As someone rocking a M3 Pro, I personally don't expect to be able to try Asahi out until mid/late next year on my MBP, but I am looking forward to it nonetheless!
Thinking back to my community college days in 2020 (right before the pandemic!), I used to rock a crappy old dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM running Fedora. Browsing the web was less than ideal and YouTube barely worked. For certain classes (the big hassle was a DB class after I transferred) running the course software was very taxing and I had a harder time with that compared to other students as a result. I remember Zoom barely working on it, but only if I didn't use the camera. I look back at this experience a bit fondly as it made me rely more on the terminal and I shifted away from slow laggy GUIs to TUIs/NeoVim. That said, for most other individuals in that position it really is a big limiting factor for their education.
Recently I was tutoring (for college essays and math) at a local high/middle school and most students browsed the web on their smart phones, but those that didn't were limited to school issued Chromebooks which were ungodly slow. Some of these students served as translators for their parents and I was under the impression that they used these devices to pay bills and for other household tasks as well. This experience is why to this day I try to keep the websites I make light on dependancies (I don't like react) and fast to load (sub 300kb ideally).
Possibly, but the array type code was implemented using GPT/Claude models before DS4 was a thing. I really recommend this write up on how he used LLMs which I think is a more sane/safe way to code with them vs the YOLOing even I'm subject to unfortunately...
As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
You need both, but it's not exactly realistic to have metro lines everywhere. The west side is pretty dense and has a lot of commercial/business activity so the value per dollar is high. By comparison the east side is super spread out and has a low(er) residential density so the value is far lower. Not to mention a good chunk of the residents on the east side aren't in favor of metro lines in their neighborhood (the stalled Whittier extension of the E line).
It's a pain for me personally since a group I'm involved with is active in the San Gabriel Valley and since I don't have a car I have to rely on buses. It's not an exaggeration when I say a trip for me that's 5 miles west would take double the amount of time east. I'm just glad the planned subway to Van Nuys and the San Fernando Valley up north seems to be going well.
A worst case scenario I feel is that the government could restrict inference providers within the US to run only approved/American LLMs, which would be a huge deal since the only recent American OSS model is Gemma. I could see OpenAI/Anthropic/Google lobbying for that though…
I’m primarily a coding instructor but I also teach lessons based around Kerbal Space Program. From that angle I’m pretty happy where these devs are going with the sandbox and level of freedom they plan on giving users. One reason my students seem to really like KSP are all the different things you can do/build (especially space planes). While it does have a high difficulty curve when it comes to the controls, once they master them they all seem to appreciate the level of control they have. From my perspective, I feel that instead of trying to make certain systems more accessible/simple they should go in the opposite direction and offer more control/options (preferably with a decent tutorial though).
However, something I really hope the developers plan on making a macOS port. I use a MacBook myself, but I’ve noticed the vast majority of my students also have Macs. I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect a larger than average segment of users interested in this game are on Mac.
Both are great shows made by GAINAX, but I highly watching suggest their prototypes as well: Gunbuster and Diebuster. All four are great Mecha shows made by the same studio and it's fun spotting the similarities across all of them.
What I consider to be a spiritual successor to these GAINAX mecha shows was the most recent Gundam series "Gquuuuuux" which shared many staff members from them and has plenty of homages that were fun to spot! Also had the same mechanical designer as the Evangelions so I got a kick out of that.
I love EVA, but I’ll cautiously recommend it. I feel like there are two sides to it: the mecha/alien/monster sci-fi side which has an amazing aesthetic, and the personal drama focusing on self loathing and loneliness. I think the first side is the most attractive to most people, but what really sticks with me to this day is the latter.
If you do end up watching I have to warn about the watch order. There are two timelines, the original TV series plus the movie “End of Evangelion”, and then the “Rebuild of Eva” movie series which started as a complete reboot but somehow ended as the ultimate Reboot/Remake/Sequel to the original stuff.
For my customers I use regexes to block them from potentially publishing personal emails/phone numbers to their websites but I really wouldn't mind running this in addition just for the extra peace of mind. I don't have a GPU on our server, but I hope this is light enough of a model to handle CPU only inference on less than 2k tokens at a time.
I use the Throne bathrooms all the time here in LA. They’re really conveniently placed next to a bunch of Metro stops and are pretty frequently used. I’d actually argue that for busier stations (North Hollywood) more should be added!
The way it works is that you text a phone number (facilitated by a QR code) which Throne you want to use and it automatically opens. These bathrooms play classical music and are touchless so you don’t have to touch any knobs or buttons, you just wave over a sensor to operate the sink or open the door. It’s overall super frictionless/convenient and I agree with the article on how well they’ve been treated (I haven’t seen any graffiti or vandalism yet) despite their frequent use.
35B (35 billion) is the number of parameters this model has. Its a Mixture of Experts model (MoE) so A3B means that 3B parameters are Active at any moment.
As someone who spins up docker containers where I use the Anthropic Agentic SDK to build Jekyll websites for customers, I don’t see much of an appeal. I didn’t find it that difficult to set up the infrastructure, the hard part was getting the agents to do exactly what I wanted. Besides, eventually I might want to transition away to another provider (or even self hosting) so I’d prefer having that freedom.
I’m in a long distance relationship at the moment, so one of the things I try to bridge the distance is sending letters! That’s how I got started, but now I’ll send letters to any of my friends (or anyone really) that sends me a mailing address.
One thing I strongly advise when it comes to writing letters with FP ink is to use waterproof/permanent inks. I had to learn that hard way that typical ink doesn’t handle rain well… Diamine just came out with a new lineup of permanent inks which I quite like, but the Platinum stuff (my favorite being Carbon Black) is quite good as well.
I’ve used an ECO and while it’s not my favorite pen, I have nothing bad to say about the nib (I believe mine was a fine as well). The way FP’s write can vary dramatically between different inks though. I’d recommend first trying out the ink you have and seeing what about it you don’t like before researching other inks.
Just asking out of precaution, but are you sure this bottled ink of yours can be used with fountain pens? Even if it is, it’s best to be careful with a fine nib (I’ve learned the hard way).
I hated writing by hand, but I got into fountain pens and that really helped change my note taking habits. I mostly write letters, but recently I’ve taken up writing notes during meetings. I loathe doing so, but my FP addiction really helps.