Very cool, expensive machines?

Is a LLM logic in weights derived from machine learning?

Well, yes. That's literally what it is.

What what is? The article has nothing to do with LLMs. It even explicitly says they don’t use LLMs.

> Is a LLM logic in weights derived from machine learning?

I was just answering this question. LLM logic in weights is fundamentally from machine learning, so yes. Wasn't really saying anything about the article.

Good one… but Is a DB query filter AI? I forgot to say though is sounds like a really cool thing to do

Strictly speaking, expert systems are AI as well, as in, an expert comes up with a bunch of if/else rules. So yes technically speaking even if they didn’t acquire the weights using ML and hand-coded them, it could still be called AI.

It is 100% valid to label an algorithm that plays tic-tac-toe as "AI"

Much of the early AI research was spent on developing various algorithms that could play board games.

Didn't even need computers, one early AI was MENACE [1], a set of 304 matchboxes which could learn how to play noughts and crosses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

Yup this is exactly my point, in the 80s there were plenty of “AI” companies and “fuzzy logic” was the buzzword of the day.

I built the Matchbox for Hexapawn, detailed in National Geographic Kids!

I didn't know what a Jujube was, but I got the idea.

That Hexapawn article was my first introduction to AI as a kid, though I never actually built it.

Found it in a "Reader's Digest Young Persons annual" which my dad got when he was a kid in the 60s. I still have that.

The original article from Scientific American: https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/idocs/GardnerHexapawn.pd...

You're probably talking about the same book I had then. I also remember it started off with a Mercury astronaut story, also had the story of Shackleton's Arctic voyage, and a two-page game board that was about trying to drive a car around China.

Not the same. The story about John Glenn's "day in space" was about half way through, nothing about Shackleton and the two-page board game was "race to the moon"

The board game was paired with an abridged version of Wernher von Braun's "First Men to the Moon", which 7-year-old me assumed was an accurate depiction of the moon landings (literally in the same book as an actual Mercury mission, and the Challenger Deep dive).

They were probably pulling from the same pool of articles.

I think this happened with airline pilots and they're experiencing a boom now

Have you heard of paying with PayPal/credit card?

while possibly too sneery for this site, paypal and a real credit card will have buyer protections. Debit cards, and basically anything else will not.

I love it. I love having agents write SQL. It's very efficient use of context and it doesn't try to reinvent informal retrieval part of following the context.

Did you find you needed to give agents the schema produced by this or they just query it themselves from postgres?

so most analyses already have a CLI function you can just call with parameters. for those that don't, in my case, the agent just looked at the --help of the commands and was able to perform the queries.

Sorry but the graphs are completely unreadable. There are four code names for each of the lines. Which is jit and which is cpython?

They are all JIT on different architectures, measured relative to CPython. https://doesjitgobrrr.com/about: blueberry is aarch64 Raspberry Pi, ripley is x86_64 Intel, jones is aarch64 M3 Pro, prometheus is x86_64 AMD.

Thanks

I remember a teardown where weights were taped inside. I think it was a beats headphone.

It was Beats. At first it was found in counterfeit Beats, but later the same was found in genuine Beats. And then guess who bought Beats for their exquisite metal weight technology? That's right, it was Apple.

The weights are an impedance match to your wallet

They bought them for the streaming service that came with it. Not for fake weights in headphones.

Streaming service?

> And then guess who bought Beats for their exquisite metal weight technology? That's right, it was Apple.

It's self-evidently extremely disingenuous to claim that Apple bought Beats for their "exquisite metal weight technology", so I thought I'd double check your claim that there are "metal weights" inside Beats headphones.

All of this appears to stem from two blog posts, written by the same VC.[^1] The first time they accidentally tore down counterfeit Beats, and when they managed to repeat the process, they "stuck by [their] claim" that:

> "…these metal parts are there to add a bit of weight and increase perceived quality with a nice look."

