medvezhenok

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قبل 17 يومًاdiscuss

You can get AppleCare+ in the U.S. for $149/year which is just as good (or better) than any warranty.

قبل 23 يومًاdiscuss

Yup, especially data backups (although I wouldn't store critical backups like this, only nice-to-have ones). One minor note is that parquet file sizes / compressed sizes can be sensitive to ordering, so you can try different sort orders to get optimal compression.

I found with using various tricks I can get the zstd parquet to be up to 10x (or more) smaller than an equivalent Postgres table - but obviously the exact compression ratios will depend on the kind of data you have and how well your Postgres table is normalized.

قبل 24 يومًاdiscuss

Yup. And an extra benefit that you can treat any file like a table, so you can also do something like

  UPDATE my_table
  SET x = file1.x,
      y = file2.y
  FROM 'first_file.csv' file1
  LEFT JOIN 's3://my_bucket/second_file.parquet' file2
    ON file1.id = file2.id
  WHERE mytable.id = file1.id;

قبل 24 يومًاdiscuss

Claude code can write exploratory queries for you to give you a quick rundown on the shape of the data set, frequencies, missing values, etc etc (without having to load it into a more persistent data store or writing custom python scripts). I also find SQL snippets inherently more re-usable than custom python code.

You can also write a skill that CC can re-use if you're analyzing a lot of similar data sets with minor variance.

قبل 24 يومًاdiscuss

Basically like a locally hosted Snowflake - it only shines if you have enough data to analyze (100 MB - 100 GB is probably the sweet-spot range - less than that and the benefits are small, more than that and you risk flying too close to the sun with memory usage).

It has connectors for Postgres & other stores, so I find it faster to connect to a Postgres instance, pull all of the data from a table (even if the table is like 50GB - if you have 30 cores on the machine it will pull from Postgres using 30 cores in parallel, so it will only take a minute or two) - and then any analytical queries on the data are 10+ times faster in DuckDB over native Postgres (GROUP BY, regexp_replace, count(distinct...) etc).

قبل 24 يومًاdiscuss

DuckDB has been probably my most used tool in 2026 - if you're comfortable with SQL it's incredible at quickly prototyping and slicing / dicing data.

I do a lot of experiments with regexes, and if you get used to the RE2 syntax that DuckDB uses, you can see up to 10-100x uplift in terms of speed compared to Postgres on things like regexp_matches(), regexp_extract(), etc (depending on query/table/machine specifics). It has quite powerful scripting with custom Macros, fixes a lot of annoyances of SQL for me compared to Postgres.

I think if you have access to a machine with a lot of RAM / cores and a beefy data set, then it's basically like a RAMdisk version of Snowflake running locally on your machine.

(and of course the fact that it makes it convenient to read CSV/parquet, read/write from S3, etc) - it's a very ergonomic tool.

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Soviet Union had childlessness tax, but you were exempt if you could prove infertility

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?

It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a day to write before, for work) - although I would have never written this visualization before LLMs (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's Jevons Paradox in action somewhat.

In order to observe the productivity increases you need a good scale where the productivity would really matter (the same way that when a benchmark is saturated, like the AIME, it stops telling us anything useful about model improvement)

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

Short answer: there is none. You can't get frontier-level performance from any open source model, much less one that would work on an M3 Pro.

If you had more like 200GB ram you might be able to run something like MiniMax M2.1 to get last-gen performance at something resembling usable speed - but it's still a far cry from codex on high.

قبل 7 أشهرdiscuss

I'm curious about book recommendations on this (as someone raising kids in the US but originally from Russia)

قبل 7 أشهرdiscuss

Yeah, I wonder if you plotted crime rate vs time spent outside or something like that (car accident rates are usually reported as an average of an accident / # of miles, since how much you drive changes your likelihood of being in an accident)

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

The core premise (benchmarks are broken), might be correct, but the poverty benchmark he uses is a bad example. The OPM and SPM (supplemental poverty measure, developed in 2009-2012), disagree by less than 10%; and the latter takes into account many of the criticisms in the article.

