TonyStr

It's 85% gross margin only if you divide by "Compute and infrastructure", which does not include personnel, legal settlements, sales, marketing and partnerships, or other operating and administrative. Their total operating expenses (34Bn as of 30th September this year) is slightly higher than their revenue (33Bn as of 30th September this year) which means they have an operating loss of ~0.6Bn so far this year. The majority of the negative numbers lie in debt to Amazon and Google (72Bn + 8Bn other), which is actually mostly convertible notes that to my understanding are never going to be paid back as cash, but as stocks in the company. A valuation of 1-2 trillion would give them plenty of room to pay back that debt with stocks, so imo. that part is a little overblown. IPOing would directly help reduce these numbers.

The spending commitments the article mentions are a little more concerning, but I haven't looked into that so I'm currently taking that with a huge grain of salt (especially since the article felt very biased and politically motivated).

If strengthening of frequently used neural pathways is all our brains do, I don't see how it's seemingly capable of reordering knowledge physically from one part of the brain to another (which I believe is the case). Infrequently used pathways would simply rot away and die away over time, rather than being moved somewhere else for long-term storage to keep the high-frequency pathways more available.

I think that quote is very apt. I experimented with making realistic video game grass (inspired by Ghost of Tsushima), and let it take the reins. But its solution became very contrived and hard to steer in the direction I wanted without me learning the specifics of how grass rendering should work. Still, it seems that I can limit my understanding to the higher levels of abstractions in most cases now. For example, I made it clump grass together according to a voronoi diagram, yet I have no idea how the voronoi algorithm works.

Yeah, I'm seeing this at work too. It's capable of adjusting behavior to meet some narrow success criteria, but it can easily introduce bigger problems in the process in large coupled code bases, which it doesn't catch on its own. Automated tests help a bit, but I find I still have to steer it very strongly at work.

Does it make sense that you should use a keyboard you need to study and practice for? Because I'm willing to bet you didn't instantly learn touch typing the first time you laid eyes on a keyboard. I would also bet that you didn't know about ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl x, multiple cursors, tab, and so many other things that you now take for granted in code editors and elsewhere. Vim is just like that - a little foreign in the start, but after using it for a while it becomes second nature. You can learn just the basics and be productive in a couple of days, then you have the rest of your life to learn the more advanced features like terminal mode or macros and so on. Though it seems most people (me included) get really excited about learning vim once we get into it, and start sprinting through a bunch of features. That can make it seem a bit overwhelming.

I've been experimenting with vibe-coding some games. One of the games started performing very badly in a particular menu, and I began suspecting it's because of a shader that may be redundantly computed way too much on too many large surfaces. I began writing my suspicion to Claude, then stopped and decided to just describe the problem and see if it would come to the same conclusion as me. A few minutes later, it had profiled the game, found what contributed most to the poor performance, fixed the rendering and made the game performant again. I didn't have to inspect the code to do any of that. The current models (paired with coding harnesses) love to test and validate their results by running the games, taking screenshots, singling out individual parts, including logs to reproduce errors or other issues, and they love to create tests. The code is good enough in the same sense that the code I used to write was good enough if it did what we wanted. My non-technical bosses didn't have to inspect my code for that.

You are attacking the person rather than the idea.

It turns out that most people are fine with most of their things being mass-produced cheap stuff from IKEA, Amazon, Temu, etc. - if that means that the cost is significantly lower. The functional benefit of having a door is huge, while the aesthetic benefit of having a beautiful, hand-crafted door is much less important to most people.

Code is not like craftsmanship anyway. The end-user doesn't see any difference whether I use microservices or hexagonal design or react or htmx or how I structure the code or which language I use. All they see is the design and the stability. Since the average developer was terrible at design anyway, the average design output from LLMs is actually an improvement in most cases, even if it always has that generic AI generated look. Stability... was not good before AI either. We have become accustomed to SAP taking 10 seconds to load each component on the page, or Atlassian spewing error messages in your face when you click submit on a ticket. It seems that the aspects that are most valued by our end users are QA and UX, not the craftsmanship of our code.

>current deep learning is much less malleable and neuroplastic as it should be

Why do you think this is? I am very new to this research, but to me, the biggest challenge appears to be how information seems to be stored in superposition (making it difficult to change one thing without affecting others). But biological brains appear to exhibit the same kind of superposition storage as well, and yet they are very plastic.

Do you use qwen for any coding? Do you make a frontier model orchestrate it? Are you running with llama.cpp? Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I've been interesting in local AI for a while, yet I've struggled to set up anything usable.

I'm not too familiar with the US workplace, but don't you have salary negotiations? Wouldn't you want more leverage for arguing for a higher salary, if you're unhappy with your salary? I'm also curious what work structure makes you feel like you're working for execs, rather than for your clients/customers/end-users. Surely you want the people who use your systems to have a smooth experience?

