skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. In successful businesses, lower costs usually correlate to greater profits not lower prices. This is particularly the case with the narrow section of the real-estate market that is single family housing (single family housing is about the lowest and worst use of real-estate (i.e. the opposite of highest and best use)).

2. Single family home construction in the US is highly prefabricated. You can go into any Home Depot and get lumber, fasteners, fixtures, appliances, and anything else you need to build a house. All of it movable and installable without much mechanization beyond a truck (and Home Depot will rent you one of those).

3. Tearing down existing houses for replacement only makes economic sense in two cases. The first is when the value of the land justifies more expensive construction (e.g. MacMansions). The second is when redevelopment is not for the market (e.g. Habitat for Humanity).

4. It is a mistake to look at construction as inefficient. Construction is just one component of real-estate markets.

5. We have very efficient prefabricated housing. It tends to look like mobile homes.

6. Wealth preservation is the primary function of the real-estate industry. Buying and selling for profit is the low end. The real money in real-estate resides in income producing property not single family houses.
A quick intuition:
magic number 7e ffffff is negating by two's complement both the mantissa and exponent.

1. 7e: the first sig bit has to be zero to preserve the sign of the overall number.

2. ffffff: due to Taylor series 1/(1 + X) = 1 - X ..., negating gives the multiplicative inverse.

Although an IEEE float has a sign bit (thus 2's complement does not work on the float itself) but mantissa and the exponent individually work with 2's complement for different reasons. The exponent has a biased range due to being chopped by half; where as the mantissa has a biased range due to its definition and constant offset. The exponent's 1 offset (7e instead of 7f) is a bit more difficult to see at first -- the devil is in the details, but 2's complement is the basic intuition.
I have build a grafana weather dashboard with the data from an enviro+ some years ago. It monitors a lot of weather data from my home.
You can see it here in German:
https://umwelt-olching.de
I guess it's mostly because I already had it? That's a good point though.
Completely agree and I'll go a bit further. I see old consoles and computers as the only VMs that will last. In 500 years, assuming we all survive, I believe it's more likely that code targeting the NES will be runnable than code targeting today's browsers, .NET or the JVM. The reason is that while these competing VMs are well documented, they are extremely complex and code targeting them tend to rely on idiosyncrasies of current operating systems, browsers and even hardware.

Also, the retro hardware itself is the ultimate documentation. You can look at every chip using (nowadays) accessible equipment and create an absolutely perfect replica in software or FPGA. VM documentation, however, can contain inaccuracies.

My speculative fiction statement of the day is that only software targeting relatively simple architectures will stand the test of time.
Another cool thing that some companies do: refuse to deal with me because the family business account is in my dad's name, despite me knowing all the correct information to pretend to be my dad.

Like, the only reason I don't answer the phone and say "this is <Dad's name>", is because I'm honest. You'll never keep a bad guy out that already knows all the information that you ask for - he'll just lie and claim to be the business/account owner.
> Claude Sonnet 3.5 (not Haiku!)

A very big surprise is just how much better Sonnet 3.5 is than Haiku. Even the confusingly-more-expensive-Haiku-variant Haiku 3.5 that's more recent than Sonnet 3.5 is still much worse.
Hopefully things have narrowed but you can see from the trends data just how few people (API may be a different story) use claude relative to chatgpt.
The First Search Engine
Similar experience, spending one week debugging memory corruption issues in production back in 2000, with the customer service pinging our team every couple of hours, due to it being on an high profile customer, has been my lesson.
Analogue makes FPGA-based emulators. These are pretty cool because they can eliminate a number of downsides with software game console emulation while still retaining some of the upsides, and versus pure hardware clones, they can be updated and patched, either to fix bugs or add new targets. Another bonus of FPGAs is that they're accessible to hobbyists. I don't know what the current preferred solution is but a while ago people were buying DE10 Nano boards for running MiSTer, which could support a large variety of cores.
Brand awareness is a hell of a drug.
yeah but in business there are really only 2 skills right? Convincing people to give you money and giving them something back to them thats worth more than the money they gave you.
> China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion and output, to some degree.

