alexjplant

3 ms·

1.
by alexjplant 5d ago
I seem to recall Anthropic going on record saying that they don't do anything to model performance to stretch their compute capacity. I've anecdotally noticed massive peaks and troughs in performance week to week (albeit with Opus
2.
by alexjplant 8d ago
I'm happy that this hardware exists but an easier solution is to quit social media, viciously curate your notifications and apps, and install an ad blocker. My phone only alerts me if somebody calls me, asks me a question specifically
3.
by alexjplant 8d ago
I sincerely wonder how this is going to work given the large divergence in lifestyle preferences between these generations. Real estate especially will be an interesting one - lots of young people either cannot (due to employment situations
4.
by alexjplant 9d ago
Just use GLM-5.3 Flash via OpenRouter. It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is. While the Z.ai coding plan was a decent deal in the past I always ran into limiting with it and since I use it intermittently for personal
5.
by alexjplant 9d ago
I bother because Claude Code does wacky nonsense unless I use OpenSpec (or something similar) to explicitly research, scope, persist, then implement in a brand-new context. Even Opus will do ridiculous nonsense like throw its hands up when
6.
by alexjplant 10d ago
> I might be showing a lot of unc energy here, but if you can't afford a raspberry pi or something to play with linux, or a used pc, gaming and having a playstation 5 should be de prioritized for a bit while you get your life togeth
7.
PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"(frvr.com)
240 points by alexjplant 10d ago|164 comments
8.
by alexjplant 14d ago
I've seen all four films plus "The Animatrix" and played two of the games and don't recall this at all. Contemporarily, however, there was an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise [1] that used this as a key plot point. [1]
9.
by alexjplant 17d ago
> It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today. I seem to recall most people being perfectly content with 128kbps MP3s on iPo
10.
by alexjplant 17d ago
Defense contracting doesn't have an aversion to LLMs so much as it doesn't like doing anything that threatens the status quo. Many places sit comfortably 5-10 years behind the median of the rest of the industry or are stuck on pro
11.
by alexjplant 17d ago
As a 12-year-old I could barely afford shared hosting let alone a license for Invision or vBulletin. I recall that phpBB also had a reputation for stability (manually-applied RPG mods excluded) that Invision sacrificed in favor of more feat
12.
by alexjplant 18d ago
For enterprise software it's a feature. For most consumer software it's an anti-feature. Each of these crowds are on opposite ends of the same axis: the executive class coalesces around the mantra that LLMs bring automation benefi
13.
by alexjplant 24d ago
To paraphrase the sage Jimmy McMillan: the number of people who interview on their work laptops is too damn high. I'm always flabbergasted when they admit this and not once has somebody who did so passed. IME there's a strong corr
14.
by alexjplant 25d ago
What? You have to run Bridge on your desktop to get the functionality anyhow... if they offered it natively then it might be worth something but you have to run a binary to get it. Meanwhile Proton's mobile app has gotten buggier and b
15.
by alexjplant 25d ago
I switched to Tuta this morning. I used to be a huge Proton advocate but multiple hour-plus downtimes in a week for e-mail is unacceptable. At this point I had better uptime running my own mail server on a VPS (or at least when the UI went
16.
Proton Outage(status.proton.me)
15 points by alexjplant 25d ago|13 comments
17.
by alexjplant 25d ago
...the second in a few days.
18.
by alexjplant 26d ago
Because Flock is the first company to so brazenly violate the post-2011 social contract: if you're going to track somebody you need to give them coupons and content as compensation. They have failed to provide the people whose privacy
19.
Proton Global Outage(status.proton.me)
47 points by alexjplant 1mo ago|33 comments
20.
by alexjplant 1mo ago
No idea why you're being downvoted. I've bought el cheapo LowEndTalk-style VPS specials on two or three occasions and have gotten what I paid for each time. They either sold a microscopic slice of some over-provisioned 15-year-old
21.
by alexjplant 1mo ago
I looked into this a while back (~6 years ago) and it basically broke down like this: diabetics outnumber injectable drug users two to one but not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home. D
22.
by alexjplant 1mo ago
> LLMs are just another abstraction layer above programming languages, machine language, etc. Programming languages are (largely) deterministic. LLMs are not. The boundary between an abstract concept and something executable sits comfort
23.
by alexjplant 1mo ago
Fellow readers whose interests are piqued by this comment: this is apparently true. This book [1] talks about it in greater depth. From Wikipedia: > [The author] describes the growth of the Abstract Expressionist art movement, and its fr
24.
by alexjplant 1mo ago
This is heavily contingent on one's individual experiences. An uncurated modern web/mobile sounds like a hellscape - ads in one's start menu, autoplaying videos, a flood of promotional notifications from shopping apps, people
25.
by alexjplant 1mo ago
OpenCode Go provides a lot of usage for these models for the paltry sum of $10/month. Z.ai's coding plan provides a single-digit multiple of Claude Code's usage for a similar price and performance level. Kimi and DeepSeek mod
26.
by alexjplant 1mo ago
If you don't have regulatory hurdles to jump over then there are a whole raft of open-weight models that perform basically as well as Anthropic's offerings (and, in many cases, better because they're pulling fewer capacity-st
27.
by alexjplant 2mo ago
> we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state. There is enormous variance in performance between police departments. Where I live now the police have been nothing but helpful. In college our neighbor was a cop and was t
28.
by alexjplant 2mo ago
Healthy eating is available at restaurants too (Taco Bell being an amusing example - grilled chicken, beans, vegetables, and leafy greens) but people choose not to avail themselves of it. The straw man "Average American" is condit
29.
by alexjplant 2mo ago
Before I built a gaming computer circa 2004 I daily drove my family's old beige box that had a 350Mhz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and Windows 98. I remember running CDex (because ripping CDs was all the rage), Trillian, and ZDaemon all
30.
by alexjplant 2mo ago
I'm going whole hog on LLM-driven development to build out an old school FOSS forum that can run in resource-constrained environments with a minimum of fuss. Think phpBB but written in Rust with modern UI niceties and a SQLite backend.

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