"Local businesses" are net money extractors. Local residents spend their money, a portion of which goes up the supply chain and out of the community.
Datacenters are net money injectors. Even if they provide relatively few jobs, or get tax breaks, they're still largely injecting capital that originates from outside the community.
As a US citizen, I can purchase ITAR-regulated nightvision, IR lasers, etc.
But that's not what's happening. Frontier models are NOT being put under ITAR. Instead, they are being placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list. So that even if you qualify under export restrictions as a citizen, if you don't have a $200B+ market cap, you're disqualified.
Many people are upset about the national security restrictions, but it's MUCH WORSE than that. If I have to verify ID/citizenship, well, that sucks, but it would at least be an option. That's not what's happening here. If you are an individual or small business, no matter how "patriotic" you might be, you're out of luck.
The EO is nearly a month old, and has precisely zero to do with the de facto current situation, seeing messaging from OpenAI and Anthropic on their non-public agreements with the administration.
> This is more likely to fall under EAR
Which, ok, maybe, but nobody is seeing movement on this. As of right now, and indeterminately in the future, EAR is still irrelevant. No private US citizen, right now, no matter how many flags are in their yard, no matter how many TRUMP stickers are on their car, can gain access to Fable 5 or GPT-5.6, unless you have political connections or an extremely large market capitalization.
> this is just what Anthropic is choosing to do.
Irrelevant. This is what OpenAI is also "choosing" to do with GPT-5.6 Sol, which suggests strongly that nobody is actually choosing anything. They are being told what to do, which is don't let the plebians, no matter how patriotic, access these models. GPT-5.5 is clearly the permanent legal limit for anyone not in the S&P 500.
n.b. I voted for Trump as a single-issue voter SPECIFICALLY because Harris threatened regulating ML models. This is a betrayal that WILL force loyal, patriotic US citizens into the arms of China. As soon as GLM-5.3 is released and exceeds GPT-5.5 capability, I'm not looking back.
NN-specific ASICs won't buy you much more FLOPs per watt than GPUs/TPUs will. These chips are already extremely good at NN computation. Sure, you could remove GP shader support and free up 5% of your die for a few more cores (which btw is what TPUs pretty much are), but that's about it.
Either way, you'll still be starving for data.
The best work in this area is memory-integrated Big-Ass-Die or Big-Ass-Chiplet solutions like Cerebras which park SRAM right next to your cores, not ASICs.
grok/claude/gpt: "Write a concise Bash script for setting up an automated daily PostgreSQL database backup using pg_dump and cron on a Linux server, with error handling via logging and 7-day retention by deleting older backups."
I know that by modern standards, 18% is better than average, but it's also still pretty fat for men. Men should strive for a 10-14% range. <10% is associated with hormone (specifically testosterone) deficiency, and >14% is both aesthetically disgusting, and bad for metabolic health.
Try losing more fat, to the 12% level, then check your biomarkers again.
> but you need to amortize in all the infrastructure and training and energy costs
The average American human consumes 232kWh of all-in energy (food, transport, hvac, construction, services, etc) daily.
If humans want to get into a competition over lower energy input per unit of cognitive output, I doubt you'd like the result.
> Better? Lol no
The "IQ equivalent" of the current SOTA models (Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT 5.2, Grok 4.1) is already a full 1SD above the human mean.
Nations and civilizations have perished or been conquered all throughout history because they underestimated and laughed off the relative strength of their rivals. By all means, keep doing this, but know the risks.
> putting a lot of blind faith in an algorithm that's proven time and time again to make things up
Don't be ridiculous. Our entire system of criminal justice relies HEAVILY on the eyewitness testimony of humans, which has been demonstrated time and again to be entirely unreliable. Innocents routinely rot in prison and criminals routinely go free because the human brain is much better at hallucinating than any SOTA LLM.
I can think of no more critical institution that ought to require fidelity of information than criminal justice, and yet we accept extreme levels of hallucination even there.
This argument is tired, played out, and laughable on its face. Human honesty and memory reliability are a disgrace, and if you wish to score points against LLMs, comparing their hallucination rates to those of humans is likely going to result in exactly the opposite conclusion that you intend others to draw.
> the human brain is much better at hallucinating than any SOTA LLM
Aren't the models trained on human content and human intervention? If humans are hallucinating that content, then LLMs even slightly hallucinating from fallible human content, wouldn't that make the LLMs hallucinations still, if even slightly, more than humans? Or am I missing something here where LLMs are somehow correcting the original human hallucinations and thus producing less hallucinated content?
100 years ago people like Rob Reiner's drug addict son's dealer would probably have been hanging from a tree.
note: this is not commentary on drug legalization, just commentary that "community efforts" were more involved in addressing negative social externalities than they are now - for better or for worse.
Not likely at all, most likely the drugs wouldn't have even been illegal, but an addict would certainly have been housed and institutionalized. More than half of mental patients were alcoholics and addicts.
That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.
So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.
I feel divided. I do love my career (computer science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.). But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company. I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them, and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride of my skills when working on open source and the like.
Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of us to escape the grind of working under ownership that doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create
Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.
FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already.
I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one.
(Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)
I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.
For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.
Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.
This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.
On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.
Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.
I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.
I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.
Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.
I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?
But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.
I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.
I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money
"Local businesses" are net money extractors. Local residents spend their money, a portion of which goes up the supply chain and out of the community.
Datacenters are net money injectors. Even if they provide relatively few jobs, or get tax breaks, they're still largely injecting capital that originates from outside the community.