We just call it alignment research instead. Same pig, different shade of lipstick.
Reading the Unreadable: Seales and Team Reveal Dead Sea Scroll Text
>Build a Flatpak, you're done. Your application can depend on a stable runtime and work on any Linux distribution.

Flatpak weakens but does not entirely remove the dependence on the underlying Linux distributon. Flatpak relies on a system service called xdg-desktop-portal to bridge apps inside the flatpak sandbox with the host OS. Applications distributed using flatpak may not work as expected if the distribution ships too old a version of xdg-desktop-portal.
Apple designs its own chips, so the RAM and CPU are on the same die and can talk at very high speeds. This is not the case for PCs, where RAM is connected externally.
If we hit true AGI, physical labor won’t be far behind the knowledge workers. The first thing industrial manufacturers will do is turn it towards designing robotics, automating the design of factories, and researching better electromechanical components like synthetic muscle to replace human dexterity.

IMO we’re going to hit the point where AI can work on designing automation to replace physical labor before we hit true AGI, much like we’re seeing with coding.
Or what if I live in a rural area and have very few local branch banks available?

I actually had an issue with this and ended up sending a notarized letter by snail mail, since I didn't feel like making a special 1hr each way trip during business hours to the closest branch.
Time to fork Ruby and delete monkey-patching and add traits/extension-methods/UFCS.
People want to think in terms of people and their actions, not in terms of systems and their structures. That's the problem.

Show a programmer a system that requires constant on-call burning out the team—they'll tell you (if they've been around) heroics are a sign it's broken, not to find more heroes. Definitely not to pull the person working on systemic issues off that nonsense and get them a shift.

Show them an equivalently structured broken system in a different field and they'll demand heroics.

I can't give you an example of an action, because I don't know, and I'm not talking about actions. I'm saying the approach itself is wrong and any action it suggests won't be effective.

Moralizing has a brutal, self-perpetuating metaproblem that makes people more and more convinced it works the more it doesn't. Actions based on moralizing will be chosen if suggested and they will not work, so any moralizing framing needs to be rejected right away, even if you can't suggest a better action.
> best LLMs are able to accelerate you

https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~ghrist/preprints/LAEF.pdf - this math textbook was written in just 55 days!

Paraphrasing the acknowledgements -

...Begun November 4, 2024, published December 28, 2024.

...assisted by Claude 3.5 sonnet, trained on my previous books...

...puzzles co-created by the author and Claude

...GPT-4o and -o1 were useful in latex configurations...doing proof-reading.

...Gemini Experimental 1206 was an especially good proof-reader

...Exercises were generated with the help of Claude and may have errors.

...project was impossible without the creative labors of Claude

The obvious comparison is to the classic Strang https://math.mit.edu/~gs/everyone/ which took several *years* to conceptualize, write, peer review, revise and publish.

Ok maybe Strang isn't your cup of tea, :%s/Strang/Halmos/g , :%s/Strang/Lipschutz/g, :%s/Strang/Hefferon/g, :%s/Strang/Larson/g ...

