mattlutze (u/mattlutze)

mattlutze commented on I want everything local – Building my offline AI workspace instavm.io/blog/building-... · Posted by u/mkagenius

andylizf · 16 days ago

Yeah, that's a fair point at first glance. 50GB might not sound like a huge burden for a modern SSD.

However, the 50GB figure was just a starting point for emails. A true "local Jarvis," would need to index everything: all your code repositories, documents, notes, and chat histories. That raw data can easily be hundreds of gigabytes.

For a 200GB text corpus, a traditional vector index can swell to >500GB. At that point, it's no longer a "meager" requirement. It becomes a heavy "tax" on your primary drive, which is often non-upgradable on modern laptops.

The goal for practical local AI shouldn't just be that it's possible, but that it's also lightweight and sustainable. That's the problem we focused on: making a comprehensive local knowledge base feasible without forcing users to dedicate half their SSD to a single index.

mattlutze · 14 days ago

The DGX Spark being just $3-4,000 with 4TB of storage, 128GB unified memory, etc (or the Mac Studio tbh) is a great indicator that Local AI can soon be cheap and, along with the emerging routing and expert mixing strategies, incredibly performant for daily needs.

mattlutze commented on We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/defo10

mattlutze · 23 days ago

Web 2.0/the Social Web vacuumed the novelty and Unique Selling Proposition out of our physical 3rd spaces, leading to their decline, and to the decline of related activities like the serendipitous chance of running into friends and meeting someone new.

The social web in a lot of ways led to our isolation and the amplification of the loneliness epidemic.

Now, these Web 2.0 / Social Web companies are the leaders in building the AI that may artificially treat the epidemic they created.

There's something quite cynically sad about that, and I would love it if we'd move away from these services and back into the "real world."

mattlutze commented on The HTML Hobbyist (2022) htmlhobbyist.com/... · Posted by u/janandonly

mattlutze · 25 days ago

I'm currently on hiatus from work and took it on myself to build some passion projects. It's been really fun to strictly build with HTML5, hand-jammed CSS and I've been learning HTMX for some dynamic content.

They are soooo simple, but still feel like web applications I've seen significant businesses built around. I hope to drive more projects this direction when I'm at work again.

mattlutze commented on How to Firefox kau.sh/blog/how-to-firefo... · Posted by u/Vinnl

lucumo · a month ago

> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because [...people build for Chrome...]

I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.

> I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.

I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions.

But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.

I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable.

For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution.

Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.

[1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it.

[2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving?

[3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.

mattlutze · a month ago

I can't remember the last time something truly annoying happened, but I just ran into it demo'ing a few of the newer vibey low-code app builders, which warned me to be using a Chromium build because of how they built their tool, e.g. Bolt

mattlutze commented on iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras candid9.com/phone-camera/... · Posted by u/sergiotapia

markhalonen · a month ago

Right but at the same time, Average Joe will take better photos with a digicam because they'll behave exactly like I did and make the same mistakes, so arguably it's very naive but also an accurate depiction of the average idiot who clicks a shutter

mattlutze · a month ago

You posted a camera comparison blog post to a nerd site, and there's plenty of camera nerds here. You might find that it's not the audience you were looking for, if you weren't intending to be objective or rigorous in your comparison.

But also, very fun to see the Copper Country featured on hacker news!

mattlutze commented on How to Firefox kau.sh/blog/how-to-firefo... · Posted by u/Vinnl

mattlutze · a month ago

I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.

I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.

The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.

mattlutze commented on The Italian towns selling houses for €1 theguardian.com/society/2... · Posted by u/lazydogbrownfox

riedel · a month ago

Why should immovable property differ from moveable property. How many things are sold for 1 EUR, just because everything else would be too difficult. Often those things have value that is only specific to the buyer and have negative value for the seller. The process for declaring something actually worthless and paying for waste removal is so much, but also gifting something to someone is often so much more difficult than selling for the lowest possible price that all stupid booking systems accept and that dictate what we may do.

mattlutze · a month ago

If geography is a factor in the value of an asset, being able to move that asset allows you the ability to effect change in the value of it. I.e., my car might sell for x in one city, but only 0.7x in another.

As an immovable asset's value cannot be changed in the same ways as a movable one's, perhaps there are different ways to tax it that are still fair, or encourage positive social effects.

mattlutze commented on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/sneakerblack

treis · 4 months ago

This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat.

Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.

mattlutze · 4 months ago

>Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.

That's what they're cutting.

mattlutze commented on Claude Integrations anthropic.com/news/integr... · Posted by u/bryanh

user_7832 · 4 months ago

I agree with your overall message - rapid growth appears to encourage competition and forces companies to put their best foot forward.

However, unfortunately, I cannot shower much praise on Claude 3.7. And if you (or anyone) asks why - 3.7 seems much better than 3.5, surely? - Then I’m moderately sure that you use Claude much more for coding than for any kind of conversation. In my opinion, even 3.5 Haiku (which is available for free during high loads) is better than 3.7 Sonnet.

Here’s a simple test. Try asking 3.7 to intuitively explain anything technical - say, mass dominated vs spring dominated oscillations. I’m a mechanical engineer who studied this stuff and I could not understand 3.7’s analogies.

I understand that coders are the largest single group of Claude’s users, but Claude went from being my most used app to being used only after both chatgpt and Gemini, something that I absolutely regret.

mattlutze · 4 months ago

The expectation that one model be top marks for all things is, imo, asking too much.

mattlutze commented on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/sneakerblack

steveBK123 · 4 months ago

I am not a fan of the orange man.

But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.

All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.

Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.

mattlutze · 4 months ago

Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.

Federally-funded academic science often looks like:

  1. The university + government fund/run a project
  2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!)
  3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge
  4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers great accessible licensing), so that
  5. Private industry can adapt, apply and commercialize the knowledge, driving new GDP growth and opportunities for improving life, etc.

Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.