As far as I am concerned, burn it all down and put the most unhinged cokehead VCs in charge, who cares at this point. Hell, add some crypto AI NFTs in the mix while we’re at it.

Literally cannot get worse than it is now.

You can not restore a data center from a pile of phones.

For what it’s worth, I have used any number of databases over the years and SQLite is very good for a number of things.

None of those things are the core infrastructure that stores your emails, money, and other must have, shared, high availability data.

There are different tools for different jobs, that’s fine.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgprewarm.html

The amount of hell that would be unleashed if the financial systems layers upon layers of database transactions got broken is impossible to comprehend.

So if you mean “important” as “necessary for society to function”, then no, your browser bookmark files, contact list, or the other two dozen things your laptop and phone use SQLite for are not important.

I need to tell if I change I made was impactful, but if the model just magically gets smarter or dumber at my tasks with no warning then I can’t tell if I made an improvement or a regression.

Whereas the model on my GPU doesn’t change unless I change it. So it’s one less variable and LLM are black box to start with.

I may be wrong for Gemini, but my impression is all the companies are constantly tweaking the big models. I know GPT on Monday is not always the same GPT on Thursday for example.

Knowing up front this is my fixed ML budget gives me peace of mind and gives me room to try stupid ideas without worrying about it.

Whereas doing it in the cloud you can a) get slammed with some crazy bill by accident, b) have to think more about what resources testing an idea will take, or conversely c) getting GPU FOMO and thinking “if just upgrade a level all my problems will be solved”.

It works for me, everybody mileage varies but personally I like to budget; spend; and then totally focus on my goals and not my cloud spend.

I’m also from the pre-cloud era, so doing stuff on my own bare metal is second nature.

FAA should just be rehoused under department of commerce where the job is actually to promote and protect American business interests.

At least then we can admit we have no regulatory oversight of aviation safety. Let’s be honest as a country for once.

I’ve gone through hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of tokens in the past year.

This article is just “cloud is expensive” 101. Nothing new.

The standard of the past 25 years of “let’s violate every privacy law and know it won’t catch up with us” is over.

You either ship privacy complaint product, which means painful and slow review and adjustment which is an obvious financial cost…OR you go to market out of compliance, get slammed by the press and regulators, and the entire project eats shit.

What seems like short-term cost saving is really just torching the entire investment.

The underlying reason Boeing planes fall out of the sky and these privacy hostile products fail is the same: speed and greed.

But where Boeing goes, bad things follow.