mrngld

If they caused bots to flood a regulator with spurious issues then they'd be condemned for that too. Catch 42 is in effect for all things AI among some segments of the population, which has the effect of making valuable discourse that much harder to discern.

Like my other comment, this might be a public-vs-private sector misconception. I can't help but notice my own employers IT and design departments, which both lean pretty right, openly use Codex to help with about everything. One group is even training their own model at the moment. And our marketing team, which is solid blue? They're the only team in the company allowed to use both Claude and ChatGPT because they claimed, repeatedly and loudly, that both were critical to their jobs because Claude was better at design (they say) and Chat for everything else (again, their claim, not mine).

No one wants a data center in their back yard, but in the private sector I think adoption isn't as political as some make it on Hacker News.

You can't use mathematics without understanding it?

Let's say GPT-23 Astra grinds away for a full month one day and out pops a warp drive. Our best physicists ask it to explain. The resulting stream of text is essentially incomprehensible. But, they build a scale model at its direction to test and sure enough it does the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.

Are you saying we shouldn't hop aboard the USS Enterprise and check out Alpha Centauri because we don't understand the math?

I think what's really happening here is that there's an ivory-tower academic class that feels entitled to make their living at public expense thinking about and writing about their topic of interest, and along comes a new tool that's changing that dynamic up. Meanwhile, in the real world, the value remains with people who can take whatever the tool of the day is and do useful things with it. Which, I think, is why despite all the talk the only professional job losses blamed on AI appear to largely be companies that had a failed strategy of some sort or another and used AI as a boogeyman to do the layoff that they needed to do anyway. To people living in the private sector this isn't seen as a dangerous invader, LLM's are productivity multipliers.

Tempting to think that, but that logistical miracle machine that thus far no one has been able to fully replicate is expensive. Their global operating margin ex-AWS (which is a whole different beast) was 6.8% in Q2. (AWS was 39%)

That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.

Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.

I can't remember what YT channel recently did it, but they compared name brand batteries, third party batteries and knock-off batteries (equivalent to Temu) for some power tools.

The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.

The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.

Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.

I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.

Your local homeowners association would like a word.

I use a Raspberry Pi, not a VPS -- as others state, Codex/Claude Code alongside things like Cloudflare and Tailscale make self hosting far easier.

People have commented a lot already, but one thing I do that I haven't seen others already doing yet is I run a news summarization pipeline with Miniflux and Flatnotes.

All my feeds are in one of two categories; Summarize and NoSummarize. Once a day, a script fires at everything unread in the Summarize category, pulls the full text from Miniflux (or calls a scraping service if it appears to only have an article stub), groups similar articles to together with a 60 to 80 word summary, and for everything not grouped together it gives each article a 20 word or so summary. Just enough for me to know if it warrants a full read or not. Then it takes that a posts the digest to a markdown file in a Flatnotes folder. Flatnotes I expose via Tailscale Funnel so I can read it anywhere, including on my work laptop if I'm at the office.

Why Miniflux and Flatnotes and not other options? Mostly because those two are about as lightweight as it gets with still pleasing interfaces and basic features.

I saw all the Netbird recs here so looked into it briefly. Depends I guess on what you use Tailscale for. Tailscale Funnel is easy and stable. Self-hosted on Netbird is ... a bit more involved.

Definitely a place for both services, IMO.

Yes, seriously, my intro to linux as a kid was seeing the slick Red Hat boxed media on the shelves at CompUSA.

Did you see the 'thrift store' part of his comment? I do the same thing as him, and depending on the location around town, an ISO on a DVD can be as little as 50 cents, and a modern Linux ISO on bluray, including 4K (though rare I see those) are rarely over maybe $3.

That's not what any benchmarks that look at cost per task or similar says in terms of cost. The Chinese models, generally speaking, might be cheaper per token but need a lot more tokens to get there.

Most of the comments so far are pushing or pulling the clock in whatever direction their personal preference is. Call me crazy but the time should be a constant, unchanging reference.

If it's dark in your location earlier in the evening, don't mess with the clock. Agree as a local society that instead of working 800 to 1700 at some point in the calendar most people transition to 700 to 1600, if that's a local issue.

Edit: Or negotiate that with your boss. Most of my team works 8 to 5, I work 7 to 4, as long as its consistent no one cares. Obviously retail employees can't do that, but customer-facing people are working past dark no matter what if it's an afternoon shift.

The avalanche of lawsuits that every NGO that hadn't been paid off would file within minutes that'd extract the same toll in terms of years, plus potentially even higher legal fees.

I appreciated the dust removal, briefly tried to run a little side business scanning prints (as glossy prints is all most people have left) and slides with a mirrorless camera + macro lens and dust was one of the issues.

The other was reflections. The camera with its 80MP resolution RAW was great in general, not hard to get better results than an Epson V600 could. The slides were easy, I rigged up a little black box to keep stray light out and backlit with it with a clean source of light, but reflections on glossy prints killed the whole operation. My last idea was taking the photo at an angle so the picture would be angled toward something featureless (and preferably black) and then correcting the perspective in post, but that had the potential to introduce focus issues (my DoF with my setup was roughly 1/32") and maybe slight (probably imperceptible?) differences in resolution across the image. Tried polarizing gels over the light and lens and that reduced the problem but didn't eliminate it.

Some people on YouTube claim to pull off this feat but I think they're either tolerating slight reflections or engaging in magic.

I for one am content to be digital from the start with my images.

Edit: Oh, and keeping prints flat was another engineering undertaking. Glass introduces all kinds of variables, including megatons of dust. I settled on a DIY vacuum box system of sorts with a shop vac, lots of little holes drilled into a box to create some suction to hold a piece flat.

I worked for a small manufacturing company some years back, and depending on what you're doing it's easy to rack up some huge file storage usage and big databases without being in the business of video, photography or music. The database that only ran our manufacturing, not inclusive of HR, accounting, etc., was about 1TB. The design files that went to the plant (most of which were just text, you could open them with Notepad) were another 3 or 4 TB worth. Maybe another 1TB or so for various collateral bits of data related to jobs, mostly PDFs.

The company has, I'm sure, probably tripled all that by now. In their case it compressed really well, but still.

All that to say, YMMV, significantly.