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layoric

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:05PM (#50296826)
Totally agree, but also deeply flawed human being that he played so well. My favorite writing of Picard and Stewart's performance was those times that showed the toll of always being that man. But despite those personal costs, to always try to take the compassionate view, and fiercely reject those that try to oppress others.
Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:48PM (#50295698)
Sadly the explicitness was needed cause it ceased being the default..
Software is improving quickly so take these numbers as a snapshot performance at best. Strata has really shown how much performance is left on the table. I have a dual A4000 16gb (Ampere) on an old X99 dual Xeon E5-2680 v4 with 128gb of memory and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next at the IQ3-S size (~96Gb) runs at 65-75 t/s which is extremely useable.
Re:How the Claude Code team does code review on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:38PM (#50124309)
Source? Only reports I’ve seen was they were profitable for one month in last quarter due to xAI discount of renting out colossus . Be interested to learn otherwise.
Re:Solar Panels That Plug into Your Wall on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:50PM (#50066416)
It is well known in Australia that you can make a lot of money working as a tradie. Better than software developers do here that's for sure. You are lucky if you can get a tradie to step foot inside your house for less than $200 USD, then the hourly costs start running away pretty quick.
Re:Intel D270 GPU AI Accelerator–Up to 480 GB LPDDR5X on Monday October 12, 2026 @10:09PM (#50065719)
Source? Extremely impressive if true
Re:Solar Panels That Plug into Your Wall on Monday October 12, 2026 @07:11PM (#50064354)
The US is getting fleeced! 8 years ago it cost me about $10k AUD to install 6kW. Yes, it came with a $2.8k subsidy but still we are talking about a third.. 8 years ago.. And I paid extra for a Fronius inverter.
Re:Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers on Sunday October 11, 2026 @06:32PM (#50048626)
Taking abandonware titles, and essentially doing a port/remaster that isn't byte for byte accurate but is far easier to mod I think is where the interesting work and value is here. The legal side is going to get messy though.
Re:Programming Isn't Special on Friday October 09, 2026 @05:25PM (#50026739)
I don't disagree.. I try to ignore what "the world" cares or doesn't care about, focus on trying to make other people/animal's etc lives easier/better than before I found them. Sometimes succeed, often fail, but goal remains simple and the same. "the world" can be cruel and bitter, but doesn't mean you need to play along. The amount of people that see hoarding wealth (aka greed) as a measure of success (aka good person/life/someone to look up to), is a massive source of the problem IMO as it is nearly always achieved by making other people/animal's etc lives harder/worse. The sooner more and more people look at greed with disdain rather than admiration, the less cruel and bitter "the world" will be IMO. :spock-hand:
Re:Programming Isn't Special on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:00PM (#50025896)
> they just did programming for money

Very reductive. I would consider myself a pretty mediocre programmer, but worked with a lot worse. I care about making useful things for other people. I care about quality but less so than utility. If I ever get to the point to not need to worry about money, I will still focus on utility over any artistic notion of the code that produces that utility. Sometimes those things align, sometimes they don’t, but I’m much happier shipping a messy to maintain thing that is useful to lots of people, than something that is algorithmicly elegant.

Re:Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:55AM (#50003013)
This is taking the term away from its meaning IMO. Very few of those who live offgrid mean completely detaching themselves from society, but as a way to reject parts of modern society. As others have said, you are more likely to find those living off the electrical/water/etc grid are generally motivated to form communities of their own, to have more of a dependence of other people, and generally to be closer to those people they are depending on day-to-day.

No perfect solutions, I've found it is usually just people trying to do what they think is right/better way to live in whatever ways they can.

Re:S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past on Sunday September 27, 2026 @10:00PM (#49872700)
This is absolutely the case for nearly all of AWS products. Some new services have filled lower price gaps, but I previously looked at EC2 and other service prices in the past and late 2016 is where it all seemed to stop getting price drops. The M5+ upgrades for example all came with price increases along with the performance gains.
Re:Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August on Monday September 21, 2026 @06:35PM (#49794372)
Your caveat isn’t just a side note, it’s worse than that, they have incentives that go against your best interests!
Re:Brood War Bench on Saturday September 19, 2026 @06:03PM (#49770487)
Same and Brood War is starting to have a bit of a resurgence. Not anything huge. When Battle.net servers are actually working, tend to play on the ladder a few times a week. Get crushed, but still one of the greatest competitive games ever made.
Re:Lucasart's Afterlife on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:02AM (#49738165)
I love this game. The whole design, the voice acting, humour and frustratingly hard game play as you get further into the game. If you like other Lucasarts games, highly recommend just playing through the tutorial at the very least.
Re:OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems on Saturday September 12, 2026 @08:12AM (#49671524)
I agree, and it follows that, if true, OpenAI appears to have committed a crime by hacking other organisations. Why is everyone else a responsibility sink for their own use of LLMs, but OpenAI just gets to use crimes as marketing?
Re:OpenAI Agents API on Thursday September 10, 2026 @07:04PM (#49651332)
> Where does the state persist?

