Viewing profile — geophile

I loved their ads. Every month, when I got my BYTE magazine in the mail, the first thing I would do was to find the Gateway 2000 ad, admire the cheezy graphics and copy, and then d…

> "They are forbidden from creating original works to express themselves. However, they are still permitted to comment on writing, interpret it, share their taste. They are still v…

You're looking in the wrong place. There is a moderately large industry around water bottles .

Well that's one way to describe it. If Nvidia gives away powerful models to sell more of its hardware is that industrial dumping too?

This is irrelevant to the current discussion. Windows was designed to make money for MS and billg. Linux was not designed to make money for Linux. Also, by what logic do you consid…

Choose your favorite metric: mindshare, running instances, development target. Free and low-end beat expensive proprietary. "Least popular" is an odd claim. If you count Windows de…

There is constant shifting between client and server computation. I think it is a stretch to call cloud servers “mainframes”. There are still old school mainframes, running JCL, an…

It didn’t used to be.

Nvidia will pay for training models that they can give away to consumers who will then buy their GPUs.

Cheap PCs enabled the creation of Linux. Linux runs on the descendants of PCs, not mainframes.

I don’t agree. In the mainframe/PC battle, MS and Apple were basically on the same side. Once the dinosaurs went extinct, different mammals fought for dominance.

Not sure what your point is. I’m commenting on a moment in time which is like an earlier moment in time. A different moment in time will have different analogs.

This is exactly the mainframe vs PC dynamic.

No, I don’t think so. PC + MS Office killed Wang custom hardware/software, for example. LibreOffice is much later, and can’t displace MS Office due to network effects. Cheaper won,…

Yes, as I pointed out, mainframes are still a thing. But the vast bulk of the market has moved on.

But aren’t the frontier models heavily subsidized? That’s not sustainable.

Exactly. Even putting aside “better”, brains show that orders of magnitude greater efficiency are possible, for training and operation.

But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a …

No it was Java. Sorry, it was late 90s.

I used to love ORMs so much that I built one for Java, in the early 90s, and it was one of the main offerings of a startup that I joined. I have come around 180 degrees. My rethink…

That's exactly what I'm doing -- Mini M4 Pro 64GB, qwen3.6. My hearing is not great, but I think I would have noticed the fan, and I have never heard it. In fact, I had to google t…

Bad managers, in general, grab a metric and then unthinkingly optimize it. I’ve never worked for FAANG, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have bad managers too.

My experience is almost identical. I have found that I need to be very careful with planning, breaking things down into small isolated steps (I can have qwen do this); and also (me…

Oh spare me the cult of Larry Wall. His language was crap, and his pontification was unbearable. That said, he's not wrong about laziness. I'd state it less cutely: Good software t…