Killing USAID.
Readit Newsfinebalance commented on Grok 4 Fast now has 2M context window docs.x.ai/docs/models... · Posted by u/hereme888
finebalance commented on Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way pudding.cool/2025/08/onio... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
This is fun!
I really struggled to effectively cut onions until this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwRttSfnfcc
Haven't looked back since.
I do it more or less this way - except I keep the root intact until the end. It keeps the onion structurally intact until I'm done with the dicing. At which point, the root takes a single chop to lop off, and then the whole thing scatters into tiny, mostly uniform dices. It's quite satisfying.
finebalance commented on OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80% twitter.com/sama/status/1... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
If by reasoning you mean showing CoT, Gemini and OA are the same in this regard - neither provides it, not through the UI nor through the API. The "summaries" both provide have zero value and should be treated as non-existent.
Anthropic exposes reasoning, which has become a big reason to use them for reasoning tasks over the other two despite their pricing. Rather ironic when the other two have been pushing reasoning much harder.
Google exposes their reasoning. You can use their new gemini python sdk to get thought traces.
> If what you're saying is true, why are we hearing about AI companies wanting to build nuclear power plants to power new data centers they think they need to build?
Well, partly because they (all but X, IIRC) have commitments to shift to carbon-neutral energy.
But also, from the article:
> ChatGPT is now estimated to be the fifth-most visited website in the world
That's ChatGPT today. They're looking ahead to 100x-ing (or 1,000,000x-ing) the usage as AI replaces more and more existing work.
I can run Llama 3 on my laptop, and we can measure the energy usage of my laptop--it maxes out at around 0.1 toasters. o3 is presumably a bit more energy intensive, but the reason it's using a lot of power is the >100MM daily users, not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.
> not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.
This seems like a classic tragedy of the commons, no? An individual has a minor impact, but the rationale switching to LLM tools by the collective will likely have a massive impact.
Not all the way. At the bottom are a bunch of unpaid writers and artists and a horde of low-paid mturk workers in Nigeria.
That's ok. AI will kill those off soon enough, and like all winners, rewrite history enough so that that inconvenient theft never happened anyway. It's manifest destiny, or something.
finebalance commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
Once again, this seems to only apply to Python / ML SWEs. Try to get any of these models to write decent Rust, Go or C boilerplate.
I can't speak to Rust, Go or C, but for me LLMs have greatly accelerated the process of learning and building projects in Julia.
finebalance commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
Not a clue.
I'm a decent engineer working as a DS in a consulting firm. In my last two projects, I checked in (or corrected) so much more code than the other two junior DS's in my team, that at the end some 80%-90% of the ML-related stuff had been directly built, corrected or optimized by me. And most of the rest that wasn't, was mostly because it was boilerplate. LLMs were pivotal in this.
And I am only a moderately skilled engineer. I can easily see somebody with more experience and skills doing this to me, and making me nearly redundant.
Knowing about a phenomenon and experiencing for oneself are sometimes two different things. The article also cites record-high temperatures which presumably they didn't have foreknowledge of if they've never happened before.
So, tech workers paid >200k couldn't anticipate that hot places are going to get a lot hotter due to global warming and all the trends we've been observing over the last decade or so? Interesting.
finebalance commented on Why Men Get So Few Matches on Dating Apps [video] youtube.com/watch?v=x3lyp... · Posted by u/Tozen
Because we are cheap and disposable and way more generic than even those who are aware of it can conceive.
... like women are all special and interesting by virtue of being female? Most of humanity is bland and forgettable. Gender is hardly a factor there.
finebalance commented on I saw the face of God in a semiconductor factory wired.com/story/i-saw-the... · Posted by u/throwaway2037
The purple prose is exhausting.