Roark66
Good luck starting a fab in Europe... Maybe "hobby sized" attached to some university. But certainly not anything that can make parts in volume.
It used to be the case China competed mainly on price thanks to low labour costs. These days they still compete on price but because of supply chain integration.
If like me you dabble in hobby grade electronics you know how parts and services availability looks like here in Europe. We have only one component distributor now that UK left the EU. And even them (Mouser) if you try to order any advanced components that run at high frequencies etc tend to ship stuff from US warehouses.
Dont get me wrong. I'm still amazed they can get an order to me from US to Poland for $15 and 3-4 days time. But if I lived in China I could walk to one of bajillion physical suppliers and have every component made available same day. If I don't want to overspend on my prototype I could buy used parts without having to wait 3 weeks for delivery.
Then we have PCB manufacturing and assembly. It makes zero financial sense to use these services domestically. I'd love to support local EU industry, but I'm not spending 10x the cost for the privilege.
I find well prompted AI makes nice looking websites. Are they better than some designer could do?
Probably not, are they better than a guy that hasn't done a minute of fronted work in 20+ years in the industry? Probably.
You can give it instructions and 5k tokens later it will do exact opposite you told it to.
It uses all if my 6 rtx3090s but runs 7 sessions at combined 200tok/s and prefill of 7k on a cheap pc (no threadripper, all gpus via usb4).
DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017 is better but it is also 3x the size... And I find running quant below 3.8bits unusable.
But flash next is good enough (at 4.5bits).
In fact I fail to see any other end game where they make profit on the huge liabilities that now have.
Those products are a sick joke played on us. About the only thing they have that is better than tjose ancient gpus is energy efficiency.
And what good are the weights when all the rtx3090s fail (they were pretty crappy to begin with) and every ddr3 Xeon system fails too?
I'm fully prepared to be running on my hardware that is 6 and 8 years old for next decade. Last 3 months saw rtx3090 going up by 20% each month.
I've been running something similar for few weeks, but with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. I started with opus 4.8 limited to 200k context as the supervisor and 5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next agents(262k context each, autocompacted). A very simple way of calling agents via a command line using pi.
Telling agents to maintain task status in files.
This has worked very well. I tried Qwen3.8-Flash-Next as the supervisor too and as long as the plan is written by a frontier model all the implementation can be done by cheap/local models.
When I have lots of code to write I use DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017, because my entire local Qwen3.8-Flash-Next throughput is 200tok/s across 7 sessions, while a single DeepSeek session runs at hundreds. 7 DeepSeek agents and one Qwen supervisor can complete substantial tasks fable needed 12h in 2h.
I haven't tried Qwen3.8-27b for coding. I've been using it mainly for interactive chat with Web tools via librechat. My benchmarks show it as weaker than Qwen3.8-Flash-Next by few points.
For example the laws treat the output power of the inverter, the kWh capacity of the battery and peak kW capability of solar panels as a single number and they simply call it "capacity".
The law states your "capacity" cannot exceed the power contracted with the grid provider.
So if your home has 20kW of power contracted from the grid you're not allowed to install a battery larger than 20kWh,or more than 20kWp solar, or your inverters can't have more than 20kW. This results in an extremely lopsided systems.
In our climate a good system for a house like mine that uses about 20kWh a day, and has 24kW of grid power contains 14kWp of solar, 65kWh of battery and 20kW of inverter power.
Other examples of stupidity. Any inverter above 3kW has to be 3 phase or it needs to be a part of a 3 phase system. Why? What is the point of that? Most 3 phase inverters allow up to 50% phase imbalance. So if you have 12kW inverter you can't use more than 8kW on one phase and most are worse than that.
Furthermore and this is the pinnacle of idiocy. Any system with over 10kW capacity (either solar, battery or inverter) has to be managed by the grid. You pay for them to manage your own system and the electricity company will decide when you buy electricity from them and when you use yours... Guess whose financial benefit they will work towards.
So what is the solution? Put our houses off grid and that is what I did.
I have a solar setup that runs my house off grid for up to 8-9 months a year, for the remainder I switch a transfer switch and I run on the grid.
How is this different from using your €90 Anthropic subscription to the fullest and then discovering same usage via api would cost many thousands a month.
No doubt they are loosing great deal of money on it, but if they provide this service why should an average person not use it?
Even things like decommissioning an old model can be extremely disruptive if all your workloads are tweaked for it. Like when Opus 4.8 dissappear from copilot in one company I work for. Suddenly our PR reviews started missing issues they always caught before.
Of course I never expected anything different from the Chinese Communist Party.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next consistently benchmarks better than both GLM5.3-Flash and the previous DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 0731. The DS 0731 was so atrocious it was getting beaten by small Nemotron in my coding tests (subset of tasks from open source coding benchmarks).
Now, new DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 really gets the numbers they promised for the first one, but it's too big for me to run the 4 bit quant locally at interactive speeds.
So I kept Qwen3.8-Flash-Next as my go to.
Until it got lobotomised. Then it lost most of it's capability.
Similar situation happened to Anthropic's Fable. It was an amazing model until Opus 5.5 came out.
So now, I'm not even looking at a "new" model until it is a month or two old. By then we will know if they will destroy ability to make it cheaper to host.
Why do you need to protest at the slightest sign of the government becoming authoritarian when you have "the ultimate argument of force" on your side?
But it's an illusion. Guns are a nice hobby I enjoy as well. They are great for self defence, but good luck to you if you think you'll use it "against government tyranny"... You'll be dead and no one will care.
