gymbeaux

My understanding is both USB 4 and TB use PCIe tunneling. Surely at this price point we’re looking at a USB 4 device. Thunderbolt has historically cost more due to licensing, which is now free I believe, but there’s still specialized hardware and requirements manufacturers need to adhere to.

It’s an incredibly dumb implementation and it feels like yet another case of “AI startup gettin’ while the gettin’s good”. It’s the dotcom bubble all over again. Do anything with AI and people will buy what you’re selling.

The RX 9060 has a TDP of 160W, but that’s the high end of what you can continuously draw from the 12v DC plug in a car, so it looks like they cap it at 100W. It has to be on the floor or under the passenger seat because it has to plug into that 12v outlet that’s usually in the front.

Things will get caught by the fan blades, and passengers will inadvertently kick it. Hopefully suddenly losing connection to the GPU won’t cause the car to hit a pedestrian or anything like that.

What would happen to Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, if tomorrow someone released an open weights model on HuggingFace that matched performance and accuracy of Opus 5 running locally on an RTX 5070? That won’t happen tomorrow, but it will likely happen someday… what’s the plan beyond “don’t be the one holding the bags?”

We’re in the phase of society where we will just build something like this ourselves using an LLM and it will be built exactly how we want it and we don’t have to worry about malicious code or forking it and hoping the owner will merge our PR… it’s sad but that’s where we are for anything the size of a menu bar that pings a URL every minute.

But they’re slower (and benchmark worse) than Opus, GPT, et al. Why?

Kimi and DeepSeek are impressive for their size but still run slow on any hardware you or I would have. If you’re proposing we run those via a cloud service, I don’t see a reason to do that when it’s an inferior model and I still have to pay per token for it.

When I see new software now, my first thought is an LLM wrote it and it makes me not want to use it. I also assume there are bugs and it’s not particularly feature-rich.

I look at all the “role model” esque people in my life - they’ve all been fired from a job at least once. There are also plenty of people I know who I wouldn’t consider role model esque who are simply lousy employees (and probably get fired many more times than the “role model” types). I say role model types simply to mean “people who you would be surprised to learn were fired from their job”.

Stigma meaning others judging you for being fired. High level “no one” wants to hire someone who was fired from their last job. I’m just saying in my experience everyone gets fired sooner or later, regardless of their abilities, job performance, social skills, et. Al.

LLMs are incredibly inefficient and can never be “100% accurate” so we have effectively seen what they can and can’t do already. If LLMs haven’t taken your job by now, they aren’t taking your job.

Everyone who could be considered a role model in my life has been “laid off” (fired) at least once. These are successful people. They’re all millionaires (not just the retired ones). We need to get over the fear and stigma of getting fired. It means nothing except your boss didn’t like you.

But what if all your coworkers are doing it, so by taking the time to understand and review LLM output you’re painting a target on your back? Anyway I’m not getting burned- the company is.

This made me think of how we have to manually block certain devices (usually smart TVs) so they don’t “phone home” and show us ads and so forth. I see your switch being banned as a sort of mixed blessing. It’s liberating in a way. I wonder if there’s some way to use a proxy to self host the software patches. We had something similar on the PS3 homebrew scene.

I often use LLMs to build locally running web apps and console apps that I otherwise never would have built, because the value-add wouldn’t be worth, say, 40 hours of my free time.

I just sold an RTX 3090 (released in 2020) for $1000. It should have been more like $200. I don’t see a point in running local LLMs with it but plenty of other people disagree, or want to “play around”. It’s so old that I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d be glad to have it- even if local LLMs ultimately catch up to the cloud frontier models (Opus, et al.). In a world where I can run Claude Opus 4.8 on an RTX 3090 at reasonable speeds, Anthropic doesn’t need even 1/20th the GPUs it has and it will dump them on the secondary market.

I would imagine Anthropic et al. are largely leasing land/buildings, so as the other commenter said… must be the server racks that are acting as collateral (if anything). Generally enterprise hardware depreciates very harshly. I’m used to paying $10 for Intel Xeons that once retailed for over $5,000. I expect to pick up some NVIDIA Blackwell 6000s for $100 each someday.

He was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.

You’re assuming supply and demand is logical or efficient but like the stock market it’s often irrational and driven by some C Suite who doesn’t know what he’s doing. FAANG blew billions over hiring software engineers in 2021-2022 and often paid engineers to do effectively nothing for months or years. Despite their very high salaries, these individuals contributed nothing to society in exchange.

Oh wow. Are they just repackaging official Windows patches or are they patching vulnerabilities themselves?

Yes, I’ve found my coworkers won’t admit they had AI write their code in any sort of group setting yet they’ve all admitted it in private. The implication seems to be if AI is writing your code you’re lazy/incompetent/bad/not working anywhere near 40 hours/week. I for one would hate for our bosses to figure out we do probably ~16 hours of actual work per week. But we all “get our stuff done” (thanks to AI).