The BOM estimate they provide lists the following metal parts:

* Inner cast metal separator

* Springs

* Torx screw

* Self tapping screw

* Cast metal supports

* Stamped metal ear cup

None of these are extraneous weights not serving a purpose. The claim of the author might be better presented as:

"Beats headphones use heavier metal components instead of plastic ones, and I think it's because they add weight."

There are a lot of very good reasons to use materials that dampen unwanted interference like parasitic vibrations. Stiffer materials such as metal parts typically flex less, and have fewer (but usually more pronounced) resonances than plastic parts, which have intrinsic damping but might distort.

A good example of this is that the driver in your headphones is moving. Therefore the housing it is placed in must consider sprung/unsprung mass. Adding metal components increases the mechanical impedance.

So:

1. It is entirely possible that your claim about the weights is correct, and Beats chose to use metal components rather than plastic purely to add weight to the product.

2. There are a great many other possible explanations for using metal rather than plastic, and I don't think that you're likely to be party to them. For example: maybe they had the parts in-chain already and didn't want to have to tie up hardware engineering or supplier quality engineering for a new plastic part.

[1]: https://beneinstein.com/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-beats-w... (the one where they tear down real Beats)

Thanks for doing the legwork. Any “nehhh apple BAD they make products for IDIOTS!” comment should be treated with skepticism, as usual.

Idk im not sure why they bought Beats aside from marketing hype in the first place...

Beats is a $1B+ a year business. Investment-wise it was a no-brainer.

Cultural cachet of Beats - note how Apple kept the brand.

Jimmy Iovine & Dr Dre showed them how to tap into a new demographic.

It helped Apple get up and running with streaming faster, they needed to compete with Spotify.

The Beats brand was a great entrée to an entire market segment that Apple was trying to better access. I'd say it was a masterful acquisition (and integration).

I completely disagree.

Beats brand basically disappeared after that or at the least has become "uncool".

Apple had iTunes already, they very well could've acqui-hired and improved their service themselves.

Apple music slowly died and is only becoming resurgent now, many years later.

Beats (or I guess Apple under the Beats name) still make H1/2 based in-ears that are generally well received.

Yep! I own both a pair of AirPods and a pair of Beats. The Beats were designed for a lower price point, without noise cancellation, than the AirPods so I can’t offer a head-head comparison.

For Apple Music

Exactly. Look at something like the Sony XM5s that have a defective design that breaks in a light wind. There a class action against them for the crap they pulled and refusal to warranty. Not that I’m bitter at them or anything.

Nothing new here then. Back when I used to DJ some 20+ years ago, people would complain back then that Sony headphones would constantly break on them.

Meanwhile I had Sennheisers and they could take an absolute beating and still work fine. While also being plastic and cheap looking in comparison to other brands in the same price packet.

Yeah, I had a pair of MDR-V700 back in the day, and they broke in about 2-3 years max, without any abuse, just randomly.

I gave them to a friend who "quick-fixed" them with a screw at the pivot point, but they lost all their flexibility after that. He didn't mind because he was using them solely for drumming, but I couldn't use them anymore.

That being said, I have had some nasty experiences with Sennheiser's IEMs as well. Had to send 2 of them in warranty within a year, products that were in the 300-600 euro range back around 2010!

Oh is that why my wife’s cheapo crappy Beats earbuds have a special UI for pairing with my iphone…

All genuine Beats as far I know come with the H1 chips and pair just like AirPods - even my cheap $60 Beats Flex I use on planes since I don’t have to worry about them falling out - they just fall around my neck

Beats.

But my favourite hack was a Sennheiser model which had foam inserts to dampen the sound. 555 - foam = 595

If there's a model that's as good as Claude 4.5 (not even 4.6) I would pay tens of thousands to run it locally. To my knowledge there isn't yet. Benchmarks may say so but I haven't used one that does yet. I always try new models that come out on openrouter

If they can buy a house and leave it empty they can buy a car and leave it empty.