in relying on others for daily fuel/fertiliser supplies for your survival, and relying on them for parts for vehicles/infrastructure that can run for decades.

There’s also the fact that EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled. Once the transition is complete I expect larger regions (ie Europe, but maybe not an individual European country) will be self sufficient in their materials.

> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale.

You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need. What’s more, if you switch to electricity for industrial heating, metal production and fertiliser production, you will have ALL the buffers you need to absorb fluctuations in renewable energy and more. Especially for heating solutions - storing energy for months is trivial. Most people aren’t aware that just dumping excess energy in geothermal wells in summer has become fairly common in the Netherlands. Especially Americans live in this bubble where they have no clue about solutions that have become commonplace and widespread in other countries.

> Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned.

No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance. The only thing that’s hard to replace is the longer hydrocarbons. But we’ve been forced to do deal with that anyway due to better vehicle fuel economy (the amount of bitumen you get when refining enough oil to drive a car X km is going down, giving you less bitumen to pave those X km of road).

> Oil is a must in military.

I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller. Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?

I suspect advancements will reduce need for oil there as well over time. We can already synthesise jet fuel.

> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.

It’s not the magic bullet people think. There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.

The main issue that nuclear isn’t cheap enough to be a part of a full decarbonisation solution. We need the dirt cheap intermittent excess electricity from renewables to make decarbonisation of fertilisers and various industrial processes viable. We have started to get the first local self sustained renewable ammonia production plants for fertiliser recently - and they’re generally tied to local renewable electricity production. The cost of the electrolysis and storage solutions for making hydrogen keeps going down, so it’s increasingly viable to produce hydrogen intermittently and store it to use when electricity is more expensive.

I like nuclear. But it’s not essential, and will probably not be competitive barring a huge breakthrough. And no, SMRs are not it. The way to get the cheapest nuclear is to build the biggest reactors. Same as with wind turbines. The scaling laws favour bigger designs (energy production scales with volume, costs roughly scale with reactor vessel surface area)

I don’t think the cookie banner is useless. It’s annoying the hell out of everyone which is creating political demand for another round of legislation that should solve the issue properly.

It was a relatively easy fix which didn’t fully solve the issue but made the very real issue of pervasive tracking visible to everyone.

If you integrate Zed with Claude Code through ACP you get plan mode (and some other stuff like memory)

It doesn’t seem like AIs are accelerating at all if you ask me. We seem to be plateauing. Smaller and open weight models are catching up to the closed weight frontier models on benchmarks. If AI labs were able to use the smartest models to accelerate their development, the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic would be accelerating away from their competitors. But no such thing is happening. The focus has shifted from intelligence to cost and speed.

The breakthroughs in mathematics are impressive. But it doesn’t feel that different from what machine learning has done with Chess, Go and protein folding. They’re finding patterns in our systems and in nature. That’s what they’ve always been good at.