ifwinterco

4 ms·

31.
by ifwinterco 24d ago
People take it for granted how insanely good modern internal combustion engines are after 150 years of continuous improvement. A modern petrol engine is a miracle in terms of reliability, performance, smoothness and (relative) lack of harmf
32.
by ifwinterco 25d ago
You're not wrong but for a lot of AI boosters it's also a political position - remember Anthropic and half of SV at this point is run by wide eyed effective altruists. Ultimately one cannot separate technology or science from poli
33.
by ifwinterco 25d ago
The more likely counter in a proper hot war context between major powers would be shooting down the satellites with ASAT weapons, which is technically feasible but politically a much bigger step
34.
by ifwinterco 26d ago
Physical stuff (window bars and a security door) is much, much more effective for that logic. Burglars know they’ll probably be on CCTV somewhere anyway but nobody in their right mind is trying to smash through a security door or saw throug
35.
by ifwinterco 27d ago
My understanding is OVH and Hetzner were traditionally more bare metal/VPS orientated (though maybe that's changed)? Fair though, I hadn't even heard of Scaleway, and that does look a lot more like a direct AWS/GCP alter
36.
by ifwinterco 27d ago
Yep, for once we had actual direct democracy in this country, they won't make that mistake again
37.
by ifwinterco 28d ago
You have no choice really if you’re a UK business, there is no UK (or French, or German, or Japanese for that matter) cloud that can do what AWS or GCP does
38.
by ifwinterco 28d ago
It kind of makes sense that critical financial infrastructure would be one of the things that doesn’t just run on AWS and accepts it goes down with everything else when us-east-1 goes down
39.
by ifwinterco 28d ago
It’s OpenAI (and Anthropic I’m sure) realising that they’ve somehow ended up stuck in the lowest margin part of the stack (providing inference), and trying to get out of it
40.
by ifwinterco 28d ago
Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models, which are good but no longer the best bang for the buck. In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market.
41.
by ifwinterco 29d ago
Cities in the tropics at high altitude far from the sea like Bogotá, Medellín, maybe even Mexico City. Maybe some moderately increased risk of extreme rainfall causing localised flooding, mudslides etc, but Bogotá in particular has an incre
42.
by ifwinterco 29d ago
Still see it sometimes in the UK, but if it's there often there's an extra fee to use paypal instead of card, so I doubt many people use it. Card number is standard, with an increasing amount of places supporting Apple Pay (thankf
43.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Yes, I agree with you. In fact I would argue: if someone is truly left wing in the traditional sense (i.e. they believe Marx when he says politics is all about class conflict, they want to live in a society where workers have more power, th
44.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
It’s no longer more than a million a year (thanks Kier Starmer, I guess) but there are now at least 15 million people in the UK who aren’t White British, it is absurd to pretend that isn’t a big number. A lot of people ideally want immigrat
45.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
People absolutely do have a problem with legal immigration, especially post-Boriswave. If legal immigration means millions of new people every year and rapid demographic change, of course that will cause a political issue. It would be very
46.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
If the government refuses a visa renewal while the person is in the country and they don’t comply you have to deport them, which is often problematic. If you make it standard procedure that everyone has to leave the country temporarily to r
47.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
They were using what (allegedly) they considered an incredibly dangerous “cyber grade” model - finding bugs in software is exactly what you would expect it to do
48.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Yes that's kind of what I mean - the powers that be are already quietly moving in the direction of cracking down on immigration, because they can see it's now causing them real political problems. Not because they care about doing
49.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
If they actually wanted to test the model without internet access they'd have run it air gapped, not relied on a buggy software sandbox. This is pretty clearly a marketing stunt by OpenAI, otherwise the story just doesn't add up
50.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Not at the moment, but the result of the current UK system has been huge uncontrolled levels of immigration leading to deep public resentment, so that may change in the future
51.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
All high level endurance athletes are on high carb diets all the time and are never anywhere near ketosis (unless something has gone very wrong)
52.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
It's different though because for structural engineering finite element models (set up correctly) will give you a deterministic, mathematically correct answer. In fact FEM is arguably more deterministic than the old school pen and pa
53.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Those people aren't really "Americans" in any meaningful sense, even if they happen to hold US passports. Once they're done with the US they'll just move onto the next country, same as they moved onto the US once th
54.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Yes I agree, I don't doubt they are dealing with some serious technical challenges. It's not just the enormous rate of growth, LLMs and workflows are also evolving rapidly. Whatever they planned for 1-2 years ago in terms of how t
55.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Because coding is solved and there’s no need for software engineers any more. Being charitable to Anthropic though: coding is sort of solved for a very limited definition of “solved”. Software engineering of huge distributed systems at mass
56.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
It’s genuinely a lot more complicated than that. Just look at how officials in positions of power in the the British state reacted, especially people like Ben Wallace. They’re clearly, shamelessly happy that this war is going on. They love
57.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Or not be as willing (as the British state is for example) to sacrifice the entire male population of Ukraine to fight a war for them. That makes you "pro Russian" apparently
58.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Israel won’t extradite citizens if they don’t want to and there’s nothing a western government can do. Why is that the case you might ask, given that they’re “our greatest ally”? Well that’s a good question
59.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
The buddha figured that part out 7000 years ago but people just don't want to hear it for some reason
60.
by ifwinterco 1mo ago
Humans simply didn't evolve to be connected to a constant firehose of random information. I firmly believe that even the smartest person will become an idiot if they just scroll X all day

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