It's hard to compare to the US as a big part of this is the very weak yen.
I spent a couple years traveling the world and punctuated my travels with a 2 week stop in Japan (Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto) in May '24. I was not prepared for how inexpensive everything was... much less than several eastern European cities I had just come from, more on par with places like Mexico City.
"My personal impression is that within these quantizations Qwen 3.6 27B is as good as (or maybe slightly better than) DwarfStar4. Though, I won’t be surprised if for longer context projects DS4 has an edge."
Curious why OpenCode instead of a more 'full-fat' version of Pi with the larger model?
I feel like the amount of context bloat that OpenCode puts these small models into the dumb zone too quickly. The system prompt alone is 9k tokens, and when you add your own setup it can easily creep up to 15k.
You might want to consider investing in something like a Babelio sound machine. It's tiny, quite loud, kinder to the environment and will guarantee you have a solution if the bathroom is too far away or the outside noise is a bit too aggressive.
They're designed for side-sleeping, but may present a bit of pressure on your ears... they do for me, I've adjusted. It's minor as the materials are quite soft.
They have a newer model that is slightly slimmer w/ more features like active noise cancellation, but has a smaller battery that is marginal for full-night sleeping, so I didn't bother upgrading.
One thing to note is they have some bad reviews due to issues with batteries dying or depleting quickly - my right bud wouldn't charge past 50% after 9 months of daily usage, which only lasted about 6 hours or so before dying. That said, Anker's tech support promptly sent out a new pair with minimal friction, which I received just days after reaching out. I've had 4 months of usage on those new ones without a hitch. Hopefully those kinks have been worked out.
Even if these new ones die outside of warranty, they're so good that I feel I'll have gotten my money's worth and will immediately buy them again.
Huge fan of my Anker Soundcore A20s w/ a mixture of noise colors over conventional ear plugs. Much more comfortable and don't create such a closed in effect. Easy to take in/out if I need to chat w/ a partner.
There was a book I read a couple years back called "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity", by David Bessis.
He discussed this topic and how generally it's left to those who are more notable in a field to ask the 'dumb' questions everyone else is afraid to ask. And such questions often need to be asked to get the audience on board and open the floodgates with areas of niche research - the speaker themself is often too far into the rabbit hole to discern the difference between opaque and obvious.
So it stands to reason, at smaller conferences this would be a big problem, with fewer thought leaders in attendance whose reputations are intact enough that they wouldn't mind looking foolish.
> Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”.
You're writing words that I did not say or imply.
The point is going against any (current) admin is almost always bad for a publicly traded company. Any public entity is going to have to have extremely good reasons to "fight back", how doing so is good for business. As a CEO of such an entity you're having to answer to many people who want a concrete plan and a belief in your strategy.
In the first rodeo, when all this was novel, it was believed such social signaling would pay off. Obviously silicon valley as a whole no longer feels this way.
TSLA is an outlier being grounded more on some superior man theory, that Apple did have in the past w/ Jobs, who is no longer there. Religious fervor stuff. It doesn't really apply. Rational moves here, please.
> There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value
This is what I asked you to expound on. Please state a few.
Let me be clear - I'm not happy about it. But ignoring such a reality reminds me of that quote comparing Job's best friend to a lawnmower.
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
Understood, but to be clear, I felt the same way after I heard how off I was, as if maybe there was something defective with my brain.
Just start small, record 4 bars of something, play it back. Use a metronome to gauge the actual amount of drift. See if you can hear what the metronome is telling you. Try to improve it with a few more attempts, then call it a day.
Try again after a good night's rest. Over time you should be able to naturally feel when you're slowing down or speeding up.
Until my late 20s, I was bad with both pitch and rhythm despite playing guitar for over a dozen years. Then I took singing lessons with a professional opera singer for 9 months, one hour a week.
She stressed how important it was to record myself and listen back, in fact she encouraged me to do it for hours at a time. The immediate reaction the first few days of trying this was "holy crap, not only am I pitchy and can't hear it naturally, I'm constantly slowing down and speeding up like +/- 10bpm."
The experience was so distressing that I tried to quit my next lesson, but she pushed back with "Hey if you can hear it, you can fix it. It won't be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. It could take a year. Improvement happens little by little. And I guarantee you'll see progress as it happens. But you have to put in the work."
After a few weeks of working up to it, I settled into a pattern of spending ~3-5 hours most weeknights in the darkness of my closet, recording myself playing Beatles songs along with an acoustic guitar into a 4-track. Usually just going back and forth over 4-8 bars of a song for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes another section, really just focusing on a couple songs like that. Toward the end of the session I'd attempt several full run throughs, get super frustrated (over increasingly minor issues), and end the session.
And she was right, by about the third month I was comfortable enough to perform in front of the person I was seeing, and by month five, I could get through a song with barely any mistakes, maybe one out of three chances. By the ninth month, after a 15 minute warmup, I could get through a 3 song stretch with just minor errors, enough not to totally embarrass myself at an open mic night.
At that point I felt I hit my goal and took a break from lessons. Never did an open mic night. Continued practicing a bit in my closest, but after a month or two I stopped as well.
And here 20 years later, my rhythm actually is pretty solid... I've been a consistent bedroom guitarist, and routinely record myself, and sometimes I don't bother with a metronome because it sounds that consistent. That said, I stopped singing and that ability is completely gone. But I am starting a similar process learning classical guitar.
So I go back to that original bit of advice with just about anything I try to tackle now... if you're self-aware of your issues, and can actually critically hear them in a recording, then there is a path forward.
In recent years Japan has been cheap due to the weakness of the yen, which has been trending 160/1 USD. Just 10 years ago it was nearly twice as strong. When I visited a couple years ago (2 weeks in Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto), everything seemed to be surprisingly cheap.
- Yes food, as well as alcohol, was quite cheap. Had very few meals that came out to more than $10, alcohol (about $3-4/drink) included.
- I purchased a couple pairs of running shoes that were about 30% cheaper than they were offered for sale in the US.
- I purchased an umbrella for $45 that sells in the US for $75.
- An all-access pass at their premier amusement park, Fuji-Q Highland, was only about $40 - when entry to comparable parks in the US can easily be twice as much.
- I recall the subway came out to around $1.50 a ride, roughly half what the NYC subway costs and the 1 and 3 day passes made it ridiculously cheap (IIRC something like $5/$10).
- I only used capsule hotels, but those were only $15 to up to $38 for a luxury one, almost all in desirable/touristy areas.
- I also took a look at apartments, and in decent areas in Tokyo you can find small apartments for about $1500 that would cost ~$3500 in Manhattan, or maybe $2000 in medium sized US city centers.
My first 'real' machine was a Price Club (now Costco) 386sx for $3800 in late '89, which would be nearly $10k adjusted for inflation. 16 MHz, 1 MB RAM, 40 MB hard disk.
That was bargain basement for that era. IBMs, Compaqs and the like were ~$5k similarly configured, and the first 486s were in the $7-9k area.
I'm assuming he's in some sort of high-end communal housing, a trend that began emerging in SF ~15 years back ... ie. where multi-millionaire startup founders and the like choose it on purpose for the synergistic benefits.
CTO @ stealth AI related startup