Working through the exercises in this new LLMbook, I'm thinking...maybe this isn't going to stand the test of time. Maybe acceleration is not so hot after all.
If you have seen the sound of music a few times, you will surely enjoy Slavoj Zizek's brief analysis of it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiTum8eQ51E
Apple uses HBM, basically RAM on the same die as the CPU. It has a lot more memory bandwidth than typically PC dram, but still less than many GPUs. (Although the highest end macs have bandwidth that is in the same ballpark as GPUs)
The GP said, "and exponential". If AGI is exponential, then the first one will have a head start advantage that compounds over time. That is going to be hard to overcome.
The point of mocking the DB isn’t to avoid hassle, it’s to not test your dependencies. Technically the calling code might not even know it’s a DB, and it might not even care, or it might be a DB sometimes or an API other times, or even a command line once in awhile. They are only tightly coupled if you write it that way. And yes, we would be disinterested in the schema and query errors we might catch because that’s not the point of the test.
So it is destructive in a practical sense. You still need a generative process to fix the "sharpness problems" otherwise you will get a blurred halo after you deconvolve it.
Knock on wood, mine still works. Please, any Whatsapp/Meta engineers, don't go specifically disable mine now that you read this comment.
Urine has dozens of uses historically, including as a detergent, at least since Roman times. Also as a an ingredient for setting dyes, with pregnant women’s urine being especially valued for this. So valued that pregnant women could actually sell their own urine during medieval times.

It’s hard for the modern mind used to modern chemistry to wrap around just how cleverly people used the chemicals available to them.
I'm right there with you. There are probably dozens of us!
I didn't realize "agent" designs were that ambiguously defined. Every AI engineer I've talked to uses it to mean a design that combines several separate LLM prompts (or even models) to solve problems in multiple stages.
Yup, American expat in Germany here just watched it with family.
I didn't understand the fascination but it's become funnier over the years, particularly with kids.
LLMs run on the GPU, and the unified memory of Apple silicon means that the 64 GB can be used by the GPU.

Consumer GPUs top out at 24 GB VRAM.
> Thanks to HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly, browser games are catching up to native ones in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Meta’s Oculus browser already delivers web games that rival native apps in performance. And once WebGPU becomes standard, the differences will be practically invisible.

If only. Have you tried Google Earth on Firefox lately? You can't even zoom in and out any more without waiting many seconds. It's CPU bound, not I/O or graphics bound. Anyone know what went wrong in there? Is it a deliberate attempt by Google to force people to Chrome?

As for games, the browser environment is still rather limited. WebGPU is (mostly) single thread.
(You can share memory between processes, which is something else.)
It's a subset of Vulkan - one command queue, and no bindless mode. Google proposes to fix that around December 2026.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason that Uber or Waymo needs to have an "app".
Happy New Year
What are your predictions for 2025?
Every LLM web app I have used has a disclaimer along these lines prominently featured in the UI. Maybe the disclaimer isn't bright red with gifs of flashing alarms, but the warnings are there for the people who would pay attention to them in the first place.
But according to the author, apparently bringing this up isn't helpful criticism.

I'm curious what peoples thoughts are of what the future of LLMs would be like if we severely overshoot our carbon goals. How bad would thinks have to get for people to stop caring about this technology?
The actor was a teetotaler as well!
I have no idea why I would want an OTA patch to my car. But I also don't know why I would want any apps or other complex software in my car.
I think a lot of the confusion is in how we approach LLMs. Perhaps stemming from the over-broad term “AI”.

There are certain classes of problems that LLMs are good at. Accurately regurgitating all accumulated world knowledge ever is not one, so don’t ask a language model to diagnose your medical condition or choose a political candidate.

But do ask them to perform suitable tasks for a language model! Every day by automation I feed in the hourly weather forecast my home ollama server and it builds me a nice readable concise weather report. It’s super cool!

There are lots of cases like this where you can give an LLM reliable data and ask it to do a language related task and it will do an excellent job of it.

If nothing else it’s an extremely useful computer-human interface.
If we can simulate a full human intelligence at a reasonable speed, we can simulate 100 of them and ask the AGI to figure out how to make itself 10x faster.

Rinse and repeat.

That is exponential take off.

At the point where you have an army of AIs running at 1000x human speed it can just ask it to design the mechanisms for and write the code to make robots that automate any possible physical task.
https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/tv/dinner-for-one-sendezeiten-...

