trzy

The reason the payoff isn't visible yet is because outside of software engineering, it isn't systematized nor integrated into workflows. But believe me, people are using it and increasing their free time. I was at an HOA meeting in Reno. The board president works for a major US cable provider doing "contract approvals and negotiations", whatever that means. This last year, he said he's cut his 8 hour days down to a few hours using Claude (pretty sure he is just using the web chat interface). Employees of the property management firm are using it too -- our representative at the meeting said it had been a lifesaver for her in recent months. We haven't seen the full benefit from their end but they are also in a state of constant turmoil as a company so it's a wash. A tennis partner of mine who is the regional (entire west coast) manager for an automotive company's extended warranty program has also been able to use it to cut down time-consuming documentation and the firm encourages it; but again, no direct integration into her workflow, she is just winging it with ChatGPT online.

I still have my Passmo card from my very first visit to Japan in 2008. I went back in 2018 and it still worked and had a balance. I used it as recently as 2025. Pretty cool!

This doesn’t seem to work when the harness feeds images and asks the agent to do things in the real world. It fails to devise ways to keep track of its progress and fails to utilize its tools effectively.

The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.

I get it -- I don't have time for anything but short retro games these days!

Yup. Although sometime in the mid-90's, the home console business became more lucrative and Sega really missed the wave. Games at home were their own distinct art form: longer, more complex, far more replay value. Arcade games rarely have more than 15-20 minutes of content and this was true of Model 3 and Naomi games. Sega's arcade focus became a major liability by the time Dreamcast rolled around.

Cool articles :) I got into emulation in the late 90s and eventually wrote both an NES and Genesis emulator. I always appreciated how cleanly organized Sega’s systems were, at least superficially considering the memory and register layouts.

You should take a look at Sega’s arcade systems, which were very cool, especially the Model 1, 2, and 3. Supermodel, an open source Model 3 emulator I co-wrote, and MAME have good emulation of Model 3 and 2, respectively, these days. Absolutely fascinating rendering architecture. It was early modern 3D when things were still weird and custom, before the industry standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D.

I think they should chuck the STL and start over. I left C++ for a while and spent a lot of time in C# and Swift. Going back to C++ is painful because the interfaces feel very non-uniform and cumbersome.

I also think that named parameters would go a long way toward improving the language.

Lastly, explore some way to make possible a breaking change with "old C++".

In practice SDL is used to abstract away the system-dependent parts required to set up OpenGL.

Slowly then suddenly. Movements in the frontline are gradual until one side is exhausted and collapses. With Trump’s ludicrous “peace” plan, Ukraine would be barred access to US weapons, the size of its military restricted, and Russia would simply rearm and try again.

And despite how things have fared in Ukraine thus far, the Baltics are a much softer target. If Ukraine does end up falling to the Russians, it’ll be used as a springboard by the Russians, potentially supported by Ukrainians disillusioned with the West’s betrayal. It would certainly not be the first time that Russia has annexed Ukraine and mobilized its people against Russia’s foes.

The idea that the size of Ukraine and the distance to Russia’s border through Ukraine diminishes the Russian threat. For two reasons:

1. Russia aims to either capture Ukraine outright or exert influence over it, which puts eastern EU states at grave risk. Note that Belarus, a Russian vassal, already borders the EU and was used by the Russians to launch the Ukraine invasion.

2. Russia already borders — and menaces - the EU in the Baltics.

Given the pained debate here by Western Europeans over the semantics of “Europe” and Ukraine’s relationship therewith, it’s very unlikely NATO would act and that’s precisely what the Russians would bet on.

What an absurd argument. If Ukraine falls, the Russians will marshal Ukrainian manpower and resources against the EU.

Ukrainians voted to align themselves more closely with the EU and are now effectively a march. Ukraine is very much within the sphere of EU concern.

Unix is a legacy mess. The sooner we rid ourselves of this scourge, the better.

Posted from a productive Windows workstation.

