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timruffles

1,614 karmajoined il y a 16 ans
timr.co

Engineer.

Poolside AI, previously Plaid, GitHub, Kiplot, Cloudflare.

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timruffles
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Import dependency. The UK government put it at 43.5% in 2025 and 43.8% in 2024: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69cd1451b5210...

> EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far.

If we're talking about 'sovereign', is it too far? I think the history of conflict in the modern era, hot and cold, shows that your rivals' ability to disrupt your energy imports matters a lot.
timruffles
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
> Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug

OK, fair enough on 'pull the plug ~instantly'. But models and chips age fast. If another country can stop you getting new models and chips, this means you're sovereign in state-of-the-art AI for only a window of a year or two (maybe this will widen if model progress tails off).

If it is a short window, strategically, that doesn't seem worth much given the timelines of: a) inter-state conflict, or trade wars b) cold-start time to be able to make your own models and chips

> Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.

Noted. But as a data-point, the audience at the event I mentioned (various AI builders and founders) made it clear from their questions to the speaker that the 'sovereign' that sov/ai was aiming at was hollow, for exactly the reasons I've stated.
timruffles
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Firstly, congrats! As a Brit this looks cool, and I'm happy to see it. I wish you every success.

Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.

Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.

I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.

If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!
timruffles
·il y a 2 ans·discuss
The Economist is a British newspaper. HQ London, editors British.

That said, ‘America’ is synonymous with the USA in writing and conversation here (and elsewhere in Europe in my experience).
timruffles
·il y a 2 ans·discuss
> nowadays every 16-year-old web-dev reaches for Array.map(x => <div>{x}</div>) when they write their pages in the most popular framework. These higher-order functions have now become part of the “hello world”

It's just wrong to ascribe the popularisation of HOFs like `map` to Haskell. `map` was there in good old (practical) Lisp 1.5 back in the 1960s. Why ascribe this to Haskell (released 1990) rather than Lisp? Guido said Python v1 (1994) got HOFs "courtesy of (I believe) a Lisp hacker who missed them"[1], Ruby had blocks in V1 (1995). Haskell's research direction was not about very, very old news like HOFs, it was about non-strict evaluation, and cool type system stuff.

[1] https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
timruffles
·il y a 2 ans·discuss
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650662
timruffles
·il y a 2 ans·discuss
Not so - it was the majority of their music industry earnings, and they are apparently quite haunted by it to this day!