The last thing my father said to me before he passed was to keep people looking forward to the future.
It's easy to romanticize the past and it can seem intellectually sophisticated to despair about the future, when in fact the overwhelming evidence is that things have gotten much much better for nearly everyone on just about any objective axis you can pick.
The fundamentals behind the tech might have gotten better but the implementations of it have also gotten worse in many significant ways for normal users.
We came up with the idea of having a place where nerds could come together to hang out and learn from each other and we decided to call the concept "Hacker Dojo". I had a sign laser engraved in 2002 at a state fair to memorialize the idea but we didn't actually get to open a Hacker Dojo until 2009.
There's a conference room in it called Kaminsky.
Dan was not a very good roommate but man, his brain worked in weird and wonderful ways, and it was inspiring how he could just rabbit-hole on stuff other people didn't find interesting until he MADE it interesting and found things nobody else had.
I wasn't sure how specific to be in my comment, but I'm glad the people who knew him know who it is. Speaks a lot of the man. I'm also 100% ready to believe he was not a good roommate by the condition of his car ;)
Interestingly enough, strong corporate governance and independent directors do not produce better returns. This is a central point in Eric Rees's book Incorruptible.
I'll need to read that, but if my anecdotal experience is any indication, there aren't that many "independent" boards of directors. Ultimately you do find some sort of connection between board members and the c-suite of many companies. In some cases (Meta) the CEO is the chairman. Marc Andreesen is also on Meta's board despite being an early investor and mentor to Zuckerberg. Seems like an explicit conflict of interest, no?
A friend of mine got phished and I did a teardown of the infrastructure components that were used to execute the attack, that executes a Browser-In-The-Middle attack with an encrypted websocket. I've already reached out to the involved infrastructure providers, but haven't yet heard back from all of them yet.
On licenses, what's your recommendation for best practice for an LLM co-authored project? Apache 2.0 or MIT seemed the best fit.
UPDATE: On the play button, I found your issue; I had tested on Chrome desktop and it worked fine, but I'm guessing you had Silent Mode enabled and I hadn't set the audio session to 'playback' from ambient. (You would have heard the sweep if you turned off Silent Mode.) I've now set playback mode and I have verified it now plays back just fine even in Silent Mode. You can verify it on cyrinx.org. Thank you for the bug report!
They did increase the base Ram for mac configurations in late 2024 from 8GB to 16GB.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
While these new Mac prices are probably here to stay, the upside is that once the AI market saturates and RAM prices fall, future Macs will likely get a significant memory boost at all price tiers.
A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.
Sure, quite often. They usually have a price target in mind, but their costs and margins mean they can't always hit it.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.
For human in the loop to be effective, the human needs to actually be performing some substantive action, giving real guidance and critique and pushback. If the human only ever accepts the default plans then not only is there no understanding but the agent should learn to stop asking. It is not learning anything from the human, after all.
One thing that I look at is pushback rate: what percentage of the agent's proposals are rejected or critiqued? If it's below 5% I have found I have gotten too credulous and I am no longer closely following. Danger! If it's above 50%, I have clearly not given the agents sufficient context to perform the task and need to update my harness and instructions.
Who watches the watchers? I can imagine a guard dog process that halts the session to yell at the human if it detects complacency: if the human is providing too few tokens per minute of new context relevant to the task.
That does seem to be the path Apple is following here. Have a local model that can answer most things and then have a fallback of cloud options when they request is too complex. The cleverness of this strategy has been overshadowed by the incredibly poor quality of their local models. It will be extremely interesting to see what next month holds and whether Google helped fine tune an Apple specific Gemini / Gemma model for their devices. Bonus points, of course, if they unveil the M5 Ultra Studio with half a terabyte of RAM to be a local "cloud model" (the true fantasy here of course would be Apple building something a little like openclaw where from your phone you could give commands to your Home Apple server). They could probably get away with charging $20k for it if it has sufficient tok/sec. If that happens and is successful one could imagine a straight line path in the next two generations to bringing the cost and form factor down to the point where some of the form factor of an Apple TV becomes everybody's home inference server / agentic HQ. Sovereign AI for everyone!
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