m_mueller (u/m_mueller)

m_mueller commented on As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise npr.org/2025/12/28/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/geox

palmotea · a month ago

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.

m_mueller · a month ago

and if you're unlucky to live close to a datacenter, this could include energy and water? I sure hope regulators are waking up as free markets don't really seem equipped to deal with this kind of concentration of power.

m_mueller commented on Cloudflare was down cloudflare.com/... · Posted by u/mektrik

madjam002 · 2 months ago

Looking forward to the post mortem on this one. We weren't affected (just using the CDN), and people are saying they weren't affected who are using Cloudflare Workers (a previous culprit which we've since moved off), so I wonder what service / API was actually affected that brought down multiple websites with a 500 but not all of them.

Wise was just down which is a pretty big one.

Also odd how some websites were down this time that previously weren't down with the global outage in November

m_mueller · 2 months ago

Maven Repository was down for me for a while, now it recovered.

m_mueller commented on DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf] huggingface.co/deepseek-a... · Posted by u/pretext

evrenesat · 2 months ago

China needs to build the world's trust and respect, while the US is slowly but surely losing theirs.

m_mueller · 2 months ago

slowly?

m_mueller commented on Python is not a great language for data science blog.genesmindsmachines.c... · Posted by u/speckx

RobinL · 3 months ago

I think a lot of this comes down to the question: Why aren't tables first class citizens in programming languages?

If you step back, it's kind of weird that there's no mainstream programming language that has tables as first class citizens. Instead, we're stuck learning multiple APIs (polars, pandas) which are effectively programming languages for tables.

R is perhaps the closest, because it has data.frame as a 'first class citizen', but most people don't seem to use it, and use e.g. tibbles from dplyr instead.

The root cause seems to be that we still haven't figured out the best language to use to manipulate tabular data yet (i.e. the way of expressing this). It feels like there's been some convergence on some common ideas. Polars is kindof similar to dplyr. But no standard, except perhaps SQL.

FWIW, I agree that Python is not great, but I think it's also true R is not great. I don't agree with the specific comparisons in the piece.

m_mueller · 3 months ago

Fortran gives you that and more, it has first class multidimensional arrays, including matrix operations.

m_mueller commented on Claude Memory anthropic.com/news/memory... · Posted by u/doppp

cainxinth · 4 months ago

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time.

Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what I want, I adjust the prompt and try again.

m_mueller · 4 months ago

I do get a lot of value out of a project wide system prompt that gets automatically addded (Cursor has that built in). For a while I kept refining it when I saw it making incorrect assumptions about the codebase. I try to keep it brief though, about 20 bullet points.

m_mueller commented on Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

breakingcups · 5 months ago

My pet theory without any strong foundation is because OpenAI and Anthropic have trained their models really hard to fit the sycophantic mold of:

    ===============================
    Got it — *compliment on the info you've shared*, *informal summary of task*. *Another compliment*, but *downside of question*.
    ----------
    (relevant emoji) Bla bla bla
    1. Aspect 1
    2. Aspect 2
    ----------

    *Actual answer*

    -----------
    (checkmark emoji) *Reassuring you about its answer because:*

    * Summary point 1
    * Summary point 2
    * Summary point 3

    Would you like me to *verb* a ready-made *noun* that will *something that's helpful to you 40% of the time*?
    ===============================

It's gotta reduce the quality of the answers.

m_mueller · 5 months ago

Not the case with GPT-5 I’d say. Sonnet 4 feels a lot like this, but the coding and agency of it is still quite solid and overall IMO the best coder. Gemini2.5 to me is most helpful as a research assistant. It’s quite good together with google search based grounding.

m_mueller commented on Microsoft Favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code theverge.com/report/77864... · Posted by u/corvad

CharlieIsAHero · 5 months ago

What do you mean by usable context window? Sonnet 4 is 968k and gpt5 is 368k. Are you saying the context window on sonnet is useless?

m_mueller · 5 months ago

I never implied it's useless. I don't have scientific data to back this up either, this is just my personal "feeling" from a couple hundred hours I've spent working with these models this year: GPT-5 seems a bit better at top-down architectural work, while Sonnet is better at the detail coding level. In terms of usable context window, again from personal experience so far, to me GPT-5 has somewhat of an edge.

m_mueller commented on Microsoft Favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code theverge.com/report/77864... · Posted by u/corvad

kerpal · 5 months ago

Claude/Anthropic is more focused on productivity (Coding, Spreadsheets, Reports). ChatGPT seems more focused on general-purpose LLM (Research, Cooking, Writing, Image Generation).

Makes sense that MS would partner with Anthropic since their tool-use for productivity (Claude Code) seems superior. I personally rarely code with ChatGPT, almost strictly Claude.

m_mueller · 5 months ago

GPT-5 is pretty decent nowadays, but Claude 4 Sonnet is superior in most cases. GPT beats it in cost and usable context window when something quite complex comes up to plan top-down.

m_mueller commented on Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription autoexpress.co.uk/volkswa... · Posted by u/t0bia_s

slt2021 · 6 months ago

This is called transfer pricing. VW can make cars in the US, but barely make any profit, thus minimizing taxes paid to the US. The subscription payments however can flow freely to the Switzerland directly, where royalty payments are taxed at the lowest possible rate.

This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma...

m_mueller · 6 months ago

Why would it flow to Switzerland? I believe VW headquarters are still in Germany.