Do you care about your users? If you care about tech, I'm sure you're as dissatisfied with the current state of broken and invasive software as the rest of us. I don't know the exact nature of your work, but don't you care about the experience of your clients or end-users?

Super cool idea! Would love support for other languages, as English Wikipedia is quite limited where I live.

Ironically, the Substack essay which was linked to is titled "A Love Song to Nicotine" and is all about how the author enjoys using nicotine for productivity boosts, and doesn't feel like he experiences many downsides to using it.

>you totally deserve this.

The vast majority of consumers don't understand that purchasing hardware with cloud integration essentially means they're renting their own products. I don't think it's a very logical conclusion to make either, unless you spend some time thinking about it. Therefore I don't think it's fair at all to say that they deserve this. Lawmakers need to push back on this, but that I think we agree on.

Nice work! I appreciate the showcase video

Would you like to share the app?

I've heard many people quip that the best thing about using a $25000 terminal is being connected to other people who can afford spending $25000 on a terminal.

Haha, I was getting ready to bring up NixOS until you mentioned it.

I've come to appreciate this book more after finishing it, as I'm able to process the themes without being subjected to the torture of actually reading it. Good luck!

The Count of Monte Cristo was my introduction to classics. I remember being intimidated yet excited by it's length. It's a great adventure, a page turner, and has interesting characters and sub-plots. I had the honor of visiting Dumas' tomb in the Pantheon this summer. Notably, his tomb was raised above the others who shared his room, including Victor Hugo.

I think Gnome removing options was more about having a smaller and more manageable set of features that need to be QA tested. I'd much rather have well-designed and well-supported defaults than 500 buggy customizable components that don't work well together.

https://ometer.com/preferences.html

I'm not sure about you, but I find Gnome very easy to use, although I miss some features. Those features can be added with Gnome extensions that are maintained by third-parties. Meanwhile I find GIMP extremely hard to use, as it packs in too many features to allow their designers to figure out a good UX which doesn't break some component.

What are the cool stuff that you gained with Nix?

I don't have a study that I can use as an appeal to authority, so you'll just have to contend with the argument on the basis of it's internal consistency and how much you agree with the premises :)

For what it's worth, I don't use the gnome app drawer either. I exclusively use the dock + search to launch applications, so in my workflow both are actually pointless. I would still argue that opening the app drawer to reach your application shortcuts is easier and more consistent than resizing/minimizing windows to un-obstruct the desktop until you can point and click to launch an application. But I suppose managing folders on your desktop could be viewed as a plus? I'm not sure if GNOME's app menu supports that.

>KDE doesn't let you do it either My bad. I'm not too familiar with KDE.

Not the case in Notepad, Edge, RegEdit, Windows Settings, MS Teams, Firefox on Windows, Bruno, Windows Search. Where exactly did you experience this? All aforementioned were tested in Windows 11

Completely agree. Besides, if clicking above/below the thumb is PgUp/PgDn, that means the buttons get smaller as you get closer to your destination, making them harder to press. Not good UX! The main counter argument to instantly moving I can think of, is that people may miss-click when trying to resize a window, and struggle to find their way back. Maybe a Ctrl-Z for window location history wouldn't be such a bad idea. You could piggyback off Vim's jump list which is navigable with Ctrl-O and Ctrl-I, though I'm sure a lot of applications already register those mappings.

>I very much miss the days of consistent UX

This is why I love GNOME. The community is doing a great job with creating GTK4 native applications. I'll often pick a GTK app over a more featured app, because they usually do enough. It's very satisfying to be able to use the same shortcuts in most applications.

Could be because this promotes a bad UX? In GNOME, you have a dock for your most used applications, which can be launched or navigated to with Super+1/2/3.., there is the apps menu accessible with Super or by clicking the top bar, where you can organize apps as well as search for them. Desktop icons are distracting, and requires you to remove windows obstructing them to access the icons. If every DE just mimicked windows, we wouldn't ever be able to move forward. Though KDE is there for you if you prefer the windows way.

Writing can be painful because putting pen to paper forces you to think through every word and sentence. You immediately realize that the first thought that came to mind, wasn't a 100% correct idea, and it'll be more accurate and better formulated this way or that way. Writing is a sort of extended thinking, in which you're being held accountable for every word (by yourself). Some people argue that slowing down the writing process even more, for example by going from keyboard to pen and paper, gives you more time to process your thoughts, and leads to better and more articulate writing.

When I read AI-enhanced writing, I always feel like I have to peer through the blinds to see the writer's true intention. This feels very dishonest and partly offensive, because it can sometimes take several paragraphs before I realize that I'm reading AI output, rather than someone's processed thoughts.

It's worth having a look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/. I found that the most of the games I play which use anti cheat work on Linux. It's also not hard to dual-boot windows as a backup, though I haven't had a use for my windows partition yet.