TechTakes

There are also really people who think all crititcs also constantly use it. Which also baffles me.

Am I part of this category? I have a rather powerful home server that, among other things, I use to:

• Run a decent coding LLM that helps me vomit up simple python functions for moving around lots of data between CSVs and graphing stuff, set up new docker containers with less trial and error, and run ML experiments on my GPU that previously took me hours to set up. I'm a biologist and previously I could run a commandline without breaking a computer but was very slow and non-native, now I can do simple non-security-critical things faster and actually understand novel error messages. Of note I never have that hooked up in a way that lets it run things just produce text that I can then do things with and maybe run myself.

• Run my own local RAG system with embedding models and a small shitty LLM to search a hundred gigabytes of scientific papers and other PDFs semantically for things relevant to roughly paragraph length queries.

• Run my own web metasearch engine with RAG and embedding models pointed at the internet, such that when I remember a paper I read fifteen years ago and provide a three sentence description it reliably finds it or finds lots of relevant old research (or old news articles I remember) when I give it a query and let it churn for five minutes.

I feel like the important thing here is that I almost exclusively use them as information channels that take something at one end and spit it back out the other in a different or filtered form rather than making stuff, or effectively a piece of reference material for something that is formally verifiable and NOT CRITICAL FOR A SYSTEM TO FUNCTION. I also feel like all the actual innovations are more than a year old and do not understand people hanging excitedly on every little development.

That appears to assume that all the ridiculous datacenter numbers put out by all the various hyperscalers that are not actually going to happen, happen, and get power sources built on time.

Doing a little of my own math:

Article says the US will emit 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon by 2030.

Using a metric tons to gigatons conversion gives us 2.1 gigatons.

Using this as a reference, these projected AI emissions shouldn’t even come close to scratching the global average

Looks like instead they will commit their capacity to AI In Space and a little Starlink (so probably mostly Starlink, even if Elon currently drinks his own Cool-Aid).

Really drives it home for me how institutionally cucked the US gov is. For this to be as big a deal, no-one must have the slightest concern that the US will claw back or conscript SpaceX capacity for national security. And correctly so.

Artemis III is going to be so embarrassing, isn't it. Next summer they're supposed to link up with a lunar lander-configuration Starship (and also Bezos' company's slightly more reasonable lander design) in orbit as a proof-of-concept.

saw that earlier as well, and I had a real good laugh about the myriad ways that will go wrong. both the obvious (derping proprietary extensions, etc), and the less so (crashing a control plane because the chatbot doesn’t understand 256MiB ram)

the sheer utter range of the crisco product range as it is…. phenomenal display of how removed from knowledge the execs are

He was on Weird Little Guys last week too. Seems like a good egg with a good book.

A big marker also works, think that is how people tag things going by the smell I one noticed when some 30 year old guy tagged a table in the train I was in. (It was an odd moment).

from futurism