This is part of why the AI bubble will burst. The only way to make the profit numbers backing the loans to AI companies is to get increased capacity, and the capacity requires energy, and the energy won't arrive in time, only partly due to all the factors here, and partly because building transmission and generation is speculative and can fail for a number of reasons.
US administration can try to pull a China and basically remove all regulatory barriers (following existing playbook of "do whatever we want and wait a year or two for the courts to catch up and stop us"). It'll create havoc that will make people very upset (more so than the people that already protest DCs in their backyards). But even then, it's construction on varied terrain and property over long distances; you can't predict exactly how that will go. Triple the estimated timeline and that is probably doable, but current AI investment likely can't wait that long, unless somebody can pull additional hundreds of billions out of a hat to extend lines of credit or a ponzi-scheme-esque paying-creditors-with-newly-lent-money. In that time the market will realize the hype was hype, the gains were modest, they'll start divesting, and then the house comes down.
One way around that might be to deploy thousands more gas turbines and make rural air quality look like 2010 Beijing. It will probably happen if things get really tight, and we'll see how the current administrations's base responds; if they stick it out, the market gets a reprieve.
Defrost is the little window icon with wavy lines on it. Same icon it's been since I started driving 25 years ago. According to the internet, it's been that way for 50 years, since it was standardized by ISO 2575-3:1975 ("Road vehicles — Symbols for controls, indicators and tell-tales"). Both US and European law decided in 1978 that everyone had to use the same icons.
And there's a user manual in the car, you know; RTFM?
Matrix seems like a decent enough open protocol for a Slack replacement, with XMPP/IRC/IRCv3 being more useful for bare-bones chat transport.
This Chatto thing unfortunately uses a Protobuf custom API and is explicitly anti-compatibility with other systems. The lack of interoperability may end up killing it, unless the experience is much better than everything else.
Yesterday I asked an AI to generate a report as a CSV. But then I wanted it split into multiple sheets, and to add some formulas, so I asked it to create an XLSX, and it did (with Python). I'm imagining Microsoft embedding an AI agent and Python interpreter in their tools... no more need for a software dev, excel expert, or technical book author
Many Japanese appliances actually do speak, but you'd probably have a hard time troubleshooting them.
One day the normal sounds you're used to don't happen, and instead you hear "Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu." So you try to find a manual to understand what it means, and the manual has a Japanese section ("給紙トレイで紙が詰まっています。") and an English section ("The paper loader is jammed."). How do you know that the sound you heard ("Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu") means "The paper loader is jammed" unless you already read and speak Japanese? One way to figure it out would be... icons.
Japanese appliances play unique tunes in order to avoid beep confusion and reduce user annoyance. A tune is also more easily distinguished from voice if you don't speak the language. Western appliances have slowly started doing the same. (https://www.gearpatrol.com/home/a45038903/singing-appliances...)
Keep in mind that there are people for whom thinking about quality has been their whole career, for decades. There've been long-running industry studies on software quality that have gathered metrics across thousands of businesses on what works and what doesn't. People have been focusing on quality in businesses in general for centuries. It's not a solved problem, but it has been tackled by experts for a long time. It's a good idea to look to their work first before taking a swing at it yourself.
Personally I find quality to have a fundamental impact on everything every human does. It affects mental state, motivation, affects ability, necessity, and time to do things, creates or reduces costs, availability of resources, clarifies or complicates, makes life easier or harder, etc. It can save or destroy a business, make someone's life feel easy as pie or insanely frustrating. But it's not always easy to do right; you need a system to apply quality intelligently or you risk your efforts being wasted (https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/produ...).
Makes sense. AI is a munition now, and nations tend to restrict them. Eventually there will be international open source communities building open weights (all you need's a few smart people and a lot of GPUs for training), making the restrictions moot. Until then this will become the norm.
> This is pretty representative of what I'm calling the flamewar style
It would be good to have a HN dictionary of terms. The normal internet definition of a flamewar is "a hostile, prolonged argument on the internet that devolves into personal attacks, insults, and aggressive behavior". I said "all coding is vibe coding". Not really a personal attack or aggressive, is it? Glad to know now there's a separate HN definition for this term though. Thank you for correcting my terrible behavior. (That was sarcasm, by the way, not an aggressive attack; I know this can be hard to interpret)
> It's enough to offer a different view, or explain what you think a more correct view is.
I already offered a different view, in detail, and their response was to double down on the opposite of that view. I would be reiterating the same original point. In order to express the inherent flaw in the view, I associated it to another view most people today find abhorrent. It's high risk, but I have nothing to lose, because they already disagreed with my point.
> In fact, if the other person senses that you're trying to "get them to see how ridiculous their argument is", or indeed to "get them" to do anything at all, they usually react primarily to that quality, and only secondarily to any argument
I mostly comment on HN to inform the casual viewer that there is a different view than that of the majority echo chamber. I don't need the person I'm replying to to agree with me. I'm trying to reach the person whose brain isn't yet shut down to logic and reason. I admit sometimes it comes off as dickish, which is regretful, but hopefully still makes my point.