Airs on NDR, WDR, MDR, SWR, BR, HR, RBB (the regional broadcasters, N stands for North, W for West, easy enough) a total of 11 times, plus 6 times in re-stagings in various dialects (no dubbing here).

Then once on Das Erste (The First, run by the collaborative federal broadcaster ARD, of the above).

And once on ORF's (Austria's public broadcaster) ORF 1.

And the Swiss have their own recording of the same sketch, performed by the same two, but with variations of course, once each on SRF 1 and SRF 2 respectively, and the German version on SRF 2 once.

In a nutshell, it's on the TV schedule 22 times. Probably a bit more than that if you properly count RB and SR (smaller broadcasters whose schedule is mostly affiliated with NDR and SWR respectively). If you count those separately, add another 7 times.
Screenshots:
https://dca3.net/screenshots/
> Once you're larger than the fits-in-pocket form factor, your comparables include a straightforward deblobbable laptop

To add some further clarity, some people use our solution at music festivals, the kinds of music festivals where people camp outdoors for a few days at a time.

Try "texting" your dad (who also has the same secure mobile solution), texting your girlfriend (who also has the same solution), and your buddy you met at another camp two days ago, while waiting to be served a drink while you're also half-way tripping balls. Not happening on a fuckin' laptop, brah.
Actually I have heard the exact opposite of what you are stating is true. Both Google and Apple fight very hard to avoid handing data to authorities. They don't want to be seen as some sort of easy conduit to government surveillance or shill. How does that benefit their reputation? I know of one case where Google spent millions on lawyers fighting government wanting access to an activist's email. Their FAQ here makes their policy pretty clear. https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9713961...
How often is the holding period updated for a stock that’s already been purchased?
When I read OP’s list of wants for an API, I don’t read it so literally.

I read it as an example of the complexity required to implement something like an API.

I agree that it’s also a people problem but I disagree that many of these failed initiatives aren’t due to bad tech as well. A complex initiative requires picking the right tech that gives you a good benefit/cost ratio. Knowledge of tech plays hand in hand with the political aspects and IMO many orgs lack both completely.
This mirrors my experience 100%. I'm not even sure why I still pay for OpenAI at this point. Claude 3.5 is just incredibly superior. And I totally agree on the point about dropping in context and asking very specific questions. I've had Claude pinpoint a bug in a 2k LOC module that I was struggling to find the cause for. After wasting a lot of time on it on my own, I thought "what the heck, maybe Claude can figure it out" and it did. It's objectively useful, even if flawed sometimes.
My Gvoice number works with Chase, Citi, Discover, AMEX, Capitol One. Does not work with Wells Fargo, despite allowing you to sign up with it. Took a notarized snail mail to fix that one.
There are still some tropes from the GPT-3 days that are fundamental to the construction of LLMs that affect how they can be used and will not change unless they no longer are trained to optimize for next-token-prediction (e.g. hallucinations and the need for prompt engineering)
Is there a good simple Docker containerized weather app? I want to run it locally and Grafana Cloud plus a bunch of required plugins is way to heavy.
How is this different than any other job? Experience is experience I don’t see how that justifies pissing off your potential employers with mountains of AI slop resumes.
I think the British Empire was a bit of a mixed bag that did good and bad stuff. Bit like the Monty Python sketch on the Roman Empire.
Going faster isn't good if the quality drops enough that overall productivity decreases... Infinite slop is only a good thing for pigs.
Seems curious to me he would make decisions based on racism. There is a lot of xenophobia around those parts.

Perhaps you’re incorrect?
See also YC Startup School and other videos in the YC channel https://www.youtube.com/@ycombinator/videos

Lots of great experiences retold - from the startup world rather than some Coca Cola exec.
My Projects from 2024
Projects:
- https://www.devopscommunity.in/

- https://interview.devopscommunity.in/

- https://tools.devopscommunity.in

- https://whopayswriters.me/

- https://ai-web-summarizer-two.vercel.app

- https://github.com/rohitg00/host-your-gif

- https://github.com/rohitg00/manim-video-generator

- https://github.com/rohitg00/ai-food-recipe-assistant

- https://github.com/rohitg00/ai_computer_use

- https://github.com/rohitg00/process-viewer

- https://github.com/rohitg00/my-own-whiteboard

- https://github.com/rohitg00/s3-file-share-for-free

- https://thatdevopsguy.substack.com/
> This is just pessimism and weary cynicism.

