neltnerb

In all honesty, what are they going to do... raise prices?

Are we to believe the only reason they aren't making a profit is because of competitive pressure? Why would I believe they don't have the same structural issues as Anthropic? That should certainly be the base case assumption even if there wasn't so much evidence of the same kinds of deals and problems.

They have to raise prices and lower expenses or there's no advantage to being a monopoly. I don't think corporate customers will pay higher prices and I see no evidence that they're actually capable of lowering expenses.

They're welcome to stop training anytime and show us how efficient it is to do inference only.

From the point of view of "the market" I imagine that it's profitable rather than merely costless.

sigh

Read the post I originally replied to. I can't anymore.

"Ballistic just means that there is no active propulsion."

"Ballistic means it follows a ballistic trajectory, as in it is governed by gravity and inertia."

If we're being pedantic about explicitly not-the-point of my post, drag is an aerodynamic force and included in ballistic calculations. And gliders are not ballistic and are not under active propulsion.

Cool.

Now that we've cleared up that we can both understand definitions, try doing "There's nothing ballistic about laminar flow."

What does laminar flow have to do with it? Ballistic just means that there is no active propulsion.

I'm not saying it is ballistic, it clearly isn't if it is steered in flight.

I just don't know how "laminar" ended up in there, it is impossible to believe that these thrusters are not causing turbulence.

(1) is certainly correct, they're poorly understood when it comes to interactions and they almost never have much clinical evidence for claims (thus they say "support"). There are also heavy metal contaminants in all sorts of things, certainly stuff bad for babies.

Just to make clear that while (2) is at least an exaggeration unless you really stretch the issues with GRAS components not being adequately safety tested, it's certainly true that evidence of benefit is thin.

Personally I'd love to see the FDA actually regulate supplements, including actually testing additives for safety rather than falling back on GRAS sketchiness.

But we can't even test food for parasites and bacteria so I guess it falls to the consumer to somehow get enough information to make an informed decision.

I am surprised this take is controversial. It really seems almost certain whenever enough money is involved in controlling narratives and selling things, regardless of the details.

Certainly employees at these companies are earning more than a single dime, so even if innocent there's still an obvious conflict of interest. That doesn't mean the posters are wrong or their opinions invalid, on the contrary their direct experience is valuable to hear.

But they are certainly paid, and this is fair to remember when reading opinions.

edit: oh, I see, they're focusing on taking the last little bit super literally. great.

My point was that using something heavily means you have an informed opinion about hating it. Hating something you have never tried is way weirder.

> I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?

Being a heavy user seems like it'd create a lot of resentment if you don't actually enjoy doing it.

If you have used a tool for years and years and suddenly it shoves in a bunch of AI, like Duolingo or Google, are you a heavy user who may well dislike the results?

I have to put in some work to not be a heavy user by any reasonable definition.

Because companies that want to go public need to look profitable or potentially profitable. And before they go public they have to release real, actual, legally demonstrable numbers for their costs and revenue anyway.

It's wild to me that someone looking for advice on how to do any kind of stock trading would be looking for a once sentence answer.

I hope it at least has real citations to actual websites like, I dunno, fidelity or some other reasonably competent authority that can explain all the details?

It's an answer that's too short for an expert to find useful, and useless to a layperson unless all they want to do is reply to a post on twitter.

I've never searched for a financial question where I did not want to know all the weird details because why would I search for it unless I was considering doing it? Seems like someone who doesn't care about the answer is going to be more an edge case than I am.

Similarly, I put a repeater in an upper story of an apartment building in Boston and am reliably able to talk to people over 10+ hops. Right this second I'm able to talk to someone 99.5 miles away in Vermont.

We had to create different channels for different regions (connecticut, new hampshire, massachusetts, rhode island) just to keep from having hundreds of messages in a single public channel when posts are generally about local things.

Unfortunately it doesn't fix congestion issues completely, repeaters still repeat everything (and can't listen while transmitting) so packets from connecticut still put traffic onto the entire mesh all the way to new hampshire, but at least it's better organized.

It seems like there are some ideas to help with congestion, maybe making channels region specific (repeaters can be programmed to only repeat traffic with a certain region code) but for now it's shocking to me how far I can reach with a 0.125W radio.

But yeah, it's not "reliable", that's what TCP/IP is for =) Definitely a toy network for now, and a single malicious bot on the frequency band would absolutely wreck it. Or a single high power jammer sending out noise at just the wrong frequency. Definitely a fun project for people who would do ham radio if they had any interest in taking a test...

I wouldn't use it for emergencies though, it's theoretically a backup if the cell network and internet go down but the reliability just isn't there and I suspect never will be.

Why? They likely don't plan to make it out and it'll make them more famous after.

I admit it was a super meta-funny response, because everyone I see that's into meshcore thinks it's open source because of that repository and posts it after a 30 second google search when questioned.

Then you ask them to actually find a source file for the apps and they go quiet. It's wild how much it looks like open source from a casual glance.

At this point I'll believe it when the money actually moves.

There's been far to many "plans" and "commitments" and an awful lot of nothing actually happening.

It's so weird right? I keep hearing people say it's open source but like... where's the code then? I've tried to find it. I can find stuff for core components, but they lock features behind a delay-wall in the app. If it was open source that stuff would be gone immediately.

Heh, I use MeshCore in Massachusetts and my layperson explanation is that MeshCore is for people who would be HAMs except they don't have the patience to take an exam.

You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun.

