ehnto

I wonder if it would be better to work on models thst can produce the 3D scenes in Blender that can be rendered to an anime style. That technique is already common, but if you could get AI to generate it in that format you could more easily ammend issues in the output or more easily add artistic direction, detail and the human touch.

Apologies, I meant ability to deploy new generation. You're right that areas of the US are cost competitive.

This can change quickly though, so it's not that big of a deal. If AI energy demands push the Gov to deregulate/fast track new plants, or the industry decides to build out their own generation renewables.

US running costs are higher than in China, because the US lags behind in energy, has higher real estate costs, and wage costs are higher.

Eventually we will hit a "good enough for cheap enough" and frontier models will hit diminishing returns (if they haven't already for a lot of types of work)

Don't think the rest of the world will sit on their hands while the US soaks up chips either, demand gets filled and if the US won't fill global demand for chips that's an opportunity to undercut again.

The other thing the rest of the world doesn't have to fund is the ridiculous valuations on these companies.

Unless you think the US can stay ahead just with model efficiencies, and that no one else will eventually match them, you are looking at the writing on the wall.

All that to say, the rest of the world is more than willing to eat your lunch, they have a dozen good reasons to, and they're already showing good results.

Just on the economics side, we've been here before too, US companies typically export their commoditization and live on brand royalties. Think all the cheap manufactured goods, the US doesn't make any of it. That's because the US can't compete on margins for numerous reasons, it's too expensive, I don't think AI is any different here except that the brands are currently valued in the trillions and I suspect that greed will be their undoing.

Please see my other sibling comment reply, the analogy is about how LLMs will be used rather than what they are.

The analogy is about business impact, I understand CNC and LLMs quite well and realise they are not the same technology.

At some point LLMs will be used like CNC machines. Prompt in, output shipped to the customer after minimum wage QC oops a sticker on it.

Skip the vibe coding, just let AI be a helper.

This I think will explain the differences in experience in industry. As pressures increase, control and power moves away from developers who have historically had a pretty strong position to dictate how they work.

Not everyone is going to be able to use AI as just a tool. The reality I have seen is that AI has sped the time-to-pr up for those who don't care what they ship, so that gets baked into estimates and expectations.

Eventually those working carefully with AI will be like the carpenter still using hand tools while the shop is operating CNC machines. The business can't afford the craftsmanship, no matter how right the craftsman is to point out that their work is better.

This is why I love AI as an enabler for myself personally, but still think it's going to ruin the experience of being in the industry.

There are other business models, it depends on what you're building. For a while almost everything coming out of SV was destined to be advertising real estate. Now I think there's more interesting businesses going on. We'll keep strip mining attention to push plastic trinkets into container ships, certainly. Probably no stopping that.

A lot is said about context you can feed into the LLM but I do think there is still superior power in human context awareness. That kind of ambient collation and organisation of the whole business and its purpose, all the different work going on and how it all relates to eachother. It happens when you isolate business units a bit too much also.

It's not surprising that if you have a hundred separate, isolated contexts working on the same business, that don't cross-talk and have no ability to subconsciously receive and collate, prioritize the thousands of signals we get from our work environment, that you end up shipping lots of incomplete or incompatible work.

Flying drones is an interesting one, I guess you do have to drive the car out to site and set up the drone. But a lot of drone ops are waypointed, automatic flight. I can see a future in which the only thing the operator does is drive the drone van to site, hit the deploy button as the drone pops out the roof, and wait for it to return. Mission set up already by an LLM prompt back at the office.

Super cool and close to my heart, albeit not the Yamanote line for me.

There is an episode of Our Man in Japan with James May where he spends an admittedly short moment with the composer of some(all?) of these melodies. It's a surprisingly thoughtful process, he tries to capture the feeling of the station and area in a short motif. Some of these motifs can contain surprising musicality and complexity, despite being so short.

I have really liked my GL.iNet travel router, also with OpenWRT. I didn't think I would need a travel router but they're pretty handy.

I didn't realise routers like theirs existed, and had been paying through the nose for your standard brands like TPLink and hoping it didn't get popped.

The front page of HN has definitely be sparse on actual software accomplishments, it's been a lot of meta-level chatter on AI. Obviously a very important technology, but also just a tool, a means to an end. I am not seeing much progress in other fields making it to HN regardless of what tool they used. I hope it's happening, and just being drowned out.

