I can run qwen3.6-27b on a four year-old Macbook Pro that dominates ChatGPT-4o (the frontier model from 2 years ago) and is competetitve against early ChatGPT-5 versions. We are also getting a lot smarter about using and deploying these local models. Your entire AI stack from two years ago would be absolutely crushed by a todays local LLM models and a high-end local inference system when combined with a good modern coding agent.
Today open weights frontier models cannot run locally, unless quantization is used. Deep seek v4 pro require almost 1 TB of RAM in INT4.
I hardly doubt there will be consumer grade HW to run it in 2 years either. And deep seek v4 pro is not even close to OAI or anthropic frontier models.
I had to convert a build pipeline from just one linux distro to multiple and then get arm64 going. Not the most difficult thing in the world but quite annoying when there's 100 binaries and a complex dep tree with lots of moving pieces. Anyway AI for sure increased project cadence by at least 2x. Not sure why there's so much denial in these threads.
I can also claim a bunch of things. If you manage to read the comment I was originally replying to, and my reply:
--- start quote ---
- Just what kind of evidence do you suppose they could have?
- Showing actual improved products and features. Showing actual code. etc.
--- end quote ---
Note how you provided neither. It's just claims.
> Anyway AI for sure increased project cadence by at least 2x.
As in: you claim this. Also, no one denies that you can ship a lot of code much faster with AI. However, somehow, very little actual evidence of grandiose claims (see farther up in the context) besides anecdotal "I'm so faster and features are being shipped left and right".
Oh, I certainly believe this. LLMs tend to be quite good at the: I'll give you a well-designed example, now extrapolate to other cases-cases.
I think it's a great example of using LLMs effectively. In the end becoming more productive is understanding where LLMs work great and where they fail miserably.
But it is a step similar to, say going from assembly to a higher-level programming language, not the silver bullet that AI astroturfers like you to believe (fire all the programmers to buy more tokens!)
I am amused that you think IT is going to respond to an unmanaged LLM tool that operates outside of the LLM policies all serious enterprises have set up by now and say 'wow, that is cool and maybe we should buy in to this!'
What is going to happen is that the emplyee who tries to sneak OpenAI into our org is going to have two meetings set up by the end of the day, one with IT to ensure the whatever tool they installed is burned out with fire and one with HR to ensure they know the company policy and acknowledge that another fuck-up like this is a firing offense.
Isn't that exactly how the iPhone won though? As another commenter said, once the cool gadget becomes a must have for executives, IT will be told to find a way to make it work.
Phone jammers are illegal because they are broadcasting into regulated spectrum. There is no such spectrum regulation around audio transmissions. I will not say one way or another if this device actually works as adertised, but particularly if the signal is outside the range normally audible to people there should be nothing illegal about this device.
Gelatine melts at a lower temperature and has a much better mouthfeel for most of these traditional recipes. It is creamy and adds body to a stock or sauce. Agar is brittle and requires a higher temperature to set. Agar would be a good choice for something where you want it to stay in a particular shape, but it is much more of a one-trick pony when it comes to cooking. Each can act as a poor man's version of the other, but neither really hits the same features as the other.
Agar is great for a gel, especially one you want to stand up to a bit of heat and remain stable at room temp, and I would always reach for it instead of gelatine when doing most desserts or pastry work. OTOH I would only use it in a sauce if I needed to accommodate a vegan guest.
> I would only use it in a sauce if I needed to accommodate a vegan guest.
As an alternative, I've found methylcellulose to be pretty good for thickening my vegan homemade sauces (mainly tried it because I use it for other stuff, like fakemeat homemade protein sources). That's for homemade mayo or the like; for sauces in stews and similar, flour does the job - though US cooks seem obsessed by cornstarch instead for that use case.
They are ‘obsessed’ with cornstarch instead of flour because cornstarch is almost pure starch and doesn’t add a flavor the way that flour does. It shares that property with methylcellulose.
Definitely a blast from the past. One of the things that made PipeNet very interesting compared to its contemporary peers (e.g. onion routing) was that it used fixed size pipes with constant traffic. An observer would be unable to know when traffic was being sent down the pipe so correlation attacks become significantly more difficult. Pair it with some probabilistic encryption like Blum-Blum-Shub and you can party like a late 90s cypherpunk.
That 'ugly' required indentation and whitespace also made Python easier to read, especially for newbies and casual coders. A standard visual structure and a syntax that is pretty close to executable pseudo-code lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of people and made Python feel 'approachable'. This perception that it was easy to use helped increase the network effects other have noted.
For simple yes/no questions ("Is over 18?", "Is US resident?") then you should look back to David Chaum's blind signatures and the work that came out of that back in the 90s. The math is super-simple to understand and there are a ton of even easier metaphors with envelopes and carbon paper that you can use to explain to your grandmother. Once you get someone to grok blind signatures it is easy to lead them to zero-knowledge proofs.
I loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I can get them into star mode.
I have a bunch (still not nearly as many as I'd like) and never got starmode working, and they finally dropped it from recent kernels so it'd be a whoooole lot of learning to try again.
But simple point-to-point dialup (using my XP box as a RAS/DUN server) served me well back in the day, even after the network went down, because I put my home node as high up as I could, and it would get me roughly a half-mile radius around the house. Loooong before 802.11ah! It was fast enough for VNC.
This dataset disappeared. Did it move or get pulled for some reason? (glanced at it when you noted this and went back today to check it out and found a 404...)
