27183
27183 on Hacker News
What are these firefighters and machinists using it for, exactly?
Certain AMD graphics drivers require specific Ubuntu releases and versions. I guess one might reasonably ask "why would you run AMD graphics drivers?" to which I don't really have a good answer. But that's why I run an Ubuntu box ;p. I'd so much rather be running Alpine.
The slack example is particularly funny, I've used slack at work since early 2015 and I can't recall ever installing an app. I just pin a browser tab. What would be the point? The website does it just fine.
Even this is annoying compared to how it used to work, before they killed the IRC gateway you didn't even need a browser tab because it worked just fine in a terminal tab.
Mechanic, welder, builder, farmer, logger, millwright, trucker, heavy equipment operator... I could go on. Literally the entire economy in the area I live is completely impenetrable to tech, let alone AI. None of it is worth a shit to any business here.
These are all jobs the silly con valley idiots claim continuously to be automating away, but it's all just fuckin lies.
Could this control problem be solved locally? Like is there some intuitive setting you could give an end user that still results in efficient running behavior? Wouldn't that be strictly better than putting it on the internet anyway?
Robinhood taking from the poor tired masses to give to the rich. Beautiful.
> Anthropic can remove all access to their LLMs and start replicating entire software companies.
"I have a girlfriend for real she just goes to a different school"
For real. I'm so tired of all this, I hope the crash is swift and we can put it all behind us.
And yet... if they had instead invested in making the equipment operable locally we wouldn't be here today. This is the problem with thinking of your users as "nontechnical" lesser beings. The engineering problem becomes remove control and ownership from the user instead of make the product usable. In this case by removing control from the user they simply gave it to an attacker. Great job, guys.
The reason you don't need to secure your house like a medieval castle is twofold:
(1) We live in nations of laws. The threat of state violence deters most thieves.
(2) You don't actually keep most of your valuables in your home. The stuff the thieves want is (mostly) actually stored somewhere else.
Security work absolutely is productive if it actually prevents theft. Securing your home is the wrong analogy, because it doesn't really prevent meaningful losses. Securing the bank? Different ballgame.
That's kind of what I was afraid of. Both is really bad news. If you think of it in terms of average speed over ground, working on low quality reports is like spending a bunch of time at v=0.
Yes, exactly. The only question I have is whether the delay is attributable to high-quality bug reports or the burden of triaging low-quality ones. It's not completely clear which situation they're experiencing.
I'm not very positive on the social, technical, or intellectual impact of AI on software development. Actually, that's understating it. I think AI is basically cancer for the mind. That said, this framing gave me pause:
> The long-term picture is less clear and in some ways more troubling: given that we have forty years of bugs that humans were unable to find but LLMs are quite capable of discovering, how are we ever going to catch up, and how will PostgreSQL continue to innovate? Right now, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I, and many others, are working really hard to figure it out.
Two thoughts:
1. If the signal quality is high--the bug reports are generally valid, the submitted fixes are generally viable (if needing some attention)--then this all seems great. Pause innovation for a while, you can afford it. Focus on burning down the bug count, and resume feature development when things are more stable.
2. If the signal quality isn't good, or is sufficiently mixed that a lot of time is being wasted on low quality contributions... that's more complex. I don't know what to do about that. Maybe stop accepting contributions from unknown contributors? No idea.
From the post I'm not sure whether they're experiencing a (1) or a (2). If it's a (1) that's really interesting, and gives me some glimmer of hope for the future.
I only have cynical takes these days. Tech has been completely taken over by charlatans, scam artists, grifters, and snake oil salesmen. I have zero tolerance for suspending disbelief. They can force me to believe with data, or they're deliberately lying. No middle ground.
Did they actually have to launch the thing to do that testing? I think a much simpler and more direct explanation is that it is simply a deceptive marketing stunt. "Hey look we're solving the power problem, don't worry we'll be able to build all these megawatts of compute we promised" when in reality it will never happen and they had no intention of even trying. It's a short term con to try to calm fears in the market that the promises exceed their capabilities.
The public doesn't need to. If these companies actually try to build datacenters in space they will bankrupt themselves. It's a ridiculously stupid idea.
The fact that this comment is being downvoted says so much about so many things. And so many people. This community--not just HN, I'm talking about tech at large--has totally lost its way.
Is this the piece of junk that can only run for 15min at a time before it overheats? They probably could have done some more analysis before launching it into space.. Like put the radiator in a vacuum chamber maybe? Or do some thermal modelling? Or did they know it would do this and launch it anyway? Would love to know why.
Why do you think so? To me it seems like they actually fit the textbook definition very well. They're firms that require constant injection of massive amounts of new capital to stay solvent, with no clear path towards profitability. The only way anyone gets their money back is if more investors buy in. It would be easy to prove me wrong, all they have to do is start turning a profit. But they can't.
[edit] And worse, they've dragged major established players in the industry with them--Microsoft, Google, etc. So now an uncomfortably large fraction of the world's economy is resting on.. nothing. To be fair, I don't blame OpenAI or Anthropic for the bad behavior of the other tech giants. It's the entire tech sector that has lost their minds collectively. At some point making things that actually work lost out to fantastic delusions.
I don't understand, could you please explain?
I'll concede that point, but it's still not enough to justify buying a used GPU datacenter on the cheap. To do so you need to believe that by powering up and running all those GPUs you will be able to turn a profit before you go insolvent. Or failing that, you need to be able to con enough investors into believing it, and then somehow make it happen before they stop believing. So far the AI industry has been very good at conning investors, and
cataclysmically bad at generating profits.
So if you're in the market for a used GPU datacenter even at fire sale prices you better have a solid plan to profitability. So far, it doesn't actually seem like there's anything you can do with those GPUs that will get there in any known or even guessable timeframe. That makes it a really fucking dumb idea lol.
> OpenAI going bust would not cause those data centres to cease to exist, they’d still be there just owned for cheap by someone else that can run them at cost.
Someone would have to see value in that. Right now the value prop of AI is that maybe someday it'll get better and we'll be able to build useful, profitable consumer products on it. That's not really a great investment thesis, unless you're drunk on the hype.
Now that the market is sobering up a bit, will operating a "cheap" GPU datacenter at cost be worth anything? Not "future value", but present value. Can you turn a healthy profit running a GPU datacenter today? I doubt it.
They successfully turned the entire tech sector into a giant pyramid scheme. That's one hell of an accomplishment. I hope history forever remembers the names of everyone who aided and abetted them.
Guess they'll just have to tighten the belt and follow through on their promise to revolutionize work, capitalism, government, and everything by building AGI. Lol. Lmao.
Yes, that's what I meant. A lot of folks just build stuff in a Microsoft hosted actions runner which can talk to the entire Internet and pull deps straight from PyPI or whatever. Then those artifacts show up on the Releases page and go into production. Whee.
The whole actions/CI thing is really nice but there's no good reason the computationally heavy stuff should be running on Github's (Microsoft's) servers. They can run the control plane cheaply and make the user run an agent somewhere to act as the build box runner thing. The user experience would be identical, but they'd outsource the vast majority of the compute costs to the user[1]. It's shocking they didn't do something like that model in the first place, tbh. Moviepass for CI.
[1] It can also have supply chain security and reliability benefits too. You're not actually building deployment artifacts in your actions runners, right? Right? RIGHT?
Delicious, buttery fish. Makes excellent sashimi too.
Is there another way to do it? I suppose you could sort of fillet them all off in the initial cutting operation but you'd lose a large chunk of meat and it might not actually get them all. Deboning after the boil seems like a Pareto optimal time/ease/waste trade.