Viewing profile — mechagodzilla

"Household Debt Service Payments as a Percent of Disposable Personal Income": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

Relatively accurate (I think they're pretty close like 70%+ of the time). Significantly better than just projecting that the next five years will be like the last 5 years.

You haven't really been getting 'human written and thoughtful content' for a vast swath of search topics for probably 15-20 years now. You get SEO-hyper-optimized (probably LLM-gen…

It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison - I enjoy playing around with LLMs, running different models, etc, and I place a relatively high premium on privacy. The computer its…

I've been running the 'frontier' open-weight LLMs (mainly deepseek r1/v3) at home, and I find that they're best for asynchronous interactions. Give it a prompt and come back in 30-…

1-2 tokens/sec is perfectly fine for 'asynchronous' queries, and the open-weight models are pretty close to frontier-quality (maybe a few months behind?). I frequently use it for a…

You can keep scaling down! I spent $2k on an old dual-socket xeon workstation with 768GB of RAM - I can run Deepseek-R1 at ~1-2 tokens/sec.

Kodak didn't really have the option to compete. Their business was largely film, which just disappeared completely, and even digital cameras got replaced pretty quickly with phones…

Did you have to do anything special to get the SSD to play nice with OS9? I tried adding one to a 300MHz G3 iMac and it took forever to initialize on boot and would randomly stall …

If anyone can pay-as-you-go use a fully automated factory, and the factories are interchangeable, it seems like the value of capital is nearly zero in your envisioned future. Anyon…

Buy a used workstation with 512GB of DDR4 RAM. It will probably cost like $1-1.5k, and be able to run a Q4 version of the full deepseek 671B models. I have a similar setup with dua…

Yeah, it was just a giant HP workstation - I currently have 3 graphics cards in it (but only 40GB total of VRAM, so not very useful for deepseek models).

I use a dual-socket 18-core (so 36 total) xeon with 768GB of DDR4, and get about 1.5-2 tokens/sec with a 4-bit quantized version of the full deepseek models. It really is wild to b…

Interns and new grads have always been a net-negative productivity-wise in my experience, it's just that eventually (after a small number of months/years) they turn into extremely …

I have a $2k used dual-socket xeon with 768GB of DDR4 - It runs at about 1.5 tokens/sec for the 4-bit quantized version.

I've done all of those except tend livestock and build a house, but I could probably figure those out with some effort.

So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China…

Ha! When I was first learning to program in high school, I wrote a 'distributed monkeys-on-typewriters' simulator. I somehow acquired a stack of surplus Pentium 100s that I had run…

I think we can already get open-weight frontier class models today. I've run Deepseek R1 at home, and it's every bit as good as any of the ChatGPT models I can use at work.

That's been the 'endgame' of technology improvements since the industrial revolution - there are many industries that mechanized, replaced nearly their entire human workforce, and …

None of that means that the current companies will be profitable or that their valuations are anywhere close to justified though. The future could easily be "Open-weight models are…

After being a professional programmer for ~20 years, and recently playing around with leetcode - my main issue with leetcode is that there's almost no overlap between leetcode prob…

I married at 22 and moved to nyc. I lived through meeting peers that thought we were freaks (“you two are definitely gonna get divorced”), to the gradual normalization as we got ol…

But the open models create a (rapidly rising!) 'floor' - models that are worse/less capable than the best open-weight models effectively have zero economic value to their creators,…

And the Llama series, and they have half a dozen closed competitors with similar performance/capability. It really seems impossible to justify these evaluations from any kind of ec…