switchbak

I spent a couple weeks trying to bolt this on to our setup to support a more serverless style approach. OpenJ9 (sadly) really didn't work out well, perhaps we run in a way they don't optimize for. Azul and OpenJDK's approaches helped - but it is quite intrusive (you need a profiling run), and the absolute benefits aren't that great. It's mostly doing classpath stuff at present, and not really AOT work on machine code (though that is in the pipeline).

All in all, I wasn't particularly impressed with the outcome. Obviously GraalVM has more headroom, but that's an even more intrusive change.

When compared with a Rust port of our service, the delta of the efforts is absolutely astronomical. Ridiculous performance, near-instant startup, radically less memory consumption. I mean - duh - but nonetheless, when I contrast the effort vs payback, it's very hard for me to want to invest so much in techniques that have so little payback (graal) when I can put that into an approach that leaves me in a much better place long-term.

If I had mountains of legacy, obviously I couldn't do that, but in my situation it seems like a much more attractive option.

They were early movers and established a lot of the patterns in the space, but I just don't see them holding on to this lead. Spark/Hadoop is really so damn inefficient that something like DuckDB shows where that overhead is, and it's extreme in many cases.

What I don't understand is why they didn't build this project on top of DuckLake instead - from my shallow analysis they vibe coded up a fake Databricks in Python.

Not that I'd use it, I want to avoid Databricks - the Duck ecosystem is far more compelling for my modest needs, and handles local develop a lot better (IMO).

Truly dark.

The issue is there are SO MANY people who stop at the conclusion "batteries are expensive, dirty, use rare materials and are fueled by slave labour" - this level of understanding is ubiquitous in my experience. What I never hear is "compared to what" - like how does the full lifecycle analysis of those batteries IN CONTEXT compare to the status quo?

Or the folks that extend that argument to "EVs are bad". Without even considering the energy mix that they rely on. If you're not even interested in doing a single ounce of research and thinking, you're not making a point - you're regurgitating corporate propaganda.

We did this many years ago for remote First Nations sites with an energy monitoring startup I worked for - saving them enormous sums of money (and carbon!) in the process. It's actually quite amazing how low some of the low hanging fruit is once you start looking.

When did it become "alive"? GPT-3? What is the threshold at which we consider something to be living. Is this a matter of complexity alone?

How alive is a collection of a dozen transistors? A million, billion, trillion? We can't just claim something is alive without being very specific about _why_ we believe it to be alive. The article's suggestion doesn't even begin to mention that.

If it's not enabled by default, "disabled" is the natural state, no?

Or is this more intrusive than I imagine?

You're in-between tiers, and thus don't exist. Please wait 4 days between washing and try again.

This kind of heuristic is actually extremely useful - and mostly what I try to develop over a couple weeks as the new models come out. I would love if we could get a fairly standardized take like this on the regular.

Of course we have far too many benchmarks (of questionable utility), but it would be helpful to get OpenAI's take on where it slots in, and how the landscape changes as these get rolled out.

I have found Fireworks to not be so stellar myself lately - I'm having a better time on BaseTen, but I only just started dabbling around there. Definitely the supposed speeds of Fireworks (that I never saw) are actually available there.

I listen to a niche green energy podcast, and the lady has such a creaky voice that I can barely stand it.

I think there's a generational judgement part of it, and some hearing damage that makes it harder to understand their words on the very low/creaky end.

Not to mention, it can cause real problems for your vocal chords. A little bit is entirely natural, and I don't really notice it in most men, but a lot of young(er) women seem to go overboard on it (in my opinion).

Lucky for us, the embedded folks don't take security too seriously! You don't need to be a garden variety hacker when your LLM can handle the drudgery for you.

But this is precisely it - when you combine some kind of fidelity with software development (so you can guide the LLM well), with some kind of depth of knowledge in a domain (probably a niche domain) you can do amazing things.

I'm currently experimenting with some custom hardware + software, composed in a way that seems novel, for a niche domain. This is with a new kid coming soon. There's just no way I would have crossed the activation threshold to do that without having LLMs provide assistance.

Wait, are you asking "Where's the disruption" when we have a couple folks vibe coding replacements for Adobe's whole stack, as well as things like Autodesk Fusion 360? Are you serious? Then you say things are being "vibe coded" away ... well, what is it? Sounds to be like the moats of the large corps are being dissolved, and that those who can ship working software - will.

"software is getting cheaper" - and easier to make, but it hasn't lifted all of the other constraints. Guess who's well positioned to understand what those constraints are and to work well in this new landscape? Answer: they didn't go to business school.

I use a terrible investment platform that purposefully nerfs the web app so you are forced to use the mobile app.

For something like a bank, I think they ought to be mandated to offer a functional website, yes. A slick app is nice too, but not if it’s the only option, specifically designed to steal my data and spy on me.