onion2k · HackerLangs

consumers are also demanding better graphics

I don't think many consumers (outside of hardcore games) could tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 10 years ago to the graphics from a game of today. Things have hardly moved on at all. As an example to illustrate the point: GTA:V is 13 years old.

onion2k

12 ore fadiscuss

It was a Gold, Silver, Bronze joke. :(

onion2k

14 ore fadiscuss

The Bronze Age was the third best age.

onion2k

19 ore fadiscuss

Your argument leads me to assume you think everything that causes to someone need an ambulance is the result of their choices.

Victim of a violent crime? You shouldn't have left your house.

Run over by someone else? You shouldn't have left your house.

Caught an infectious disease? You shouldn't have left your house.

Fell down the stairs? Why were you in your house!?! Don't you know how dangerous it is?!?

onion2k

22 ore fadiscuss

For some models like the popular coding and chat models, things move faster. For things like images, voice, sound etc they definitely lag a long way behind.

onion2k

22 ore fadiscuss

I don't think the question is "Should ambulances be a thing?" though. It's a question of "Should someone in a situation where they need an ambulance have to balance the potentially life-threatening impact of saying no versus the potentially financially ruinous impact of saying yes?"

The (fairly obvious) answer to that no one should be in that situation. It's horrible. Society should find a better way to pay for ambulances. Most of the world has accepted that some system to spread the cost among everyone is better than putting people in that situation.

onion2k

22 ore fadiscuss

Your question implies a belief that things are 'good' or 'bad', but the reality of the world is a lot more nuanced than that. Pretty much everything that doesn't lead directly to human suffering can be seen as both good and bad.

onion2k

22 ore fadiscuss

"industry worked out a way to sell you air at the price of cream and eggs" would be a more accurate distillation. They haven't reduced the quality of the product because the ingredients got expensive; they've reduced the quality because they worked how to sell you less for the same money, which results in more profit.

If the law banned 'frozen dairy dessert' they'd go back to selling the higher quality product, probably at a similar price to the worse product (price elasticity being a thing and all.) The only reason they sell the worse product is because they can, and they can because they hide the fact they're selling half a tub of air.

onion2k

23 ore fadiscuss

Running models on-device on a Mac is immensely annoying though. Figuring out what will work out of BF16, FP8, BF16+FP8, NVFP4, INT8, GGUF ... the list goes on ... is 'non-obvious' at best. Apple do little to support with tooling. There's MLX, but unless you're happy to transform a model to that format yourself you'll be lagging a long way behind.

Apps like LMStudio, Ollama, Draw Things, etc do a great job of simplifying it but it's still a pain.

onion2k

l’altro ieridiscuss

Not even hitting 1 nine at the moment - https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

onion2k

l’altro ieridiscuss

I don't think Anthropic are doing that because they don't have enough compute capacity. If we had 100* more datacentres the message would still be the same - they're focusing on selling Fable access to enterprise users because that's what makes them more money.

onion2k

l’altro ieridiscuss

The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.

The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.

There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].

This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"

onion2k

l’altro ieridiscuss

I am happy about all the little side-projects, and ideas it help my realize..

Same, but I really have to fight the urge to just add fun new features to things I work on any time inspiration strikes. I am an appalling 'feature factory' if I don't actively keep myself in check. The cost of just building everything is so low, but the value of those things is also incredibly low, so I'm often just bloating what I build.

There's been a lot of articles and posts about the increasing importance of 'taste' in software built with AI, and I'm finding I know need to look for strategies to find some.

onion2k

3 giorni fadiscuss

All that sweet, sweet shareholder value.

onion2k

3 giorni fadiscuss

There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel macros' or 'VBA' instead of just Excel.[1]

The core truth of it is that a massive amount, possibly most, of the world's software is not a carefully hand-crafted application in that lives in Github written by expert software developers. It's a heap of Excel functions in an XSLX file, with no tests, no source control, no PRs, and no real planning behind it. And it works for that one specific task that the person who built it needed at the time.

AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground between that stuff and 'real' code - it does more than just building somehting to complete today's task, and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it, but it doesn't really look that way to someone used to working on 'proper' software.

[1] Further reading if you're interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27048672

onion2k

3 giorni fadiscuss

It's also possible that giving access to Fable when lots of people have been taking time away from working on things (4th July, World Cup, etc) meant they didn't spend much time with it.

onion2k

3 giorni fadiscuss

If thorough testing and 100 experts can’t find a problem, the thing is probably perfect.

If you can get 100 experts to agree on something then you've cracked a much harder problem than software quality.

onion2k

3 giorni fadiscuss

Unless you are extremely crafty, you don’t get to retire from this sort of criminality.

He got away with it for 30 years. That shows at least some level of craftiness.

onion2k

3 giorni fadiscuss

I don't really understand the mentality of people who do this sort of criminal activity. If he'd stopped after, say, $5m and just retired he'd probably have managed to get away with it. Continuing to such a ridiculous degree through sheer greed led him to a death sentence. That's just plain stupid.

onion2k

3 giorni fadiscuss

If a fancy new feature can’t degrade gracefully, then 98% isn’t “widely supported”.

Close, but the other way round. Don't avoid a feature because it lacks good enough support. Write code to progressively enhance the experience if the feature is supported in the user's browser. If you're not willing to do that, then don't use the feature.

Progressive enhancement today means you can use pretty much any browser feature you want. You just have to do a bit of legwork with some @supports or JS prototype checking after doing the basic version first. It's not really much extra work.

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