The best box cutter is the Moby Safety Knife. I used it when I was working in a supermarket 20 years ago, and I haven't found anything even remotely comparable.
The short blade on top is perfect for breaking the tape to open the box without damaging the contents. Then the mouth can be used for quickly breaking down boxes or cutting shrink wrap. You are just cutting tape, so the blade never wears out.
I cringe every time I see someone using a Stanley knife in a supermarket.
I think it's more a consequence of pushing for the biggest valuation/IPO. Rumoured profits on inference are north of 70%.
Taking SpaceX as an example, they have increased prices across all their consumer products over the past six months. But they definitely aren't short on money with Alphabet and Anthropic combined paying them over $2 billion per month.
Microsoft/GitHub lost out here as they were just repacking other people's products.
Don't forget the fan controllers to try to make it silent and the neon lights. I still have that machine at my parents house, used it a couple of years ago to rip all my teenage CDs to digital formats.
Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".
I basically don't use Facebook any more because of this. Opening the app shows me the most sensationalist, fearmongering and outrage bait content they can find. It's worse than news channels (I haven't watched TV for 20 years). I have auto play turned off, and every few months the setting gets turned back on.
The first few posts I see scrolling through:
- US adds mandatory tips ahead of world cup.
- Woman dies after being hit by Audi in city center.
- There was a huge queue for women's toilets at a tech conference.
- 50% off mattresses.
- Some influencer I don't follow bought 20 rolls of 3M tape from Lidl.
Do I still have friends, do they still post stuff? I only see them in the reels/stories section at the top.
The only reason why I still have Facebook is because of groups. It's the main 'groups' tool people use in my country, so there are various local groups I am part of.
This also perfectly describes the career change from software engineer to engineering manager.
Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.
There are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.
If training robots doesn't pan out, they could always pivot and use the data to train AI to control humans instead. Some industries such as Amazon warehouse pickers and drivers are effectively already this.
I run some numbers, how much would it cost to build MaltaGPT - sovereign hosted ChatGPT.
Malta has a population of 500k. Let's assume 100k people use MaltaGPT daily, and they send an average of 10 messages per day, so roughly 1M messages per day. That averages 694 per minute, but at peak could be 3-5x that, so let's say 3000 per minute. Usage will of course vary by day of week and time of day (they could partner with a Pacific island and share inference hardware).
Those 3000 messages per minute translate to 50 messages per second. Let's say average prompt input is 5k tokens, and output is 500. So 250k tokens per second for prompt processing (let's ignore caching for simplicity) and 25k tokens per second for output decode.
If we take a 500B dense model, that concerts to roughly 1 trillion flops per token. So we need 250 petaflops per second of prompt processing and 25 petaflops for output decode. So 275 PFLOPS in compute.
That may sound like a lot, however a NVIDIA DGX B200 machine (8xB200) has a compute of 144 PFLOPS at FP4. That is assuming 100% efficiency which isn't really possible, and we also need to factor in memory usage which we would be limited more by than compute. So let's say we'd need 10 of them. For an entire country to have a sovereign version of ChatGPT.
The cloud cost to rent one machine is around $50/hour, so that would mean our cluster comes to $4.8m per year. However the list price of a machine is around €400k, so the price to buy the cluster outright would be around €5m (you need the rest of the data center too), with operating costs of around €500k per year.
Is there any progress being made on cars so they are less susceptible to rust? In my country that's the main reason why vehicles are scrapped, engines can be repaired easily enough, but when various suspension parts are corroded and need replacing it's not worth fixing anymore.
As I understand one of the reasons against using materials like stainless steel or other alloys for cars is that is is harder to work with, but most new cars today are written off - rather than being repaired - after even minor accidents, so that doesn't really seem like it's a realistic concern.
I'm in the early phases of working on a game that explores that.
The backstory is that in the late 2050s when AI has its hands in everything, humans loose trust of it. There are a few high profile incidents - based on AI decisions -, which cause public opinion to change, and an initiative is brought in to ensure important systems run hardware and software that can be trusted and human reviewed.
A 16bit CPU architecture - with no pipelining, speculative execution etc is chosen, as it's powerful enough to run such systems, but also simple enough that a human can fully understand the hardware and software.
The goal is to make a near-future space exploration MMO. My Macbook Pro can simulate 3000 CPU cores simultaneously, and I have a lot of fun ideas for it. The irony is that I'm using LLMs to build it :D
> I reformatted to a linear log filesystem ... I'm sure it was shuffling all the old data around as well.
I’d assume for these you should follow the same advice as SSDs, and issue the ATA Secure Erase command to have the drive wipe itself (or as is typically the case now, just it’s internal state and encryption keys):
With Google Assistant (old assistant) I could say "Hey Google, play daft punk" and it would start playing Daft Punk on Spotify.
With Gemini (new assistant) it says "sorry I cannot play music, but here are links to services where you can find Daft Punk albums".
Fortunately at the moment you can still toggle between them. I guess not for long though.