I was also thinking about the prices and what problems they were being used for to motivate the investment.
It then occurred to me that loaded Mac Studios and DGX Stations have some comparability in CAPEX scale. Here are some other prices for example:
> The VT278 started at $6,795 [$23,700].”
> This was sold as the DECmate III+ for $5145 [$15,400] alongside the standard III.
> The VAXmate finally hit the market in September 1986 starting at $4045 [$12,100].
> For the back end DEC announced a turn-key MicroVAX II system with 5MB of RAM, Ethernet, 16 ports and a 30-seat ALL-IN-1 plus WPS wordprocessing starting at $81,160 [$243,000].
> PostmarketOS is amazing on supported arm chromebooks.
Any tips on best models that are abundantly available used on the cheap and work well?
> I have a few that I throw in a bag for beach/jungle holidays - they are literal e-waste, something liberating about carrying a laptop that's worth significantly less than a decent family meal.
I definitely do this with a few Thinkpad 11e I have laying around from a failed project 4 years ago.
However I’d really like to switch to e-waste as what you describe would be very liberating. An e-waste Linux device with encrypted disk that you just wifi tether to phone and works fine for use old school types. I wonder how cheap they can go? How easy to flash? etc
It’s a great example and I have recently been thinking a lot that AI assistance maybe enable rapid porting progress and bringing life to recycled devices for 3rd world situations.
Linux can be trimmed way down and with an efficient stack on top can make many devices extremely useable.
Here is a related comment on user software side I made recently.
I don’t remember exactly the specific examples off the top of my head (some are definitely ffmpeg commands) but I do know that when LLMs keep hallucinating command line flags that don’t exist for that specific command their “suggestion” is actually very reasonable and so many developers are adding support to their tools for common hallucinations.
Not to belabor my point, but I think "adding support to tools for common hallucinations" is a bad idea. Sounds like something a vibecoded project being spammed with issues by agents might do. Not so much a serious, mature project, though.
Well we will have to agree to disagree because my understanding of what has been generally the case is that the LLMs might vibe-coding spam, that’s true, but the interesting difference is generally speaking their “suggestions” are very reasonable and represent in hindsight useful changes that make the commands more useful for everyone, humans included.
If an option exists but it's got a poorly named flag, adding a flag alias is probably a good idea for usability in general. Most CLI tools probably don't report telemetry about failed executions, though, cuz that would be very creepy.
It’s also likely that agents would also be better if they didn’t deal with json vomit either. I’m optimistic that agent frameworks will eventually come full circle and realize concise teletype linear CLIs aka old school UNIX is actually very effective and efficient for agents as well as humans!
Does anyone have a good source that details these negative effects? I’m not doubting they exist, I mean gambling in general has many negative externalities, but I’m just interested in identifying the cancer aspects more specifically.
>but I’m just interested in identifying the cancer aspects more specifically.
the most obvious and maybe most concerning one is military related insider trading. Just two weeks ago a guy was sentenced for using classified information to gamble, which mind you is the literal point of the market but from the perspective of US military security is a disaster. In addition military bets apparently pay out significantly more than regular bets, suggesting more insider trading. The idea isn't too far fetched that someone could push to carry out or botch an operation to cash out on a betting market at which point we're in dystopian novel territory I guess.
You’ve reduce the memory requirements so much that it could all run on an early 90s computer easily. When I see such extreme examples I think back to the OLPC machines and this idea of how can extremely cheap but with useful software computers be available in very impoverished areas. I understand this has nothing to do with your argument or anything you’re writing about. It just made me think if LLM assisted software production might make the failed OLPC idea viable again. Could a minimalist but useful set of tools be created to run on old chromebooks for example.
Back when I was using Amiga, there was an ongoing competition to trim tools down to the point you'd see people shaving off bytes at a time in some cases. It largely stopped because of the time investment. Ironically, if we can fire off some hugely resource hungry LLMs and trim the bloat we might end up reducing the resource requirements for everything else again...
- SPAC IPOs that dodge standard disclosure requirements and worsen information asymmetry. See WeWork.
- Board positions filled with CEO loyalists instead of independent directors. See OpenAI firing Altman before Microsoft reinstated him.
- Management taking seemingly arbitrary decisions that turn out to be directly linked to their own compensation. SpaceX ordering a bunch of Teslas, or merging with a distressed asset (xAI). See above point on loyalist boards.
- The very concept of leveraged buyouts where financiers borrow money to buy a company, then put the burden on repayment on the company AND pay themselves hefty management fees. This inevitably leads to layoffs and a rapid decline in product/service quality while the company is scrapped for parts.
Slumlord owners of the network effect monopolies innovating ever lower investment in innovation and upkeep with ever higher increases in rent extraction, with a few nipple tassles slapped on the side to entice retail investor hype cycles.
> I’m convinced the only reason people don’t use Mercury is that they don’t know what they’re missing.
Very well could be true because I had no idea who or what they are.
Do they have strong low level automation support for the customer programmatically even for personal accounts? I use ledger for plaintext accounting for both personal and business and sync of data is slightly annoying, perhaps Mercury’s products solve that trivially?
I run a small business books using mercury and beancount. The API supports enough operations in the free tier to do so with ease, though mostly I’m just fetching transactions. I do pay the ~35USD / mo for the extended API to get invoicing, though that’s not something a personal user would need
Feel free to use it as it stores data on your browser's local storage only. For syncing between devices, you would be able to use Google firebase's free tier and export your accounts (after compressing and encrypting) there and import from another device. Let me know if you want to try it..
Or maybe there is? or a version where only those funding have access to the results.
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