we're about to buy a $2400 m4 pro mac mini to grind away at a useful but low-medium priority task in perpetuity using one of the qwen 3.6 models. The ROI vs haiku api cost is less than 5 months. SOTA models are cool but a quantized 30B class model can do most any batched work if structured carefully, and you have a fairly flexible failure budget

The big issue is GDDR6 memory which is pretty new and there's not a ton of capacity already, and it's all been bought out through the end of 2028. Plants take 3 years to come online and are expensive (Read: risky) to build if the demand falls off
 
I would love to be able to buy a 4TB GDDR7 machine and never have to use cloud services again, but it's not happening before 2035

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Move further south, I guess. The rest of the country is much warmer, more livable, and doesn't freeze solid for three months out of the year. The fact that you have to change your clocks twice a year to cope with it isn't my problem.

Given your user ID # I think you know the reason(s)

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

It is like, $20 a month and far, far cheaper than cable or whatever. I don't like paying for services, but I don't like dealing with ads even more. If there's an option for an ad-free experience, I will always take that option.

Basically everyone who works in a regulated industry, or industry that should be does, yes.

I've been paying for Kagi ($10/mo?) now for over a year across both personal and work devices and I don't miss it at all. The only time I still use google is if I need to buy a product and want to see what is available besides what is on amazon, i'll seach "toaster oven" to get inundated with ads (and then 12-48 hours later see ads for toaster oven across all my social medias and youtube). Turning off the googs cold-turkey and then selectively using it, it's been very interesting to see what kind of targeted ads I see.

Jet fuel is set to skyrocket by August and I don't think jet travel will remain affordable for most of society. Looking at the proportion of the airplane that is Economy Plus, or Economy Plus-Plus, about 5%, I don't think there's enough demand for a tremendous amount of supersonic travel between any two cities besides perhaps NYC and LA, and NYC and Atlanta/Miami

Get paid to fight AI
 
Honestly, AI is going to slow hiring, and then companies will stop hiring new positions. I don't think it's going to be an obvious "we are laying off 20% of the company due to AI being amaze-balls". Yeah yeah like 30 very large companies are laying off employees saying it's due to AI but... if you look at their public finances they're flat growth whereas S&P 500 is up 999% (or whatever, it's a lot) so they're saying what they have to say to keep their job as CEO.
 
My prediction is 97% of "job replacement" by AI will simply be the slow march of progress as the one really talented guy on his team, slowly replaces his coworker's workstreams via automation, something that was going to happen anyways, just 10 years later than the current timeline. You can't really legislate that kind of slow motion trainwreck. It's very easy to do quarter after quarter of 499 employees reduction in workforce to avoid layoff public notices etc. And businesses will win in the courts under "public notices for less than 499 employees is excessive burden on businesses" etc etc.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

This is what happened
 
LLM trained on security breaches are getting real good at finding tiny security flaws, probably unwinding years or even decades of intentional security flaws for various agencies

There hasn't been a single improvement to android i needed/wanted since my Nexus 5 back in....2013. I just want vanilla android, no changes, particularly to the UI, and security updates, for the next 60 years. I just don't give a fuck about whatever feature the UI/UX designer trying to justify their job, is trying to squeeze into a mature product at this point. Go fuck yourself, UI/UX dude at google. I hate you, you actively make my life worse.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.