> because it breaks the implicit contract of curious conversation
Almost nobody on the internet has agreed to such a contract. Most people's brains implicitly believe that whatever they already think is correct, unless presented with some irrefutable proof, or argued by a person they implicitly trust. Many people are curious, but not so curious as to want their mind changed by strangers. Which is why people lean on the heuristics of popularity, authority, success, etc to choose what to believe. Most people don't have curious conversations, they have disagreements and agreements.
HN is the epicenter of the tech contrarian, here to disagree with any prevailing wisdom and consider any claims that don't sound like "common sense" as suspect. You've built a wall to keep out intelligence and evidence, and inflate the power of the crowd to make certain opinions seem more valid, depending on who happens to have more traction in the comments. I believe it's a feature built into this platform to increase engagement and controversy to increase site traffic.
Yes, margin on model inference is high with some providers. If you just wanted inference (at cost), you'd buy a GPU, or rent one from AWS or Microsoft. But you're not paying OpenAI/Anthropic for inference. You're paying them for a platform. Every feature OpenAI/Anthropic bake into their applications, models, online services, etc - anything that isn't pure LLM text generation - is a custom integrated add-on service that LLM weights do not include. Even if open weights became cheaper and better than OpenAI/Anthropic, most people would still pay for OpenAI/Anthropic, because they give you things the weights alone don't give you.
Comparing Z.ai GLM 5.2 to Claude Code w/Opus 4.8 is like comparing Linux Kernel 7.0 to Microsoft Windows 11. If you don't know much about computers, you'd say these are the same things. If you know a lot about computers, you know the latter has a thousand extra things that make a huge difference in what it does out of the box. Which one you use speaks to what kind of customer you are.
Sure, GLM 5.2 doesn't have vision; but an AI power user can plumb together any VLM with the text generation of GLM 5.2 in most AI harnesses, just like a Linux power user can combine the Linux kernel with KDE Desktop. Most people don't use Linux and KDE, because it's unpopular, difficult to use, hard to get support for. Instead they pay for Windows or Mac, because there's lots of support, with a giant company pouring money and effort into filling all the usability gaps, making it seamless.
Most people don't pay for the cheapest possible thing. They pay for the thing they can afford that improves their life while making it easier. An open weight alone is almost completely unusable by itself (like the Linux kernel), compared to an AI platform (a completely usable system). If you're constantly wondering about when open weights will reach parity with OpenAI/Anthropic, you're a Linux person. If you just pay $20/$50/$100 for OpenAI/Anthropic without thinking about it, you're a Windows/Mac person. There is nothing wrong with either of these groups, but they are fundamentally different, and always will be. An LLM weight is simply a different category of thing than an entire AI platform/provider.
It's not a flamewar style comment, and I think you know that. I was responding to someone's suggestion that software engineering quality is determined "by instinct" - as in, by feel, as in, vibes. It's a pointed argument about conventions of the software industry, made by repeating what the person said using different words that mean the same thing, to try to get them to see how ridiculous their argument is.
You have warned me several times over the years over valid arguments I've made, with no rhyme or reason other than you personally don't agree with my views (or two people downvote it). It would be nice if you didn't throw your weight around so casually, but then again this is your world, not "the community"'s.
The "tasteful solves" is codified cargo culting. The software industry has a tendency to anthropomorphize software while playing to the ego of the programmer. The programmer imagines they are creating a "beautiful" artistic expression. Good code becomes "tasteful", as a software artist must have "good taste" to tell the good software from the bad software. Good quality lacks "bad smells", because a good artist has fine senses (and everybody must like the same smells). "Fine craftsmanship", in code as in woodworking, means your finely-crafted work is "technically superior", so you can charge more money for something that could've been made cheaper and faster and done the same thing.
But it's a lie. Nobody's paying you to make paintings. They're paying you to build machines. The comparison between "making working software" with "taste" always devolves into bikeshedding and subjective opinionism, uses subjective human feelings to describe what should be objective and functional, isn't rooted in scientific rigor, and detracts from the real purpose of the thing. The work doesn't actually get better by trying to apply artistic principles to engineering. It just feels better for the people making it.
Once you make the machine work, then you can go about gilding the lily. But this is unromantic, unsatisfying, boring. Since the inmates run this particular asylum, we end up with a benchmark that tries to accurately mimic the human ego as applied to software design. Thus the new Gods create their digital Adams and Eves in their image.
It's a bad tool how? In that it doesn't automatically do everything perfectly from a 0-shot prompt?
We don't have to do anything. We could continue with the status quo and all the problems that entails. Or we could embrace progress and try to use technology to make our lives easier and better.
This makes sense in the short term, but we really need the industry as a whole to learn how to code with AI in a safe sustainable way. Open Source has a particular problem of taking a really long time to make changes, fix bugs, etc. A lot of design decisions are due to "we don't have time for this". AI can speed those things up and drastically increase the utility we can get out of open source. We just need to figure out how to do it without creating a mess.
Well it's a feature in that the ratification rules were part of an intentional illicit rewrite of the constitution. We could make it easier to modify like other nations, but that also makes it easier to repeal.
I think the fix is to require more political parties to be involved, so a 51% majority of a single party can't remove federal laws whenever they have a majority. Then you wouldn't need an amendment to solve controversial problems.
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The views and opinions I express on HN do not reflect those of my employer.
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#OpenToWork - Information Systems Engineering (DevOps/SRE/Admin/Architect/Security/Programming/etc) and I only work remote