The author uses MIT Living Wage numbers to argue that should be the new "poverty" benchmark - an absurd proposition. Those might be reasonable middle class numbers. He also implies that the benchmark historically represented what is now covered under that $140K calculation - also false; it took ~$9000 in 1966 to cover a "basic standard of living" for a family of 4 with 1 earner; inflation adjusted, that's around $90,000 today. If you add in SS/Medicare taxes (3% then, 15% today), that puts you at ~$100K-105K.

Using the same MIT Living Wage numbers and taking Essex-Princeton NJ as the area (roughly what the author used), you end up with $99,922 as the living wage for a single earner, 4 person household - almost exactly the same as the household back in 1966.

Were there more jobs in 1966 that paid $9000/year versus jobs that pay $100K today? That's the real story you're looking for.

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

The core premise (benchmarks are broken), might be correct, but the poverty benchmark he uses is a bad example. The OPM and SPM (supplemental poverty measure, developed in 2009-2012), disagree by less than 10%; and the latter takes into account many of the criticisms in the article.

The author uses MIT Living Wage numbers to argue that should be the new "poverty" benchmark - an absurd proposition. Those might be reasonable middle class numbers. He also implies that the benchmark historically represented what is now covered under that $140K calculation - also false; it took ~$9000 in 1966 to cover a "basic standard of living" for a family of 4 with 1 earner; inflation adjusted, that's around $90,000 today. If you add in SS/Medicare taxes (3% then, 15% today), that puts you at ~$100K-105K.

Using the same MIT Living Wage numbers and taking Essex-Princeton NJ as the area (roughly what the author used), you end up with $99,922 as the living wage for a single earner, 4 person household - almost exactly the same as the household back in 1966.

Were there more jobs in 1966 that paid $9000/year versus jobs that pay $100K today? That's the real story you're looking for.

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

The strongest argument is probably that for someone subsisting on the minimal wage, the CPI is not a good representation of their consumption basket (whereas it might be for someone close to the median).

Therefore the adjustment should probably be based on a different number reflecting the actual consumption of households near the poverty line (food would probably be higher than it is in the CPI currently, as one example)

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

The increasing levels of abstraction work only as long as the abstractions are deterministic (with some limited exceptions - i.e. branch prediction/preloading at CPU level, etc). You can still get into issues with leaky abstractions, but generally they are quite rare in established high->low level language transformations.

This is more akin to manager-level view of the code (who need developers to go and look at the "deterministic" instructions); the abstraction is a lot lot more leaky than high->low level languages.

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

Human societies? No.

Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e. rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

Sure, but LLMs tend to be better at navigating around documentation (or source code when no documentation exists). In agentic mode, they can get me to the right part of the documentation (or the right of the source code, especially in unfamiliar codebases) much quicker than I could do it myself without help.

And I find that even the auto-generated stuff tends to go up at least a bit in terms of level of abstraction than staring at the code itself, and helps you more like a "sparknotes" version of the code, so that when you dig in yourself you have an outline/roadmap.

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

Indeed. But the unintended consequence (perhaps) of LLMs making things easier to use is that more people will use them - basically Jevons paradox.

I would expect that this will cause certain programs to see more demand than the creators anticipated for (extrapolating previous trends), which might require changes in the programs (i.e. more people apply for benefits than expected, benefits / application might have to be cut, etc).

And in some ways there's a Cantillon effect (though traditionally associated with proximity to the "money printer", but here the proximity is to the LLM-enablement; in that those who use the LLMs first can get the benefit before the rules are changed).

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

I think this was true before AlphaZero; now, I'm not sure there's any benefit to having a human + engine versus just an engine alone.

From my understanding the AlphaZero based engines (i.e. neural nets) do not really benefit from having a human in the loop.

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

I think they said M4 Ultra Studio is not going to happen, have to wait for M5 Ultra...