sottol

> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.

Sounds glib, but honestly ... more Ads :/

But WHY do these agents even want to communicate (specifically in the first openai incident, there seems to be instructions to communicate here)m

It must be some artifact of their RL or training? Maybe it's RL for agentic workflows with planner, coordinator and workers?

Does anyone have some insight on this? I'd be very curious.

It feels like pulling and building someone else's code. It just happens to be *exactly* what you're looking for.

This is the best way I can describe how I feel about it.

When the software output is the _goal_, it's a lot less rewarding. When it's not, it's fine I guess. I'd still feel better if I had it done it myself but it's fine.

Semi-related, but I did recently wonder if China's real-estate bust might serve as a strong fertility support measure / incidental pronatalist policy.

Tier-3 and tier-4 cities supposedly saw 30-50% property value declines, setting them back more than two decades. If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.

Otoh, rural Japan has lots of cheap or even free real estate but it doesn't seem to support fertility rates at all.

I just got my PCBs - yay! I will try soldering the switches and MCU this weekend or early next week.

I'll try to write up a post if I get it all working. Probably even if not... publish your failures and all.

Thanks :(

I'm still waiting on my order of 15 PCBs done with Sol - a mini-BT-keyboard that I hope will be comparable to the Psion 5 / Gemini PDA ones, using Kailh PG1316S switches. I still need to design and manufacture a housing (I do have a lot of hobbyist experience with this though), but the idea is to have a magsafe-connectable keyboard I can clip onto my Pixel and make use of the new Linux subsystem (or Termux) and do some productive stuff on the go. It's just been manufactured by JLC but not shipped yet. Funny enough, production itself was ~$70, then $80 for shipping, taxes and fees (tarriffs?).

Instead of directly generating Kicad, I chose to let it write "generators" in Python that output Kicad (S-Exps!) pcb and project - with mixed results - but I can generate a version with/without per-key Neopixels and customize certain parts of the board, including debug-stuff. I also _think_ this makes it easier to resume working on this in new sessions but not sure. Otoh, I never actually looked at the Python (vibed...) so it's still a lot of hard-coding.

I also landed on and used KicadRoutingTools after trying FreeRouting, combined with some minimal "auto-placing" code for larger ICs and such that are placed with certain constraints. My routing runs are way slower though - on the order of minutes.

I always wanted to try atopile - that might be a good match for AI/PCB work. The only thing that really held me back was the lack of routing.

Anything that puts pressures on Nvidia's margins is going to have an outsized effect imo - margins declining from 75% to ~50% would undo all of its projected 2027 growth of 70%.

And what about the purported "AI frontier slowdown" - if frontier labs stop pushing better and better models, the main way to grow the pie is more users and that will eventually stop, too. Then providers would probably stop buying new hardware hand-over-fist and move to a slower depreciation-based replacement.

Thanks! Qwen-3.8 27B seems to benchmark better but I'd like to try this some time.

I'm torn on this - on the one hand performance matters, on the other so does capability.

I could run Qwen 3.6 27B on my laptop, but at 5 tok/s it was too slow even without overthinking - I never used it. OTOH, Qwen 3.6 35B A3B ran at 20 tok/s but it just could not get done what I asked of it. It sort of got close but you had to repeat and retry so much that it might have been faster to run 27B dense... maybe?

So that said, I might take a much better model that runs 2-3x slower (total time per task) but that's more capable over a faster, less capable one.

I'd also like to try a proper "plan-then-execute" type execution where thinking is entirely disabled (or low) during the execution stage but enabled/max during the planning stage.

I will definitely give 3.8 27B a better shot than 3.6 though.

A lot of the benchmarks seem often near meaningless these days - really bench-maxxed to the hilt. I tend to still look at the Artificial Analysis rankings to get at least an idea on relative performance of models, is that still warranted?

What or other opinions on how representative the AA rankings are of real-world performance? Any better indicators?

There's 5B working age people world wide and only 50% of those make more than $500/mo where it's even conceivable to spend $50/mo. I did the napkin math, it can still sorta kinda work out.

I think more realistically we'll have something like the Google/social media US-vs-world profit split of 40-50% US vs rest of world combined. Even those numbers can work out but then I don't see tremendous growth.

But the sector valuation is already priced for wholesale workforce replacement or massively expanded productivity and AI platform providers taking a lot of that pie for themselves.

With corporate profits already near all-time highs with respect to GDP, who is going to buy all those new products (from expanded productivity ) if all the gains only go to OIA and Anthropic employees?

It's an interesting time.