The AI can't be held liable so it somewhat defeats the purpose of that kind of paper trail and compliance work. If the threat was losing your livelihood and possibly jail time, would you currently be comfortable being held responsible for AI output?

I think the unlock only happens once though. I think that's where people are misled at the moment, the technology was there but required huge compute and data ingest to show improvement, but we have done that now. What's next for a giant leap is not more compute, and what new data we can provide now pales in comparison to that first ingest.

Because a lot of things in the real world require forward planning, I don't think everything can be just-in-time and tentative/reversible. Some things have to be committed to else you have real consequences and lose your money.

The crowdsource page says it has refillable ink tanks rather than cartridges. Unless they are modifying HP cartridges, which is probably not smart from a legal standpoint.

I think I understand, but I will say that problem solvers are often masquerading as coders. I think they will leave software too. It is exactly the interesting problem solving that goes missing with heavy LLM use. Most business problems are not that challenging, from a problem solving perspective, that's just life. So the interesting part was always the problem solving in the build. I have built things with a huge spectrum of skills and tech, not just software. I learn details fast and have good systems thinking that help me apply that new knowledge.

What LLM usage has changed is that there is no longer a deep dive into domain knowledge, the LLM goes off and does that. Then implementation time comes and again it's just handholding the drunk chatbot inside the codebase until it is done. The whole time my mind is barely engaged. Yes my expertise is required to guide it, I am constantly catching issues and problems it generates, but that's still not engaging the problem solving skillset I developed. It's just leveraging my experience.

I think at that point in my life I quite enjoyed how much he laboured the details. But the book Ready Player One had a few areas where the author just listed pop references, on and on, which reminds me of that.

Something that helps me is just giving myself license to skip stuff. It's usually better I finish a book since I will never come back to it. So I just jump around a few pages if I get bored.

I have certainly noticed my stress skyrocket in this new mode of working. I was used to getting a lot done very quickly, with intense pockets of work followed downtime. Now it feels more like a steady stream of medium stress, and there is no opportunity to stop or drop the thread.

I must admit, if this is the new way of doing software development (eg: not actually programming but working with LLMs) I am not going to stick around for that long. It's not what I fell on love with, it's not what I trained for etc. I may as well do a job I don't enjoy that lets me rest my brain for later.

Somehow this is only the first time I have seen this vector taken advantage of with my own eyes.

I remember thinking it was a stupid idea to embed third party hosted JS back when jquery and prototypejs were the duopoly of javascript. I'm surprised it took me this long to see it.

They are linked, but what I meant was its not a 1:1 relationship. You can get stronger without as much hypertrophy, or you can get bigger without as much strength gain.

The only reason I mention it is because I often see people, especially men, assume getting bigger is the main focus of getting stronger and healthier. But a more holistic approach including stretching, functional strength excercises, cardio and balance training is perhaps more important

Hypertrophy and strength aren't as strongly linked as we thought. Generally for wellness, injury prevention, you want strength and flexibility.

I have met people who figured, because they don't excercise they don't wear their body out, so their joints etc. will last longer. Same for injury, no sport no injury, that must be good!

You'd want to be able to see how your process missed it.

An incredible risk to take on someone elses behalf, for personal gain. Don't worry, market forces will surely fix this, no need for regulation.

It's also great to have capability to run local models for more brute force tasks. Because you can change the system prompt, you can get local LLMs to do all kinds of high volume tasks without burning through tokens on a hosted model.

Just one example, I needed a bunch of images tagged and organised, with a local vision capable model I could pretty easily set that up and leave it running overnight.

I already had the GPU and memory for gaming, so it was at no cost for me to start running local models. But I feel the long term writing is on the wall, local models will only make more and more sense as they get better and more efficient.

Apparently it is not all you need, according to the article.

That will likely change after this goes into effect, otherwise all that legitimate spam will never make it.

I've been watching Seth for years, that comment is pretty in line with his writing style. I expect he's using AI, but I don't think he would be lazy with it. I would expect him to prefer not replying at all over using AI to reply.

It just meant building their business for them basically. Back then, mostly eCommerce businesses before the software and supply chains for that were commoditized.

Or smaller scale, if someone's a CTO at a startup, part of their worth is going to be assembling a team who can build stuff, so you become one of the valued contacts.

We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.

I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.

The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.

I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?