hexapus

The current regime decided lawlessness was beneficial to them. Cuts both ways. I suppose people should consider carefully whether signing bonuses and the chance to abuse marginalised people with impunity is worth it. I'm fine with people making it riskier to throw in with corrupt authoritarians for personal benefit.

I can't think of a feature I care less about on a laptop. I have owned several laptops with touchscreens, and literally the only thing it's ever done is misclick something when I inadvertently touched my screen. I have a tablet and a phone if I want to tap a screen.

Unrelated: I find it amusing that the screen they showcase looks like a very broken display panel.

I think it's good to continually remind oneself that these are next-word/token-predictors...you can wrap them up in a harness, you can feed them into each other, you can influence the likelyhood of a given word through weights and system prompts...but that's literally all they can do. They can't reason, but they can predict what reasoning looks like.

None of this means they can't be useful tools, but when they fall down, we should remind ourselves of why that is, and be honest with ourselves about what they could ultimately be capable of.

To torture the analogy a bit: You didn't sculpt bridges out of clay - critical infrastructure was built from stone. Even if you wanted to use clay, you made bricks, and architected the structure from those units. You couldn't just throw a lump of clay across a stream and vibe-build a bridge...

If we want to use LLMs responsibly, to build substantial pieces of infrastructure, we should be using it to create discreet "bricks" of code, that can be tested, relied upon, and used to implement human-driven architectural decisions.

I really do need to play with Haiku more.

That's super helpful. Thank you SO much.

Gosh, I don't know about everyone else, but I'm convinced! Thank you, blanket-assertion from internet rando!

That's the one.

You should have seen the inside of the actual Cray 1.

I am running a Cray Simulator at faster than full speed on a cheap Raspberry Pi knockoff called "Le Potato" and I spent the weekend vibecoding weather forecasting software for it as a tribute to NCAR.

I spent the weekend setting up the open source Cray simulator on a really cheap SBC then vibecoding a weath forecasting application that uses the Cray's vector processor to process raw weather data.

Mine is a lot smaller, but it can run Cray workloads at full speed.

I spent the weekend vibecoding software for the Cray 1.

I installed the open source Cray Simulator on my "Le Potato" SBC, then installed UNICOS, then tasks Gemini with writing a weather forecasting program that ingests raw data from METAR weather stations and uses the simulator's vector processor to generate the forecast. It renders a nice little weather dashboard viewable in the terminal. A python http service runs outside the Cray and serves up a nice little web page with a virtual terminal that displays the dashboard.

Is it useful? No...but it's cool as hell. I plan to print up an enclosure for it along with a mini terminal with a 4" LCD to display the live dashboard. Then I'll have a nice little baby Cray to put on the shelf in my gameroom.

My little tribute to one of the first deployments of a Cray at NCAR.

It's absolutely possible. I think I was pretty explicit about that. It was a conscious choice. In the event he's actually better off than myself, then I suppose I got scammed. I doubt that, as someone with a tech career in the Western world. But if he's a poor young man in a desperately poor country, then I didn't get scammed even if he lied to me about specific details. I just helped someone.

Once we get to that point, and I know he's fulfilling orders reliably, maybe I'll write up a blog post somewhere and share it here. I'm still somewhat guarded, but he's been quite transparent about his situation so far. I asked him to travel to the local shop and take a picture of the sewing machine he'd need to buy, and he did. He told me how much a flat would cost him, and I looked up listing in his city, and it was dead-on. It's not often you have the opportunity to potentially change the course of someone's life for a few hundred dollars, but maybe I've been given one. Maybe I'm gullible, but if it works out for him I'd be happy.

They let it get this far, but I truly hope they disprove my intuition in this regard.