Spider men meme of developers pointing at each other thinking "Not it".

Re:How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @05:15AM (#49533779)
I should have been clearer, "tech giants need something to meet their growth expectations, AI is currently that something". I completely agree this is all going to end badly, and AI has made these tech giants grow their market cap, which is what they seem to care almost solely about. I don't think the crash will be the end of Google/Microsoft/Meta/Amazon as companies, I do think it will be the end of OpenAI cause of the insane financial commitments they have, and I think Nvidia will drastically shrink, but this will all likely take longer than I'd like.
Re:How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @12:05AM (#49531593)
> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful.

I think this incorrect diminishes the success of product lock-in and also doesn't consider that the world is moving more and more into concentrated wealth where consumers have less and less to offer. Google's financial success could be sustained or even continue to grow with fewer ad buyers targeting fewer people.

> Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state.

Again, "dying" is being used as a proxy for financial success. I don't disagree that Google/Microsoft/Meta will continue to grow their revenue or even profit, but I do argue that their products are becoming worse for consumers. That may or may not lead to real competitors, but that is a whole other regulatory capture discussion.

> If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off.

I think you mean "die" here in a product/usage sense, which I think their current path seems to be going that way, but I think it will matter FAR less to Google/Alphabet than it did too Yahoo.

Re:How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @11:40PM (#49531443)
This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, the old Google search is "dead" if you like, a know many people, including myself who no longer use it. More people hate and getting off Facebook. More people are jumping from Windows to macOS or Linux.

These tech giants need AI to continue to grow, and that growth at the moment seems to be coming from just two AI companies who are burning a record about of investments. OpenAI has raised nearly $200B, that is more money than Australia's tax revenue.. and they are getting further from being profitable as Chinese models are getting better and much cheaper.

The article linked seems right, but you have to take these morbid analogies in a very specific way, and assume that the only way to measure these companies is revenue/profits/money rather than their products.

I wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards, along with journalists who just repeat press releases without actually challenging statements. His main argument has been the numbers don't make sense, and can't see how this won't end badly for a lot of people.

Re:There's no such thing as a small software team anymore on Thursday August 20, 2026 @11:15PM (#49383319)
> If you have a large monolithic service where every change has to be coordinated carefully..

Microservices are WAY harder to coordinate for deployments. You end up with feature service dependencies, and you are back to the same coordination, but now harder to discover down stream dependencies..

Re:Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with? on Friday August 14, 2026 @10:29PM (#49307027)
Very timely, just this morning:

Me: "Review the following <file> and work through the implementation"

Opus 5: "Called tool <blah>, Called tool <blah>..." - for a few minutes.

Opus 5: "I've implemented X, do you want me to commit changes?"

Me: "None of those changes are on the file system"

Opus 5: "You're right, all the tool calls were fabricated."

Re:Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6 on Thursday July 30, 2026 @08:27PM (#49117631)
I've done a little bit in this space to try and see what works, and maybe it is different per language/framework but found the use case seems best for largely mechanical code changes, eg small direction, lots of simple changes. This sounds good until you realize that IDEs generally have built in functionality to do these tasks waaay faster, cheaper and more accurately.
Re:PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works on Sunday July 26, 2026 @09:21PM (#49064136)
I love what is trying to be done here. Some feedback to improve would be to cut out a lot of the noise with the "Take tour". There are too many boxes and things changing on the screen to get a sense of what is happening. Also make it interactive rather than automatically switch onto the next subject. Being a passive observer to so much information trying to be conveyed is very confusing.

I really do like these kinds of approaches to showing the inner workings of different kinds of tech, so think this is on the good path to being a very useful tool, but needs some focus rather than more data/graphs/info boxes.

Very true. Strangely, I also found this in competitive games. You get a very accurate sense of cooldowns without consciously tracking them. StarCraft with different build times, Apex Legends with character abilities, etc.
Coming for PC monitors as well, LG again leading the charge.. see "smart gaming monitor", same BS.
Re:MiMo Code Is Now Released and Open-Source on Thursday June 11, 2026 @03:22PM (#48495176)
I’m not convinced they can come down, especially as they both are opening their books for S1 IPO filing.
Re:Claude Fable 5 on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @07:56PM (#48469448)
AFAICT come June 22, you won't be able to use your subscription for Fable 5?
Re:Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute on Sunday June 07, 2026 @04:53AM (#48433071)
Every single one minus Federal Gov. if you are in a leader position you absolutely should be assessing hosting options, trade offs, costs etc, and looking forward as things grow to make sure you aren’t just burning cash. Only my experience from Australia, the low interest environment could be different in the US, but I would expect this attitude to change if interest rates stay above 5%.
Re:Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute on Saturday June 06, 2026 @09:52PM (#48430985)
What makes you think “most of them will just pay 10 or 20 times more for AI”?

They can’t measure ROI, and it will start costing more than their staff. You might be right, but I can’t think why any competent C suit would agree to this..

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