I tried a self-hosted GitLab on a 64 core beast of a machine with Optane drives. Completely empty of content, there were multi-second delays everywhere. Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade, I switched to Forgejo, Crow CI and YouTrack and couldn’t be happier.
While there are a lot of little knobs that can tweak performance, it shouldn't be slow out of the box, yet it is the number one complaint about GitLab.
If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.
With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly.
We saw a similar philosophy in TDD advocacy many years ago. Search for something like "Sudoku Jeffries" to see how that went. Then search for "Sudoku Norvig" to see what it looks like when you actually understand the problem.
The idea that you can somehow iterate your way to a solution when you have no idea where you're trying to go or even which direction your next step should be in has always seemed absurd to some of us but in the era of LLMs there's no longer any doubt. In the agentic era (can we call a few months an "era"?) I estimate that 90% or more of the writing I've read about how to use agents most effectively came down to making sure there is a clear specification for what they need to implement first and then imposing extensive guard rails to make sure their output does in fact follow that specification. It's all about doing enough design work up front to remove any ambiguity before coding the next part of the implementation and almost everyone claiming any sort of real world success with coding agents seems to have reached a similar conclusion.
This is very naive and reductive thinking. Experiments have a cost, you really have to think carefully about what you are trying to learn. Even when code is cheap, traffic and time are still huge constraints, and you better make sure your hypothesis actually makes sense for your goals, because AI is more than happy to fill in the blanks with a plausible but completely wrong proposal.
More broadly, it's well understood that experiments are not a replacement for design and UX. Google is famously great at the former and terrible at the latter. Sure the AI maxxers will say the machines are coming for all creative endeavours as well, but I'm going to need more evidence. So far, everything good I've seen come from AI still had a human at the wheel, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I think you and 7e are both right. Being able to iterate some N orders of magnitude quicker is a big deal. This doesn’t eliminate design and UX. Rather, it merges it with high iteration speed to produce a form of “play”.
“Play” is what produced at least two (likely more) generations of attentive (and therefore competent) programmers. The hype around LLMs is painful, yes, but attentive human minds will ultimately bust through it.
And before long you have a solution that is made up of a thousand pieces of spaghetti that neither you nor anyone else understands. And when your solution becomes too brittle to use, cannot be maintained, or fails catastrophically, then what? Just hope that's someone else's problem?
Refactoring is cheap too, but you have to read your code and know when to stop and ask the agent to refactor, rewrite, adopt or change libs, fix issues presented by linters and code quality scanners, change abstractions and rethink the architecture.
It's never been easier to replace chunks of code with sane software patterns, but you have to have a feel for those patterns. And also understand what's under the hood.
You folks speak like the only function of the agent is to spit code and features. Get a grip and treat your deliverables with care, otherwise you only have yourself to blame, not the AI.
You actually get what you ask for. And you can ask for anything, vaguely or not.
You'll end with spaghetti if you'll play a bad manager and only ever allocate time for new features and never for cleanups.
You can go through code, add REFACTOR comments based on your tastes and thoughts, and get your result and iterate to your heart's wishes. You just don't need to do the direct code typing.
> If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive.
No, because no amount of experimentation can solve many of the problems that have been solved by thinking. Even your claim about "experiments are cheap" requires thinking to decide what experiments to do. No one is generating all possible solutions that fit in X megabytes; you have to think to constrain the solution space.
In the Sahara there is plenty of space and plenty of solar. Any heat you can radiate away in space, you can radiate away on Earth. Or, more simply, dig into the ground and pump heat into the cool earth.
In theory it "should" be much easier to build on earth, but in some ways it's just different challenges. On earth you're forced to deal with those pesky government things and in the Sahara not a lot of them are exactly reliable or good-faith actors. Then there's night time. So out of the gate, you're dealing with needing massive power storage for the night time.
So you invest $5b into a solar farm and data center outside of Tunis and 5 years after you finish construction a popular uprising topples the government and now you're dealing with new management? Nah, nobody is going to do that. And who's going to work there? How are you going to get data out of there? You're going to end up using satellite comms anyway. It's not 1953 any more and (thankfully) nobody is in a position to "Operation Ajax" your popular uprising when that happens too. I mean, maybe, but yeah, I would not do it.