It’s completely overstated. The article is a bit ridiculous — like, oh no! They had to put up some English signage at temples! Foreign guests aren’t finishing their traditional breakfast!

I’ve spent considerable time in Tokyo in recent years as well. It’s largely the same as it ever was. “Incidents” with tourists are clearly blown out of proportion by local social media. Yes, there are visibly more foreigners than in 2008 (mostly immigrants who work and speak Japanese). No, the character of the city has not changed.

On my Shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo most recently, a noisy quartet of drunk guys chatted loudly for over a hour on the late evening weekday train and spilled a beer. Can you imagine the horror? They were Japanese restaurateurs from Osaka.

I was there in January. Maybe not the busiest season but honestly this issue is overstated. I was the only white bro in a kimono (and it was my Japanese friend who really wanted to do it). Most of Kyoto is completely unaffected by tourism, though these are not historical areas. We had great omurice at a very local place on the outskirts of town after finishing up with Kinkaku-ji.

Google Flights isn’t a third party portal! It takes you directly to the airline web site to book. It attempts to estimate the fare price but that’s becoming increasingly difficult with variably priced seats and other “gotcha” expenses that get figured in deep into the booking flow.

Who cares? This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to finally gatekeep software engineering the way lawyers and finance professionals do with their fields! Enjoy the windfall in 5 years!

How was the chassis and steering mechanism built? Any plans to release that design?

I remember Sega Channel. In 6th grade, my friend had it. I didn't grow up with BBSes and had only learned about the Internet the year before (from the same friend), so the idea of downloading games was pretty wild. The service was way ahead of its time.

IIRC, it was $15/mo. There was a monthly or weekly rotation of games, including some pre-releases. I think at one point we played Vectorman when it was still new in stores or possibly just prior to its official launch.

They were indeed!

Nagai's work seems to have been an inspiration for the late 1980's/early 90's Sega aesthetic (OutRun, Sonic, etc.)

The problems are roughly: - Monoculture - Generally risk-averse and cliquish population whose primary concern is (understandably) survival and accumulating the money needed to live a normal middle class life and are drawn to the “peaceful” atmosphere of the region (a word you’ll hear especially frequently) - Terrible urban planning and poor density for socialization: sprawling suburbia, lifeless downtown cores, everyone is far away from each other and as a result of the grueling commutes, few are willing to spontaneously hang out after work

It’s a toxic mix that leads to a social death spiral.

Take-home pay is indeed higher in the bay but unless already had a family, that take-home pay is worthless in what is without a doubt the most socially dull major metro in the US.

Of course not but the task requires excellent image understanding, large context window, a mix of structured and unstructured output, high level and spatial reasoning, and a conversational layer on top.

I find it’s predictive of relative performance in other tasks I use LLMs for. Claude is the best. The only shortcoming is its peculiar verbosity.

Definitely superior to anything OpenAI has and miles beyond the “open weights” alternatives like Llama.

Bullshit. Claude 3.5 Sonnet owns the competition according to the most useful benchmark: operating a robot body in the real world. No other model comes close.

I'm working on robots. In the long run I'm interested in dexterous manipulation for industrial or commercial tasks (e.g., assembly of products) but given the big $$$ already deployed in this space, am wondering if I can find a simpler (and faster to build!) application.

Playing with 6-axis arms but also built RoBart for fun, controlled by Claude. Would love to connect with folks to ideate on the concept of a very cheap autonomous robot (maybe with some very limited manipulation ability for e.g. opening doors). I can think of an application in the health care space already.

Footage at my web site (which badly needs a redesign lol): http://trzy.org

None of the small LLMs are good enough yet. You could certainly build a system around local VLMs but it would require much more task specific programming baked in.

I’m certainly interested in building a product (not entirely controlled by an LLM but I see lots of utility in building interfaces with them) but not really sure what this would be useful for. Looking into some spaces now but there has to be a clear ROI to get any sort of funding for robotics.