there were a lot of laundry fires of late

and?

yup

Completely agree, and the fact that this is the narrative that’s being peddled means that most people have no idea what’s really coming.

Yeah, very much agree with all that. The decision making is very erratic. Although, I do think that attack on Iran was largely about cutting Asia and Europe off from the energy in the Gulf. While Venezuela and Greenland could be long term grabs where they don’t necessarily expect an immediate benefit. The big question is whether the US economy can handle the immediate shock.

I don’t really see how that helps the current crunch though. Any new oil development is going to take years to ramp up. By then the crisis will have already happened, and likely countries will have started mass switching to renewables from China.

For sure, it’s pretty magical, and I feel like this year has been a real breakthrough for local models where they really can do non-trivial work. I’m really excited to see what things look like by next year.

I find it absolutely incredible that just within a few years we went from need a data centre to running this stuff on a laptop. And there are still a whole bunch of papers that have come out in just past few months that haven’t even been adopted yet. Like the whole MTP thing itself is completely new, and we see some new breakthrough like it happening every few months.

I really think the whole AI as a service business model is dead in the water at this point. I’m sure there’s going to be some market for it, but running models locally is just a superior experience in most cases. You get to keep your data on your machine, you don’t have to worry about the provider changing things from under you, or your costs changing. Once it works, it’s predictable and you own it.

can’t blame you

It’s really frustrating to watch how people keep talking about how you just have to vote harder, when we can see a concrete example of how workers actually take power in Bolivia.

Yup, and that’s probably going to happen in the coming months, after that there’s no way to stabilize the prices.

O7

Exactly, it’s a self reinforcing process with more countries fleeing the currency as confidence collapses. And having a global reserve underpins the US fiscal policy, if the demand for the dollar drops dramatically then it’s almost certainly will lead to a domestic economic crash.

I think some are used to suppress price domestically as well.

Yeah, as I recall it was just codex repackaged, but there is also the aspect of the tooling itself that the model interacts with which they massively fumbled. People will still use codex on its own, but nobody wants to ever use copilot.

I find it’s the first model I can run locally that actually feels genuinely useful for coding. I’m really excited about what things might look like in another year. We might really get current frontier model performance on a laptop at this rate.

kinda of hilarious that MS has a stake in both of the worst commercial LLM offerings

The thing is that even if the war ended tomorrow, it’s going to be years before production ramps back up to prewar levels. So, the damage is already done. The only question now is how bad it gets.

Oh yeah, that’s definitely the best approach if you don’t already have the hardware since DeepSeek is just absurdly cheap to use. Eventually, hardware prices are going to come down, and local models are going to keep getting more efficient too. So, dumping a few grand on a rig right now doesn’t really make much sense.