2nd amendment makes an ultimate duty of a citizen in a democratic country - to not allow it to turn into a tyranny, into "you don't need to worry about politics, worse case scenario you have your AR15 and a box of ammo".
While in a country without such false ideas people get out and protest in mass numbers.
I don't think I've ever heard of a proper protest happening in USA. The kind of protest that involves 10% of adults at least and happens in every city and town. (Also I'm not talking about rioting like in France)
Burning down a school to protest against class overcrowding is like something straight from idiocracy.
Peaceful protests work on governments, even those hell bent on authoritarianism, but they have to be massive.
Let's say you have a million or two of people show up in Washington. Will it make any difference? Nope. Why? Because it's under half a percent of US population.
Let's now say 10% of people in every city and town go to their town centre and protest. Does this make a difference? Yes it does, because it shows real power to everyone.
But in US human life is not worth much.
I use such orchestration for those 2 reasons. One, a supervisor model like Opus 5.5 (or fable before they lobotomised it) limited to 200k of context and told to keep it's progress updated in a text file is smart enough to understand the whole task.
It farms smaller sub tasks to a fleet of 7 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next agents. Not only it uses up 10% of the tokens opus would use those 7 agents run at an aggregate rate of 200tok/s. While opus would run at few dozen at most.
The Qwen in this example runs locally. If you don't mind sending your code to China you can spin a bunch of DeepSeek Flash agents and each will run at ~150-200t/s. Then your task gets done way, way faster
Regarding Qwen3.8-Flash-Next only Alibaba matches the quality I get when run local inference.
Mind I run mxfp4 and int8 kv (before I run unsloth's q4_xl). And it is much more capable than providers that claim full precision. I have no idea what they do to mess it up, maybe they quantize the kv?
Either way the provider you choose matters a lot.
>No we don't. Battery systems can stabilize the grid. You need inverters that are designed for this, but it isn't hard to make an inverter that will set then grid frequency and force it correct.
I know in theory we don't, but in practice there is no such real grid anywhere in the world that would run on large percentage of solar. So it seems we do.
I'm talking about real grid as something that powers at least thousands of households. Not a compound with a dozen buildings.
Take Canary Islands for example. They are an ideal environment to setup a 90% solar and battery grid. They have a great climate and size well suited to this. But they still run thermal plants.
Why? Because no one has successfully showed a largish scale frequency regulation/stabilisation with inverters.
See a writeup about the Texas outage a year or two ago to understand how fragile grids with too large percentage of semiconductor sources are compared with rotating masses.
I was migrating cicd from Jenkins to gh workflows for some 70-80 apps each in its own repository and support team in a random timezone. I had to open 2-3 PRs in each repo and a day or two before someone enabled "copilot reviews" in our github org.
Not only did copilot eat up all my bloody llm credits (thankfully it was almost end of the month) it created few silly comments on each of those PRs I had to respond to.
So I used an llm to write a script to respond to each of those and close them.
Also the same script wrote emails to all the teams asking for approvals, sent reminders to those that ignored it over next few days and finally merged everything in the right order.
Overall I'm a big fan of properly used LLMs.
So we setup llm based reviews that catch 99% of simple problems saving us 7 out of 8 rounds of PR reviews.
Seriously. Even as simple rules as: - if you submit a PR with new X, put a link to a successful run of said X to proove it's working. - if you choose not to reuse Y, but create a new one explain why.
Those are 100% ignored by people (or their crappy LLMs more likely - so I have to teach them how to prompt, or tell them which models to use for what).
Instead of loosing sanity responding for the 10th time to someone in time zone 12h away that he tries to merge reimplementation of what we already have with no description and no test run I have an automatic llm review that tells them that exact thing 2min after they create the PR.
Github copilot review is s great example of the worst possible way this can be misused. It is the worst waste of tokens there is.
Instead we use a process we created ourselves that runs opus or sonet (depending on complexity) to do a review (taking into account pr description and comments - copilot ignored those) and then to re-review the issues found to cut out BS.
This has been working very well mainly thanks to the prompts and docs we made it read, as well as us having lots of example code that shows how things should and should not be done.
One crappy thing Github does is that it doesn't allow our workflow based review's tokens to be accounted to individual PR authors like "copilot review" does, but accounts tokens to the organisation. It is obvious they are trying to herd people to using gh copilot review instead. But the quality difference is like night and day. So we are staying.
But the beauty of solar is that it makes you independent from the grid. China makes the whole system. Cheap, but good quality solar panels. Cheap inverters - these are actually pretty good for the price. And finally cheap LFP batteries.
When amount of solar capacity exceeded half of entire grid, my country has established few silly rules to stop the growth.
For example let's say your house's grid connection is 24kW 3phase. If you want to connect your solar to the grid and feed in power you are limited to 24kW peak solar panels, and.... 24kWh of battery.
This is beyond stupid, but there is more... If your inverter is 10kW or more you have to give the grid operator full control over your system. They then decide when you are sending power to the grid, when you use your battery and when you use the grid. Of course they will make you push to the grid when prices are the lowest and you'll consume from the grid when they are highest.
So many people do what I did. Build off grid systems with ability to swap between the grid and the system.
Such systems do not have to be registered anywhere and I bet they are responsible for huge amount of power use.
For example before I installed solar I wouldn't even think about installing a heat pump for both air con and heating. But having extra power allows me to do it economically.