The quality of the output is so variable. It depends on the model, “effort level”, prompting, probably even the programming language/app functionality, and libraries involved. For example, I find LLMs are best at making simple web apps. These web apps, while simple, would still take a senior engineer perhaps a week or two to create, but LLMs can spit them out inside of an hour. Conversely, LLMs struggle with things like Docker or local model stuff. Parallelization of code is a mixed bag. In these areas I think it often would have been faster for me to write the thing by hand.

I didn’t start using Claude Code until late 2025. Prior to that I would use ChatGPT to give me snippets of code but I was still doing most of the actual code writing. Coworkers told me in late 2025 about how they hadn’t written a line of code in “months” and just use Claude Code/agentic “whatever” so I tried out Claude Code and was pleasantly surprised. It is passable to have entire apps written by LLMs (I’ve made several that I otherwise never would have had the time to create by hand), but I wouldn’t say maintainable or easily extendable. It’s hard to be specific, but there’s something about LLM code that doesn’t look “natural”, and I’m not talking about the excessive use of comments in code. The code itself is unnatural. Functional, but unnatural. I wouldn’t want to suddenly lose LLMs and have to read through and understand and continue enhancing a codebase created by an LLM.

It’s easier to open an app on my phone, and I believe wholeheartedly that Robinhood works hard to make their UI/UX as “fun” (dopamine-releasing) as possible. One area where Robinhood would be easier than any web app is biometric authentication. Not even having to sign in to the app makes it that much faster and easier to get a dopamine hit from placing a trade.

Robinhood makes their app fun to use with things like swiping up to place the trade, sometimes they put confetti on the screen… it really has quite a lot in common with an actual phone game like Monopoly Go or Candy Crush.

Both are console-sized x86 based computers that can run Windows or Linux. Both even lack a 3.5mm headphone jack (maybe that’s too old for a 2026 computer though). Both have a low TDP that means they will never compete with a traditional gaming computer.

I’m not sure what Proton has to do with anything.

If you have an options strategy that works 99% of the time, then you’re a millionaire, and if you’re a millionaire I have to ask what you’re doing here replying to people about options trading.

I mean unfortunately, as with the rest of the constitution, it’s up to the courts (ultimately the Supreme Court) to interpret, and the majority will never condone revolution, no matter how corrupt or ineffective the government becomes.

I think not many people realize that if the American Revolution was unsuccessful, the founding fathers would have been hanged for treason. It’s nice to have that given to us as a “right”, but with no means to enforce that right it may as well not exist at all. As time goes on I become more and more convinced that the founding fathers were exactly like Elon Musk- greedy, selfish, and out to brainwash the populace into doing their bidding. Many were wealthy slave owners, after all.

Most brokerages don’t have an app that encourages reckless trading by exploiting dopamine. This becomes that age-old argument about where the corporation’s responsibility ends and the individual’s responsibility begins. I guarantee it’s a lot harder to blow your retirement on 0DTE options via a “traditional” broker than an “app first” brokerage like Robinhood.

It’s harder to do on Fidelity. Robinhood plays on human psychology to make their money.

The plan is simply for insiders to offload their bags (overvalued shares) to retail investors, like the folk who frequent the wallstreetbets subreddit and do all their “investing” on Robinhood. This speaks to the larger trend of the lower and middle class apparently giving up on any plans to retire- and it’s understandable as the federal minimum wage has never been so disconnected from the cost of living, plus inflation, plus the current job market being universally terrible (even for software engineers), et al.

It’s worth noting that this is nothing new. I’m reminded of Virgin Galactic, another “space company” that was heavily speculated on. Predictably, insiders like Richard Branson himself sold a large number of shares (well into the millions of dollars) ahead of the inevitable “dump” where the share price fell around 75% in a matter of weeks. Virgin Galactic (SPCE) entered the Nasdaq via SPAC - Special Purpose Acquisition Group - essentially a company whose sole purpose is to acquire a private company, thereby effectively making the company public. Why wouldn’t Virgin Galactic just go public? Why go through a SPAC? The short answer is “to bypass regulations.”

OpenInsider is an excellent website that makes it easy to see when insiders buy or sell a stock, and the most common pattern is insiders dumping their shares in overvalued companies. We saw it when Zoom and Crispr and a few others shot up several hundred percentage points during COVID. C-suite and board members made out like bandits. Those weren’t even SPACs, those were just companies that people were foolish enough to speculate on.

Finally I want to bring attention to Robinhood, the stock trading platform that eliminated commission on trades from all brokerages - Schwab, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, et al- by making it incredibly quick and easy (and free) to buy and sell stocks. They opened this Pandora’s Box, though I suppose it was bound to happen eventually- brokerages charged $7 per trade (sometimes more) and obviously for the college student who wants to throw $20 at Amazon stock… losing $7 in and then $7 again on the way out makes no sense. Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account. Options are essentially gambling, so to enable people to throw away their retirement on gambling is truly vile.

The Steam Machine makes sense if it costs the same or less than a current-gen console, but a whole grand for this feels icky. I paid around $300 for the original Steam Machine (Alienware Alpha) in 2014. It played Fallout 4 better than the PS4 and Xbox One which cost about the same. The "tradeoff" was that you had to maintain the PC's OS, which at the time had to be Windows 10.