At a very abstract level, when you're manufacturing DRAM you need to manufacture a lot of circuit elements that have HIGH capacitance, since a DRAM cell is basically a capacitor and the higher its capacitance the less frequently it needs to be refreshed.
On the other hand, when manufacturing logic (CPU/GPU/ASIC) you want to minimize the capacitance of almost all circuit elements, since capacitance introduces delay and switching energy cost.
Nearly everything about the manufacturing processes for DRAM and logic is optimized around this fundamentally incompatible figure of merit.
I worked on the development of Intel's eDRAM process, which was used to integrate DRAM into the CPU/GPU die for Iris Pro embedded graphics from 2013-23. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6576667/
Yeah, this is what's glaringly missing from the article.
Exactly how does Microsoft's device identifier get associated with the ngrok session (normally initiated via its closed-source CLI)?
I can't tell from the article whether Microsoft is doing something underhanded to inject its device identifiers into network traffic, or whether the ngrok client software (again, closed-source!) grabbed the device identifier… and might well do the same on any other OS, using /etc/machine-id on Linux for example.
Since ngrok uses a "freemium" model, it wouldn't surprise me at all if its clients send machine IDs to try to catch users trying to get around its free limits.
Interesting read. Canada would be even more US-skewed.
Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).
I read about 60% of it and skimmed the rest and my conclusion is:
Man, I just. don't. care.
Why should I worry about this hypothetical future dystopia, which seems to me incredibly unlikely to come to pass, rather than the glaring and terrifying current dystopia being enacted by Donald Trump in the USA?
I have been a major LLM skeptic and "late adopter." I had never actually used LLMs for anything at all (either in work or personal life) until about two months ago, although I had followed their development with interest and skepticism.
A couple months ago, I started using Claude for some tasks related to processing really messy data. Our company was making a big push for its use, and a co-worker gave me a fairly impressive demo of what he was able to do with this data in an hour or two.
Our company's Claude subscription defaulted to Opus 4.7 and we were encouraged to use it as much as we could.
I don't think I ever did more than 10 or 15 prompts in a day; I tend to do very detailed prompts and then spend 10-30 minutes playing around with the results and resulting code.
Today we get this:
> TL; DR: We're nearly at NNN Claude users and growing fast. Three quick asks: (1) default to Sonnet for everyday work; we have launched XXXXXXX to help with clarity, …
> …
> As we scale, let's be smart about how we work. Claude offers several models, and for everyday work — … — Sonnet is your go-to.
Quite honestly, this is the most interesting and useful thing that I have ever read, directly responsive to the question of "how good are LLMS at doing difficult tasks, in terms of both bang-for-the-buck and in terms of raw performance?"
My hat's off to swelljoe.
This part was especially interesting:
> The cheap Chinese models kick ass. MiMo and DeepSeek are directly competitive with Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 at roughly an order of magnitude lower price. There have been accusations of “benchmaxxing” with the Chinese models, but I don’t think there’s any reasonable way for the models to already be tuned for these very recently disclosed bugs. I think they’re genuinely becoming competitive with the frontier from Anthropic and OpenAI. If you’re in a hurry, DeepSeek was the fastest, on average, while finding 4/9 bugs. And, if you’re cheap, MiMo found bugs as well as any model for the lowest price.
Got it, thanks. I believe that the version I have might be a later printing of the 1978 version, but actually the book I'm remembering most clearly was a later 1986 book by Ahl with a similar title of "Basic Computer Adventures" which has 10 longer adventure games… including an early version of Oregon trail.
My copy is at my parents’ house so I can't check the exact date now, but it's from the mid-to-late '80s and targets 8-bit home computer BASIC (e.g. Commodore 64) and IBM/Microsoft BASIC.
So I presume there were several revisions or additions.
I learned a lot from typing and trying to modify the BASIC games in it. I went on to learn C and many other programming languages, and to use them professionally and otherwise for decades.
How would I learn anything at all from untested, machine-generated C translations of them?
This is practically the definition of AI slop, to me.
A nice illustration of the homogeneity of LLM responses. Another way to describe this effect would be…
If you ask humans to write 1,000 books, you're asking 1,000 different humans with different experiences and different skills and different moods (etc.) to write those books.
But if you ask LLMs to write 1,000 books, you're probably only talking to 3 or 5 different models, tops. And they've all trained on the same or similar data, and are trained to respond in very similar ways.
The LLMs don't differ much in anything like "life experience" or "skills", and they don't really have anything like a "mood" independent of the prompts you've given them.
I've just refused to install such things on my phone.
You want me to have email and teams/slack on my phone? Sorry, I won't install the spyware. Want to pay for me to have a second phone with it? Okay. No? Well then, I just won't have email on my phone.
Yep, on older phones it was certainly possible without an Internet connection.
On the Nexus 5, you could just `fastboot oem unlock` right out of the box, install TWRP (custom "recovery") and install CyanogenMod/LienageOS, without ever booting the stock ROM.
On my Moto G4 Play and Moto X4, you had to get an unlock code from the Motorola website (based on the phone serial number I think) and waive some warranty terms, but once retrieved at least the phone didn't need to be online to unlock the bootloader.
The process on the newer Pixels is disappointingly intrusive, like basically everything Google has done for the last decade.
> if we need popular sentiment to get companies excluded for being obvious grifts.
I don't understand this argument.
SpaceX is not being "excluded" for any exceptional reason.
S&P has stated, essentially, that SpaceX will be subject to the same INclusion rules as other companies. When (if!) SpaceX has a series of profitable quarters and reaches 50% free-float market cap, it will be included in the S&P 500 index like other companies are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414252