rablackburn

Finally, a well-formed question to which the answer "42 (times)" is a possible solution.

What a lovely example to end on.

Personally, I (guiltily) love using ol'fashioned contractions. I wish it were more normalised.

> I'm curious to see what you can do on an 8GB consumer GPU these days

Running smaller 4B-7B models entirely on the GPU VRAM will get you fast inference, but you will need to scope and define the tasks well. eg, using it the model as a classifier and just feeding it from a queue.

The best performing "agent"-like model to plug into a harness that I have found so far has been Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (mixture of experts) model as I can park most of it in system RAM and CPU, while the VRAM holds the attention/shared weights.

It's definitely workable as a local AI homelab. But expect homelab levels of tuning/fiddling with it.

With the improved support for AMD GPUs I'm finally considering getting a modern 16GB card (and maybe a second one in a few years assuming prices come down)

It doesn't have to chase it down, just keep plodding along implementing the new standards as they become accepted.

Google likes to make up its own "standards" and push them out on chrome, but Safari tends to be the late-comer to supporting impactful standards, not Firefox.

Do you have a particular use-case where Firefox's lack of support blocks you?

> Safari has much, much better compatibility, but even then this browser is hated for it's quirks

I think this meme has almost run its course.

Funnily enough I just had to fix a Safari layout quirk yesterday (for iOS 16 & 17 devices only). I was excited to pick it up because it had been _so long_ since I had to deal with a CSS-related browser incompatibility. I was nostalgic :')

I raced Claude to fix it. I knew which CSS had the issue, but I needed to set up an iOS simulator to verify my fix. So I had to download xcode, which download 10GB of data for a current simulator and Apple's embedded code-assist model. Then another 8GB for the iOS 16 simulator.

Claude took about 5min to find the right CSS file and then got stuck at the same point as me: needing to simulate it to verify. It just got the old webkit binaries and hacked together its own minimal browserstack clone.

It finished before me because of those downloads, but it only found half the fix. So... I won!

Except...I made a typo (`no-wrap` instead of `nowrap`) and had to do a fixup commit.

So I guess we'll call it a draw :(

> That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.

The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.

They probably could have loaded faster if they shipped less than 80mb(!) for a single page

The future set of people who once would have "work(ed) for free to design you a state-of-the-art kernel"? If the tail is long enough passionate hobbyists will do it because they love it...eventually.

> but way, way better at creative writing than Qwen and even better than Gemma 4 26 and 31b.

I suspect this is the only use-case I would consider...and I don't really have a use-case for "creative writing" that I would delegate to an LLM. I suppose for dialogue generation in games?

But yes, hard agree. Why on Earth would you ever want to write code with a model that is supposedly "jailbroken"? So it can put great backdoors into everything it touches? Pass.

> For contrast, the Newcomen steam engine (widely considered the first commercially useful engine) was used for over 60 years before the next major improvements. Now, 300 years later, we’re still finding ways to significantly improve heat engines.

Off-topic, but I stumbled upon the first Newcomen engine imported into Australia in a museum in Sydney and I was unexpectedly charmed (not an Engine Guy). It's large, but nothing like the awe of "mega-engineering", it's crude, but it clearly has such amazing utility (when compared to a reality without it) and it changed the world

Nuclear weapons (so far)?

Banning CFCs perhaps?

If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse

I daresay it's because the assistant training corpus is heavily biased towards one-shot solution answers.

Because the correct response to that query is "I have no idea -- you will need to provide more information"

and LLM Agents suck at that.

How many companies have 1000 frontend developers?

Do they need 1000 frontend developers?

Aside from the Giants maybe some consultancies or hire-firms have that many? But they use whatever the client uses. If you're not in the business of selling frontend development services then a big part of your competitive advantage is _being able_ to make technology choices that are more-optimal than the labor market's lowest-common-denominator slurry.

Between JS/ECMAscript being abandonware for a decade and CSS' historical immaturity (cross-browser layout, custom properties, more pseudoclasses, etc) the Web was more of a wild west "whatever you we can cobble together" place. So of course we built an entire toolchain ecosystem for all the cool new tools we would reinvent from scratch.

but Things Are Pretty Good these days. We even have the world's only fully system portable assembly language: WASM! And the browser's Web APIs are becoming something like the missing Standard Library (shoutout to Deno).

The author's point seems to be that we are past a tipping point where we need all that additional complexity. You don't _need_ a separate system of reactivity these days, you can write a (closer to pre-hooks React, even!) React-style component library with Web Components now.

Personally I would need for Type Annotations to be a fully supported part of the spec before I made the point to "use the platform" professionally. Until some market force causes the core web technologies to truly fork my skills are useful for life. It's like a pale shadow of how UNIX users must feel :')

> Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.

Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;)

There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off