lukeschlather

AWS and GCP both work pretty well if you avoid conditions, which are a nightmare. Azure is like everything is conditions, and also buggy.

I'm sure there are absolutely brilliant people working at Azure. I think the overall system is very badly architected and I don't know what it would take to salvage it. Infra security is a lot easier to do when you have a system that has mostly solved it already, and I'm not saying GCP and AWS are perfect, but "security is mostly solved" is a decent description of their systems, I think. Of course it could all fall over tomorrow, but I'd guess that's a lot more true of Azure.

If Intel were capable of building more chips they would. I don't think their lagging TSMC is a diabolical attempt to inflate their profit margins. Although I only really know what I read on the news.

The Danish status quo is radically anti-capitalist and anti-business by American standards. Do you think the average Danish zillennial is in favor of moving to a more American model (privatized healthcare, minimal union protections, etc.) ?

I had Claude write me a script to probe all the GCP Vertex models. I can say with confidence that I know how to call Argon, because Claude told me how, I did it, saw it was modestly better than Flash for my use case and I decided it wasn't worth the money right now, for this use case.

I'm fairly confident I can't call Carbon, and I am okay with that.

The problem with that is then you would have GPT 6.1 Max with max thinking which is different from GPT 6.1 Small with max thinking.

If you look back the naming problem started around the point that OpenAI started doing reasoning models (o1, 4o) where they had to describe this fork in model behavior that let a smaller model think longer and be smarter.

You can come up with naming schemes that don't clash, but there's something to be said for this approach where the thinking level is like you describe and the model name requires you to learn that Astra is the largest model.

There's obviously a limit to what you can change via ToS. Yes, their ToS says they can alter the deal at their discretion. Adding ads to a premium ad-free tier seems like fundamentally a violation of the presumed contract. (Specifically talking about one-year plans, saying that they can make these kinds of fundamental alterations to the deal mid-year sounds like it ought to be illegal if they're selling one-year plans.)

That's fair, changing mid-year is definitely a problem and arguably illegal under current law, though really if we had functional antitrust I'm not sure that bundling would be legal to begin with.

That seems like revisionist history. Amazon started out with Prime Video bundled with Prime as a whole, and didn't raise the price. After 5-6 years they made it an add-on, then they added an ad-supported tier.

But if anything, the racket is bundling free shipping with ad-free video and everything else. Raising prices periodically to keep up with inflation is not a racket. And whether you would prefer to get downgraded to the advertising plan or automatically pay more is a personal choice, and automatically downgrading you rather than renewing you at a higher price is in some ways a more sensible default. (Though I'd prefer to be upgraded to the higher price generally and be notified so I have the option to downgrade or cancel, though downgrade really isn't an option I would consider.)

The margins on GPUs are estimated at 80% right now. So the price would most likely drop by 70% just by building the additional manufacturing capacity. Assume some modest reductions in cost and the price should drop by 80-90%.

The only reason computers are so expensive is that demand is so out of control.

I would bet that there are some proofs whose simplest form are simply incomprehensible to humans. Explaining them in terms a human could possibly understand is a fool's errand. However the theorem itself may be much simpler, and the theorem is the thing that's most worth translating.

Attempting to translate the proof is valuable, but we have to be realistic about what is and isn't possible.

It's not a constant factor, that's the misunderstanding. It's an unknown factor.

I've had pretty good luck having Gemini or Claude use SAM as a tool. Gemini is really good at identifying things in images, but it doesn't do a great job doing segmentation per se, but SAM on its own can't really decide what you need to segment.

They're looking for like, plumbers' email and quickbooks which tells you what kind of plumbing jobs they do and how much they get paid, so they know what kind of things to make robots for.