7b gemma nano models are... not terrible. I can see having a 30b model that uses 15gb on a phone that outperforms early (1H 2024 era) GPT 4 models by the end of the decade. Maybe in a year or two. Things are moving pretty fast. GPT4o mini was good enough for almost anyone already.

Agree, coral dying off is scary and makes big headlines, but coral will establish itself via polyps in cooler, or otherwise more appropriate waters, new species will form. Every 2 years or so there's a big media scare about the coral reefs bleaching but that's not actually a die-off, they run in low power mode until conditions change, then recolor

Also they enforced drink driving laws starting in the late 1950s. I don't know what alcohol consumption per capita was back then but I'm pretty sure it was more than double what it is today

This is the correct take; coastal cities from georgia to virginia largely exist due to inertia at this point; they aren't growing, and if they are it's largely due to people fleeing rural areas, or HCOL situations. The central/south coast is largely unproductive which is one of the reasons it's so easy to buy huge plots of land for cheap and fill factories there with labor. That entire coastline is low-lying swamp already, anyone who visits the area understands the long term trajectory of the region. Land owners screamed bloody murder when FEMA finally corrected their half century old flood maps made with critically flawed methodology claiming the area was much drier than it actually was.
 
There's a reason why I-95 sits ~150 miles inland from the atlantic coast for most of it's length, and why so few coastal cities exist in that stretch. It's not an accident.

>death rate has declined since 1950
 
I mean, I've seen british rural roads in modern times, 1.25 lanes total, lined closely with 400 year old stone wall or hedges. I can only imagine how bad it was before this. Most of england's road network reflects their past, an impoverished rural island community surrounding metropolitan london, with proportional road funding. Roads built for horse and buggy, later driven on by motor vehicles with no upgrades was definitely going to be dicey. The bar to improve their roads was set very, very low.

As mentioned in the blurb, Panasonic makes the in-flight entertainment systems that go into the majority of all airplanes. I was surprised when an acquaintance of mine told me he worked for panasonic, but he indeed built those systems. So while they sell consumer products, they sell commercial/industrial products too. I don't know how much those in flight entertainment systems cost, but I can't imagine they're cheap.

> worked flawlessly the whole time on the few dim incandescent bulbs, satanic candles, etc
 
Satanic candles are unusually efficient light sources for solar panels, not everyone is burning those; check your privilege

If there's something truly novel that required more than 4 hours thought, it's worth putting a one or two line summary in the form of a comment for the next guy. Heck with modern tooling you don't even have to document it yourself "add a comment here explaining the problem and how this solves it and why". My code isn't 50% comments, but it's at least 3-5%

It's really interesting to see not just the 4060, but the 3060, 2060 as the most popular cards of their generation by a wide margin. If anything the argument ought to be to buy the *060 model simply because it's going to be best targeted for support by developers as it's the most common card. 4060 has been more than adequate for casual gaming since I got one on sale

You should Google how often the world mocks the UK for their "heat warnings" or whatever you call them over there, rather than listing all time heat records. Great job pointing out the us and uk use different measurement systems, literally nobody knows that, so it was very useful to learn today, thank you for that deep insight. You will surely be the person to turn around the uk's declining fortunes. Stiff upper lip, I'm rooting for you.

Whats "extreme heat waves"? In england a "heat wave" can be 75F, in Phoenix it's 120F. You could have three global warmings and heat waves in england would still struggle to crack 88F. In southern california 88F is a tuesday.

You should check out the latest state of the art stuff coming out of Google and OpenAI; they're releasing stuff that runs just fine on an 8gb consumer gpu and performs as good as summer 2024 models, with offload to system ram through new architectural techniques. A "20b" model will run performant on a 8gb card these days, provided you have 16gb system memory. You don't even need a good or modern gpu just wicked fast VRAM. Google has released some gemma and Gemini models in the 270m to 4b (that 'm' isn't a typo) that are functional for running lights, thermostat, kitchen timers etc that can and do run on raspberry pi hardware now.

And yet people don't feel the need to take their TV remote to a shop in the mall to pay to swap out the two AAA batteries in the back because you can open it with your thumb and swap them out in seconds.

The devices with screens (that can show you ads) tend to redirect you to an external website, whereas the hockey puck screenless devices tend to answer the question directly. We don't use the screen devices for much beyond turning lights on and off anymore as their answers involve looking at the screen. I'm looking forward to switching to a separate private hosted llm solution as soon as good hardware becomes available that's not a raspberry pi in a 3d printed case

yes and this is already done it's called speculative decoding. it's mostly applied to allow smaller models to write the majority of tokens (words like, the, and, if etc) and then those are fed to a larger model to check. checking tokens is way, way faster than generating them.