I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out.

Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing?

At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case.

So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.

It gets messy when the other poker players are your mentors and family whom you love and respect, when the money is real, when the amounts to you feel enormous (whether they matter to the investor is a different story), and when losing carries unpredictable emotional and social consequences. And when mentors and family do it you are probably their only bet. It feels like betting other people's money and I totally get how that's a psychological hangup to feel that it is wrong.

I am not being sarcastic or flippant in this, it limits me to not be willing to take advantage of the risk/reward system, but it's somehow deeply tied into my ethics in ways I didn't even really notice until my second startup. And I'm okay with that limitation, but I'll work through it sooner or later and regain my appetite for risk.

Aside from that, many people despise thinking this way about their work. Like me, even though I'm willing to do it. I've met founders who loved negotiation. Like I swear they must have been nightmare children. I hate negotiation, I want people to treat each other fairly and will stick with a good human that does so forever. I suspect those people don't mind ripping off family and friends, much less strangers. It is harsh, and I've seen things, but anecdotes aren't statistics, and that's a huge obvious red flag to me. If the leaders like to do internal negotiation games I just want out. It's just painful to have to deal with being around when you just want to make stuff work.

It's important to talk about ahead of time, and get in writing, but that's also something easily overlooked among family and friends who do not do this kind of thing much. And the downsides need to be honest and clear to avoid mistrust.

Now, after working at two startups and starting three, my third is a consulting company that exclusively does things hourly except in very special circumstances. It's never going to grow fast because it scales as my hours of labor. But I am way more able to pick a price for my labor than decide how to price something that I haven't done yet. I could figure it out, I just kinda don't want to. For now?

This is what I do, I'm a little confused by the issue. If you have a device that outputs HDMI just never connect the TV to your wifi. It's not like you need or want firmware updates if there's no internet connection.

A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.

Imagine the process of solving a problem as a sequence of hundreds of little decisions that branch between just two options. There is some probability that your human brain would choose one versus the other.

If you insert AI into your thinking process, it has a bias, for sure. It will helpfully reinforce whatever you tell it you think makes sense, or at least on average it will be interpreted that way because of a wide variety of human cognitive biases even if it hedges. At the least it will respond with ideas that are very... median.

So at each one of these tiny branches you introduce a bias towards the "typical" instead of discovering where your own mind would go. It's fine and conversational but it clearly influences your thought process to, well, mitigate your edges. Maybe it's more "correct", it's certainly less unique.

And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.

Don't most tech startups lose money for years before they maybe make a profit?

I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.

It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.

I love uMatrix, but all evidence is that they stopped developing it in 2021.

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.

I think what's important here is to reduce harm even if it's still a little annoying. Because if you try to completely ban mentioning something is LLM written you'll just have people doing it without a disclaimer...

Yes, comments of this nature are bad, annoying, and should be downvoted as they have minimal original thought, take minimal effort, and are often directly inaccurate. I'd still rather they have a disclaimer to make it easier to identify them!

Further, entire articles submitted to HN are clearly written by a LLM yet get over a hundred upvotes before people notice whether there's a disclaimer or not. These do not get caught quickly, and someone clicking on the link will likely generate ad revenue that incentives people to continue doing it.

LLM comments without a disclaimer should be avoided, and submitted articles written by a LLM should be flagged ASAP to avoid abuse since by the time someone clicks the link it's too late.

It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.

I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.

But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.

Definitely, it's always used GCC under the hood, and also just been the IDE.

Arduino (the original AVR boards anyway) have always relied on GCC, and not just that but the entire open source chain that already existed for AVR-GCC. I'm sure they contribute back (I guess "sure" is an exaggeration), but it worked pretty darn well already.

Arduino, for me, replaced emacs for an IDE. The main reasons I use it are because I don't need to write a makefile, and the integrated serial port. Those are good enough features that I still use the IDE even though I haven't touched a real Arduino in a decade or more. But I work alone and don't usually have more than a few thousand lines of code so it's not too complex to manage.

I recall AVR-GCC not only working just fine in 2005 but being the official method for compiling code for those chips. I used it before Arduino came out to target the same chips.

Arduino was a nice beginner friendly IDE for sure that eliminated the need for make files or reading documentation for GCC, but the existing ecosystem was definitely not closed source.

From context I can't tell if they mean the heated coils in a heat pump head, or somehow connecting to a traditional radiator.

In older homes there isn't necessarily HVAC at all and instead there are actual radiators. I've lived in two like that, there is just no forced air to rooms.

The combination with air conditioning and dehumidifying is genuinely compelling for the simplicity. Especially in new construction.

But these things trickle down to renters last. And if the landlord installs it, you bet your ass the rent is going up more than your savings on electricity.

Lose lose lose, if it gets installed then the current residents probably get priced out anyway. It eventually trickles down but we could do so much better.

I listed a reason that impacts a third of houses. I didn't write an essay because the article lists plenty of others. It was just weird that they never mentioned the misaligned incentives.

I've got to throw out an obvious explanation.

A third of the country rents. Renters pay the utility bills. Landlords pay for appliance upgrades.

Why would the landlord put any effort into upgrading appliances when the cost of not upgrading them is borne by the renters?

I've never rented at a place where they didn't want to fix broken equipment with the cheapest possible replacement. And no renter would ever consider purchasing a major appliance like this since they'll end up priced out before they recover the cost in utility bills.

They're a nice technology, but our incentives are all wrong for a lot of housing stock.