Even in relatively stable places like the US or the EU, let's say you bought some random parcel of land in the New Mexico or West Texas desert region. Or even in Southern Spain or something. Even if you get the land cheap, with relatively easy fiber access (doubtful, but whatever), you're still beholden to the communities there. You think they have spare water to cool your facility? How are the schools for the kids of the engineers working there? You think that people are going to be head-over heels in love with Amarillo or Extremadura? The land is cheap because people don't want to live in these places, so picky people are going to steer clear. And at the end of the day, you're still going to have to get everything permitted, approved, stamped 80 times, and the project will grind on for months.
No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there. You can park the satellites in a sun synchronous halo that lives about on the terminator, and just pull in power constantly and radiate directly away from the sun in the other direction. It's going to be expensive, it's going to be technically challenging but we will do it. Also, think about the California high-speed rail stuff. If you try to build on earth you're going to be permitted and social-media'd to death anywhere on earth you decide to build one of these. For better or worse people hate Elon. I mean, I understand it, he's kind of insufferable and his dalliance with politics was a bit of a disaster (seriously, USAID cuts are killing people), but he's certainly no moron and I do not think he's entirely un-selfaware. He knows that people aren't going to let him build these wherever he wants. You're going to have to ask for permission thousands of times, there's going to be social media campaigns to stop him, literally any screw up (his fault or not) is going to be loudly shouted to everyone. If he decides he wants to expand his facility, that's more permits, more restrictions, more permissions.
So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone. Initially that was red states or at least relatively "non-hostile" states like where Tennessee, but even there people will squawk about it. I don't mean to say "squawk" to dismiss those folks, well, maybe I do, but I just think it's a bit silly in the context of us burning gazillions of gallons to bomb the Iranians. Nobody is going to do a damn thing about the climate or anything right now, and stopping data centers from getting built feels like stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, but I digress.
Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical. The technicians and engineers can live in California, or work remotely from anywhere really, and you won't have to deal with increasingly well funded and clever NIMBYs. The real challenge is going to be finding optimal launch sites for this stuff. Hilariously, my neck of the woods up here in Alaska is uniquely suited to launch into inclinations that would allow for constant sunlight. It's what, 98 degrees inclination for an SSO? So you can launch launch north out of Poker Flat and south out of Cape Chiniak. Though we don't have the infrastructure up here to support that out of Poker Flat yet. And nobody will squawk too loudly about it up here. I think those lunatics trying to slingshot satellites into space are trying to launch out of Adak too, so, hypothetically, that's an option as well other than the logistics of getting vehicles up here.
Anyway, this has turned into a bit of a book report, but these companies are not optimizing for cost savings right now, they're optimizing to avoid people telling them no.
>> No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there.
>> So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone.
>> Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical.
This is pretty naive. What happens when one of the other sovereign nation destroys your space assets or holds them hostage. There is also no defense in space.
You think Grand Forks ND or Tempe Arizona is going to say, “we’re going to shoot down your datacenters?”
Of course not. The only people to stop you is like 6 nation states that have the capability to tell you no, you know? Maybe less? And most of them all need your launch capabilities?
Cmon. Who is going to tell them no? The US government? And jeopardize NRO satellite launch abilities or whatever? No, the Feds won’t stand in the way.
Destroying a satelite is much easier than launching one, even with existing systems. Worse, given rate of improvements, I think we're going to get ground-to-orbit anti-satelite lasers before 10% of this constellation gets launched.
And at least one of the nations with the existing military capacity to make a "no" stick is currently considering criminal charges against Musk personally, while another has a long history of assassination including of their own oligarchs.
Inequality of some level is perfectly acceptable in the societies being discussed. It’s a real problem, though, when it becomes a crisis of affordability for the median earner. It’s a problem when the ultra wealthy can leverage their fortunes not just for private power but also for control of the public sector. In the US right now we’re looking at both.
Citizens United and public capture in general are forming an aristocratic class in the United States.
