foxylad

Joined 16 years ago

Karma
2,184
Submissions
544
Member since
Jan 11
Founder of an ethically-run (and profitable!) online services company, based in the heart of the Southern Alps in New Zealand.

Our flagship service - School Interviews - is used by 5,000 schools and 2.5 million parents each year, in 30 countries.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
Non-LLM user here. Why? Apart from the ecological issues, I'm very uncomfortable giving my organisation's crown jewels to {random_internet__corp}. Look at the lengths they go to for training data - 10M for Spirit's call logs? Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them? They make meth-heads look scrupulous.

Your prompts, especially if they contain your entire codebase, are _way_ more data-rich than an airline phone call or 1920's novel. So they _are_ going to train on them, no matter how many checkboxes you tick to stop them. Which is both a commercial risk and a massive new attack surface.

It's not just software developers; if law firms aren't controlling any public LLM prompts _very_ carefully, they can expect some meaty client confidentiality suits. In fact any organisation in a competitive environment should be worried: Acme Bolts: "Write me a presentation for Zoom Construction". Beta Bolts: "Is Acme Bolts pitching to Zoom Construction?"

Maybe this is part of why OpenAI and Anthropic are finding demand softer than they would like. And why open-weight models that organisations can run on exclusive hardware are thriving.

Comment · 2 months ago
Same, tinnitus and floaters. And the number of others with both makes me wonder if they are correlated.

I've lived with my floaters for twenty years or more, but sometime on a recent holiday the biggest one moved slightly to obscure the central vision on one eye much more often. Now when a floater in the other eye drifts onto the central area, I just can't focus. I have to flick my eyes to the side hundreds of times a day, and it's annoying enough that I'm considering a vitrectomy.

Comment · 3 months ago
This is right up there with Google suing another company for scraping their web site. https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/12/google-lobs-lawsuit-a... - which a judge just dismissed.

Maybe the techbros are playing irony roulette, seeing who can get away with the most outrageous hypocrisy.

Comment · 3 months ago
Adding...

I hate LLMs because their pushers are hurrying us into the next financial crisis, which will impoverish another generation.

I hate LLMs because they have captured pretty much all R&D investment when we have far more important and urgent existential problems to solve. The world is literally burning in front of us, but no time for that because an even bigger model might make 0.03% less mistakes.

Comment · 4 months ago
Conversely one leg would be cheaper and lighter. I look forward to welcoming our hopping robot overlords!
Comment · 4 months ago
Perhaps he does - dontgive.af does not resolve.
Comment · 5 months ago
The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates.

The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet.

We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).

Comment · 5 months ago
Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak. His somewhat voluminous rantings contain raw figures on investments, data centre builds, energy availability and depreciation.

He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.

And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.

Comment · 5 months ago
Did you find a credible solution for heat dissipation in the papers you read? I fear the laws of thermodynamics will kill this project.
Comment · 5 months ago
> What users want...

Take a step back. What users want is to be able to use the machine they bought the way they want. The outrage is because Bambu are doing a bait-and-switch: selling an autonomous 3D printer, but switching to a 3D printing service. Enshittification pure and simple.

Comment · 5 months ago
Same, but the first printer was an Anet A8. Moving to a Prussa Mini was a breath of fresh air, going from 35% to 95% print success.
Comment · 6 months ago
I only open VSCode when I need to resolve a conflicted merge. The Zed interface is basically diff2, and doesn't show character-level differences.

Apparently Zed was working on a better diff viewer, but that seems to have been shelved.

Comment · 7 months ago
I prefer the Fediverse to BlueSky, because it solves your three problems.

I choose to see every post on my (small country) instance, so if there is an echo chamber, it's an instance-shaped one. Which I like - I see the range of views prevalent in my small country. "Elite" posters depend on posting good content and are rewarded only by other people boosting their posts.

I tend to use Mastodon which makes finding a post's popularity a click away, and so emphasises posting for interest instead of outrage. This may also be an artifact of living in a small country that expects more civilised discourse from it's citizens.

Having no algorithm definitely makes the Fediverse more "boring" - I had to persevere after moving from Twitter. But I soon realised this was due to the lack of outrage, and that that was what I wanted, and what I was seeing was far more "real". Big fan now, and it's made my social media consumption a lot healthier.

Comment · 8 months ago
His (compelling) evidence for that assertion is that printers still jam after 40 years. For humans, writing something on a piece of paper is absolutely trivial, and if something goes wrong, grabbing a new piece of paper or a pen is also trivial. Computers _can_ now write on paper tolerably fast and well, but they absolutely can't handle even simple failure modes. And the real world is _massively_ failure-prone, in contrast to the digital domain.

Think about Tesla's pivot to "AI robots". My guess is that they'll get to something that can very slowly pick up a dropped sock and put it in the washing basket. But that it will fall over occasionally on the stairs, wrecking your kid's photos and the vase standing at the bottom, and dinging the wall. It might do a passable job of picking up the shards of pottery, but gluing the picture frames together, plastering the wall and repainting it... well maybe in in Elon's chemical dreams.

Comment · 9 months ago
This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.

But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!

Good job Zed!

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