there is no comprehension
I intentionally didn't say AI but LLM because for me the word 'intelligence' is misleading. But LLMs are definitely a leap forward in NLP and what other word for 'comprehension' would you use?
Readit Newsdust42 commented on Is it a bubble? oaktreecapital.com/insigh... · Posted by u/saigrandhi
The question is, can SV extract several trillion dollars out of the global economy over the next few years with the help of LLMs and GPUs? And the follow-up question: will LLMs help grow the global economy by this amount - because if not, then extracting the money will lead to problems in other parts of the world. And last not least, will LLMs -given enough money to train them on ever bigger data sets- magically turn into AGI?
IMHO for now LLMs are just clever text generators with excellent natural language comprehension. Certainly a change of many paradigms in SWE. Is it also a $10T extra for the valley?
dust42 commented on 30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript" web.archive.org/web/20070... · Posted by u/donohoe
If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
A big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
dust42 commented on 30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript" web.archive.org/web/20070... · Posted by u/donohoe
Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. JavaScript will be an open, freely licensed proposed standard available to the entire Internet community. Existing Sun Java licensees will receive a license to JavaScript. In addition, Sun and Netscape intend to make a source code reference implementation of JavaScript available for royalty-free licensing, further encouraging its adoption as a standard in a wide variety of products.
The 90ies had quite a few pretty visionary people. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use.
At that time there were still CompuServe, AOL, Minitel and BTX around - not just walled gardens but walled worlds but a handful of people already saw and shaped the future...
To play the devils advocate: TLS on websites where you are not logged in is the greatest security hogwash of all times.
For example the cookies of the NYT:
- Store and/or access information on a device 178 vendors
- Use limited data to select advertising 111 vendors
- Create profiles for personalised advertising 135 vendors
- Use profiles to select personalised advertising
- Understand audiences through statistics or combinations
of data from different sources 92 vendors
And even if you block all cookies, ever-cookies and fingerprinting, then there are still cloudflare, amazon, gcp and azure who know your cross-site visits.
The NSA is no longer listening because there is TLS everywhere? Sure, and the earth is flat.
dust42 commented on Are we repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/davedx
OpenAI has 800,000,000 weekly users but only 20,000,000 are paying while 780,000,000 are free riding. Should they by accident under provision then they could simply remove the freebee and raise the prices for the paying clients. But that is not what they want.
IMHO the investors are betting on a winner-takes-it-all market and that some magic AGI will be coming out of OpenAI or Anthropic.
The questions are:
How much money can they make by integrating advertising and/or selling user profiles?
What is the model competition going to be?
What is the future AI hardware going to be - TPUs, ASICs?
Will more people have powerful laptops/desktops to run a mid-sized models locally and be happy with it?
The internet didn't stop after the dotcom crash and the AI wont stop either should there be a market correction.
dust42 commented on China's BEV trucks and the end of diesel's dominance cleantechnica.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
Thus in China a 600KWh truck is 85.000€ while in Germany an eActros with 600KWh is 290.000€ (w/o VAT) [1]. Consumption is 100-120KW/h per 100km. The range is then up to 500km / 310 miles.
Electricity price for industry is 0.112 USD in China, 0.455 USD in the UK, 0.29 USD in Germany, 0.149 USD in the US. [2]
This definitely looks like starting to be competitive for various use cases and regions. Obviously it needs a charging infrastructure that can keep up with it.
Charging speed is currently 350KW, 1MW chargers are in development.
[1] https://www.auto-anders.de/eactros-600 [2] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/map/electricity_industria...
dust42 commented on Garibaldi, history's sexiest revolutionary? historyextra.com/period/v... · Posted by u/thomassmith65
More fun trivia about Garibaldi: he was elected to the french parliament, and he caused a stir when he showed up wearing his signature poncho rather than formal clothes. He was also the only french commander in the Franco Russian war to capture a Prussian flag.
Also, he was supposedly invited to fight in the American civil war but refused since he couldn't get the level of command he wanted, although there was a Garibaldi Guard in that war.
Queen Victoria wrote in her diary , about Garibaldi's visit to London, that most of the elite was far too fascinated with him. During the same visit, the servants at the house he was staying sold the water he used to wash himself to collectors.
I think the most hilarious fun trivia about him -being the unifier of Italy- is that Nice named a square after him in 1870, thus 10 years after _splitting_ from Italy and joining France. And then to add insult to injury at his death the city decided to put a statue of him into the square. So now he stands on a square in France which actually during his lifetime was Italy. Must hurt him every day ;)
dust42 commented on Two recently found works of J.S. Bach presented in Leipzig [video] youtube.com/watch?v=4hXzU... · Posted by u/Archelaos
My absolute personal favourite is Toccata and Fugue played by organist Hans-André Stamm on the Trost-Organ of the Stadtkirche in Waltershausen [1]. Great videography, great organ and very expressive organist. From 3:28 on you can also see the foot work.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnuq9PXbywA&list=RDNnuq9PXby...