This phenomenon isn’t confined to Italy. You see it across Europe, the US, and (reversed) in Australia. Charitably, you could chalk it up to sunnier regions being better for agriculture and not cities, but I think that heat simply causes the human brain to thermally throttle, which makes humans in hotter climates slower (and dumber). And less enterprising, and wealthy. And certainly humans need to be more resourceful to survive in areas with less food available. Is it a coincidence that the last uncontacted tribes are all in the equatorial belt? Coelacanths of the modern world!
More speculatively, Europeans in particular could have been subject to extreme selection pressure during ice ages. Glaciers made it all the way to central Italy, which would have definitely shaped the evolution of humans, both biologically and socially, in those areas.
Finally, humans are less fertile at higher ambient air temperatures, and the risk of death greater than in milder climates. A population boom spurs all kinds of cultural and evolutionary and epigenetic changes.
Some people in the wealthy countries of the world use a large portion of their income on rent, have to own a car to commute 1h+ to work because they have to live on the urban periphery—because of rent—and can spend their free time doomscrolling about how their lavish lifestyle of commuting and eating processed food is causing climate change. Making the uncontacted tribes look like anti-civilizational geniuses in contrast.
What about Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Roman Empire, India, Maya civilizations, Islamic Golden Age societies, Singapore etc? Northern regions have also historically been poor, isolated, and technologically stagnant. Seems pseudoscientific racial/climatic determinism to me.
yup, this applies worldwide with some exemptions (Singapore), the closer you are to equator less motivation you have to develop various ways to survive since the land provides you with everything, further you are from equator more hostile the enviroment, thus you need to develop to survive
Why is there such a rich history of now-wealthy countries colonizing the Global South? Could their enterprising nature not provide for themselves without stealing?
That low-effort Forbes article just talks about correlation. With some groundbreaking speculation thrown in.
> If I saw a six-month Swedish winter coming around the corner, I'd probably be pretty quick to get my act together and start laying in supplies
When I moved from California to a place with seasons I became way less slack with getting tasks done (because winter was coming) and had a personal shift relating to time, tasks, work versus enjoyment (I need to make work more productive because I need to enjoy my tiny amount of summer days, I can't just say 'I'll go do that later' because later will be the wrong weather). Notably this did not involve me changing race.
Or just take today. It feels amazing/invigorating, because the weather is finally nice, there are flowers and beauty all around (after months and months of cold and dark and grey). Life is experienced differently when you have dramatic seasons. I never really had that to such an extreme in Santa Cruz. But Santa Cruz allowed me to be way more chill and aware of myself instead of my environment (it's hot, I can do this later when it's not hot, I'm not dumb, I'll do this later versus 'this has to be done now no matter what turn off attention to what your body is telling you' be it chopping wood in 100f+ heat or shoveling snow in -20f). I think this is why the German/Swiss zombie stereotype is (you have to have less response to negative feelings, winter doesn't care) versus the loving/connected southern zone stereotypes (you aren't going to freeze if you don't get this done so you can care about other things). All with zero race in the mix.
California was attractive because it attracted talent. Most of the people that I grew up with were like me, way more chill than the average person irrespective of their race, in fact the slacker surfer stereotype has traditionally assumed a white guy.
I mean, after having spent some time in both LA and Sicily, I can see some merits on the idea /s.
Unfortunately no, outside of the clubbing and the winemaking scene there are way too many differences. Trying to sell a coffee in Palermo for $5 would be cause for public commotion, for a start.
We got a 3000m tall volcano in the middle of Sicily (currently full of snow unless it changed somehow since I last saw it this morning) and the Appennini in Umbria and Marche (800-2400m elevation) whose temperatures are roughly on par with those in most of northern Europe.
People living in those areas are not particularly smarter than those living on the coast, I'm afraid. Correlation is not causation, yadda yadda.
Tesla is trying to escape launching the semi TEN YEARS after announcing it. Instead, they are attempting to launch a mere nine years after announcing it.
The Pepsi trials with this truck were a disaster, we’ll see if they fixed the numerous problems.
Being a two-time Tesla owner for 8 years, at this point, there is no claim Tesla can possibly make that I would ever believe. Their (and Elon’s) track record on countless claims have been wildly misleading at best or completely false at worst.
Trucking seems like an industry where exaggerating the range will lead to contracts being cancelled and companies being sued. I'm assuming that a Tesla Semi can't just stop off at the nearest Supercharger.
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