> What is happening here is that leading AI labs are charging not only for inference but also for research in model architecture, training data collection and curation, model training cost (which can be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars), paying their employees and recovering the marketing costs.
> Adding an in-product tip to recommend running /clear when re-visiting old conversations (we shipped a few iterations of this)
I feel like I'm missing something here. Why would I revisit an old conversation only to clear it?
To me it sounds like a prompt-cache miss for a big context absolutely needs to be a per-instance warning and confirmation. Or even better a live status indicating what sending a message will cost you in terms of input tokens.
Instead of just dropping all the context, the system could also run a compaction (summarizing the entire convo) before dropping it. Better to continue with a summary than to lose everything.
And if you don't want to buy a Mac? A 80 GB NVidia GPU costs $10,000K (equivalent to 30 years of ChatGPT Plus subscription) and will probably be obsolete in 5-7 years anyway. What are my options if I want a decent coding agent at a reasonable price?
When I was a kid reading Marvel comics, Spiderman seemed like a bad and relatively uninteresting super hero. His problems were trivial personal issues and he rarely left NYC, fighting local crime or villains like Green Goblin who were just broken humans. Meanwhile the Fantastic Four were in regular contact with government institutions, went into space, and fought interstellar aliens. They just seemed better and more important. Not to mention the Avengers.
As an adult, while Marvel isn't my favorite thing anymore, I find Spiderman to their most interesting superhero.
The use case I always envisioned from the sidelines was that I could ditch a poorly designed, garbage-collected mess of a language (JavaScript) for something typesafe, with predictable performance, cache locality by default (as in not making everything a reference), no GC, generics, etc. But WASM won't be there until it has first-class access to the DOM, in my opinion.
You are allowed to throw from a destructor as long as there's not already an active exception unwinding the stack. In my experience this is a total non-issue for any real-world scenario. Propagating errors from the happy path matters more than situations where you're already dealing with a live exception.
For example: you can't write to a file because of an I/O error, and when throwing that exception you find that you can't close the file either. What are you going to do about that other than possibly log the issue in the destructor? Wait and try again until it can be closed?
If you really must force Java semantics into it with chains of exception causes (as if anybody handled those gracefully, ever) then you can. Get the current exception and store a reference to the new one inside the first one. But I would much rather use exceptions as little as possible.
Destructors are vastly superior to the finally keyword because they only require us to remember a single time to release resources (in the destructor) as opposed to every finally clause. For example, a file always closes itself when it goes out of scope instead of having to be explicitly closed by the person who opened the file. Syntax is also less cluttered with less indentation, especially when multiple objects are created that require nested try... finally blocks. Not to mention how branching and conditional initialization complicates things. You can often pair up constructors with destructors in the code so that it becomes very obvious when resource acquisition and release do not match up.
The worst part about MS Office isn't the direct user experience, because I can usually choose to use other software. The worst part is that I and everybody else are subjected to the documents that Office produces. Their defaults and their UX inevitably produce stuff that is hard to read and inconsistent, unless you fight the software really hard and make sacrifices with your desired output. And there's no escape from it. Another specimen of Word's 2.5 cm margins, 200-character lines in poorly designed knockoff Helvetica will probably find its way to my mailbox before the end of the day.
I see where you're coming from. But I often find that when I have some idea or challenge that I want to solve, I get bogged down in details (like how do I build that project)... before I even know if the idea I _wanted_ to solve is feasible.
It's not that I don't care about learning how to build Rust or think that it's too big of a challenge. It's just not the thing I was excited about right now, and it's not obvious ahead of time how sidetracked it will get me. I find that having an LLM just figure it out helps me to not lose momentum.
You misunderstand my point. I'm not saying that the purpose of Hermès is to sell bags. I'm saying that the _product_ that Hermès sells is status, and the product of a restaurant is a dining experience.
Maybe not slower once it has warmed up, though for memory-bandwidth bound use cases I would still say the lack of mutable records has you fighting the language to get reasonable cache locality (and everybody will hate your code for not being good Java). The fact that everything is a pointer kills the CPU execution pipeline and cache.
But even for I/O bound applications it still feels slow because excessive memory usage means more swap thrashing (slowing down your entire OS), and startup time suffers greatly from having to fire up VM + loading classes and waiting for the JIT to warm up.
I can start a C/C++/Rust based web server in under a second. The corresponding server in Java takes 10 seconds, or minutes once I have added more features.
The article got off on the wrong foot from the start by separating the purpose from the product. To my mind the purpose is the product and always will be.