It's an absolute regression to the mean. We need to understand the correct place for LLM-driven coding agents et al: they're beige paste extruders. Which is actually a perfect match for 80% of corporate world.
For anything unique, they're a boon, in that they can free you from dealing with the boilerplate, but you must think on your own, must have your own insights, tap into your creativity. If you start to depend on them for ideation, it's slippery slope to the slop bowl.
The other day, I took apart an old handheld vacuum cleaner to scavenge the internals. All there was inside was a small but powerful motor, and a couple of 18650 batteries with a charge controller and a switch.
Two small batteries, running a relatively powerful vacuum, which could do spot cleans of the whole house (corners and crevices and such) without needing a recharge.
We're getting closer to the bubble-bursting peak. Yet another tech corp that fired a ton of experienced people hoping to squeeze more $ for a quarter, finding out AI hype is not all it's cracked up to be. Loving that for them.
Second thought, I wonder if zuckburger has turned into the Cramer of tech. First, the metaverse fiasco, now another massive overinvestment into a dead-ish end?
The "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
I throttle the GPUs to ~280W each (my cooling solution is insufficient to run them full tilt), and so at peak usage I show a ~1200VA draw. Electricity is relatively cheap here, so the main disadvantage of the at-home setup is having the equivalent of a small space heater running in the summer.
I think it's silly to go for a laptop form factor. Last fall I put together a workstation with two second-hand 3090s in it (paid $850CDN each, now the best I can find is $1200). With 48GB VRAM it's reasonable - and I've been using Qwen 3.6 27B for various tasks around building KGs from text corpora / reasoning about them.
I've ran comparisons against everything that's available on OpenRouter (well, as of few weeks ago), and for $0/tok, the local 27B Qwen can't be beat. Sure, it's slower, and yeah, the office is a few degrees warmer than it ought to be -- but nobody can pull the plug, nobody is watching over my shoulder, and the results are on par with SOTA.
Can't wait for a similarly sized Qwen 3.7 - from what I've seen so far, it's a leap ahead of the previous version.
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
Canadian federal govt just pushed thru a slew of similar legislation - absolutely unprecedented assault on privacy, tools for tracking everyone all the time, minimally constrained, giving broad leeway to a three-person unelected body to implement the actual details.
I think we got excited / wanted to believe that we won't have to expend any effort whatsoever, and the AI could "do it all".
The reality (as far as I can comprehend it) seems to be that AI expanded the scope of what we can shove into one mouthful, and now it takes much more effort to chew. Metaphorically speaking.