I don't read it that way. I read it as engineers engaging in pre-optimization for no business benefit. It's utterly rampant in the industry because it's fun to design and build a redundant auto-scaling spaceship vs. just over-provisioning your server by 200% for a tenth (or less!) of the cost and having backups ready to deploy in a few hours.

Sometimes these ideas make sense - after you need them. Not designed-in at the early product stage. Very few products go on to need the scale, availability, or complexity most of these implementations try to solve.
Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware this had more or less landed. (though I think my broader point about cross platform support unfortunately still stands, I personally don't care about supporting iOS on my side projects and I'm excited to mess with this)
Yes, optical drives tend to fail. A couple of days ago I tried to play with my old Gamecube that had been in storage for at least 10 years, and surprise, it doesn't read the disks anymore.

On the other hand, a few months ago I bought a Saturn and despite being much older, it works flawlessly. That thing was built like a tank...
There are some really good books about wars between cultures that have AGI and it always comes down to math - whoever can get their hands on more compute faster wins.
This Glorious Machine
Close, we're training an AI model, profiting a mTurk and bypassing captchas
I've got one of those, bought and installed it a few years ago. Unfortunately it doesn't work with all games. Maybe that has been fixed, but was very annoying to find that hydro thunder didn't work!
ChatGPT does a good job of imitating the average crypto influencer. They don’t know what they’re saying either, and 99% of crypto investors would be thrilled by the prospect of a “pivotal Phase 3 Bitcoin ETF trial” that will “drive trust value realization”. Sounds great, can’t miss out on that!

The hallucinations are simply a mirror of a community that thrives on this nonsense. When nothing is real, you can’t blame the LLM for not figuring it out.
See Google Today: https://www.google.com/search?q=dinner+for+one
There is no excuse for making defective products, no matter how low the profit margins are. The key why properly engineered anything works is that safety margins are baked into the design. Every real engineering field uses repeatable processes with known likelihood of success. Software "engineering" doesn't do that.
We may not need smarter AI. Just less stupid AI.

The big problem with LLMs is that most of the time they act smart, and some of the time they do really, really dumb things and don't notice. It's not the ceiling that's the problem. It's the floor. Which is why, as the article points out, "agents" aren't very useful yet. You can't trust them to not screw up big-time.
Not at all, you can have that today if you are willing to pay the costs of providing these guarantees. We know how and some organizations do pay that cost.

Outside of those rare cases, everyone is demonstrably unwilling to pay the unavoidable costs of providing these guarantees. The idea that software can be built to a high-assurance standard by regulatory fiat and everyone just gets to freeload on this investment is delusional but that is what is often suggested. Also, open source software could not meet that standard in most cases.

Furthermore, those guarantees can only exist for the narrow set of hardware targets and environments that can actually be validated and verified. No mixing and matching random hardware, firmware, and OS versions. You'll essentially end up with the Apple ecosystem, but for everything.

The vast majority of people who insist they want highly robust software neither write software to these standards nor are willing to pay for software written to these standards. It is a combination of revealed preferences and hypocrisy.
Also, after a decade, browser vendors still don't provide any usable 3D developer tooling better than SpectorJS.
> Is it a deliberate attempt by Google to force people to Chrome?

For the last several months, the YouTube player takes me several seconds to load on Firefox and freezes on me for a couple of seconds every other time I press play/pause...

And changing the user agent fixed it! So I say yes. But I found the extensions to do so quite clunky so I gave up.