Also I think many extroverts misunderstand introverts in this respect. My mom (introvert) and me (introvert) would often just read in the same room, and that was enough for us: I assure you, it felt very different than sitting with my butt against a complete stranger on the subway. My younger kids (introvert and ambivert) insist on digging their toes under my back while we sleep to make sure I haven't gone anywhere; they are not even conscious, but the proximity is important to them. This particular kid is an extrovert and has made about a dozen bids for my attention in the time between my previous comment and now (most of which have been reciprocated), but that is again the huge difference between sitting next to a family member and sitting next to a stranger on the subway. With family, that bond of trust is already there, and so you feel okay interrupting the silence to ask what your next move should be in Magic Sort, or why you can't download Township, or how do you turn the phone off silent mode, or showing me how he just beat his personal best score on 1 To 100, while you would never ask those of a stranger on the subway.

I could see a future where the government is replaced by the software system which has the fewest security flaws, simply because it is the last thing left standing as everybody hacks everybody else. We end up with a Matrix-like or Terminator-like future where humanity now lives in service of the machines.

You use an arena when you have computation that might consume a bunch of scratch memory, and then you want to free all of that memory at once when the computation is done. It's basically dynamically-scoped memory, very similar to stack-allocating a big structure and letting the stack pointer free it, but without the requirement that you know the size of all the memory you're allocating at compile time, or that allocations follow a strict LIFO ordering. They can be very fast for the same reason that stack allocation and copying GC is very fast: it's just bumping an allocation pointer. But unlike copying GC, deallocation is fast too, because you just free the whole arena at once.

free() being a no-op with arenas follows naturally from that, and is basically the whole point.

But ArrayLists also not playing nicely also follows naturally from it. An ArrayList (or Vector) has its own dynamic memory management; it transparently reallocates when you run out of space. This is useful for convenience, but if you're aiming for performance - which is basically the main reason to use an Arena - you want to be a little bit more careful about copies and allocations.

Typically, the common pattern for arena-based allocation is that you have one pass to plan out & compute where everything goes (where you're allocating just metadata, and metadata is storing pointers, sizes, and lengths of the actual data), and then you do one pass to allocate and write out the output data structure. That way everything is copied no more than once: you copy and compute your results and write them directly to the output data structure, then free the arena with all the scratch work all at once. Object serialization is the canonical example, and indeed common serialization libraries like Protobufs or Apache Arrow are big users of arenas. But if you're just accumulating things in an ArrayList and letting it automatically resize, you're doing it wrong.

Remember that in the mid-00s, this is what YouTube and the social web was. Folks doing little, productive economic activity, usually unpaid, which can now reach an audience through technology. And now the top career aspiration in young kids is "Be a social media influencer." That's how disruptive innovations start: with little transactions that aren't considered business at all, which then grow until they subsume the economy that everybody knows of.

Is it as good as a professional could've done with Photoshop? No. But it's about 90-95% of the way there, which is good enough that neither her nor any customers would care.

A great deal of business is precisely this, tasks that need to be done but where you only care about "good enough" solutions. After all, a key principle of business is you don't outsource your competitive advantages. You pay people for the table stakes, the things that everybody needs but that they only need to be "good enough". LLMs can generate "good enough" facsimiles of a wide variety of fields.

For a lot of tasks, classical deterministic computer programming is better than an LLM. It's just that LLMs are very good at classical deterministic computer programming now.

Entirely possible that none of the big incumbents ends up winning, economically.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/4/no-moat/

Closure was the homegrown framework that's everywhere. It is a different flavor of bad than Angular. Angular was basically "You too can make your Javascript look like HTML", Closure is "You too can make your Javascript look like Java", and nobody bothered to ask Why? For that matter, React was "You too can make your Javascript look like Ocaml." JQuery was the only framework that really let Javascript be Javascript (other than writing in vanilla JS, which post-ES2015 wasn't as insane as it sounds).

Products are only viable when you do a lot of work to solve a problem, which is then shared by many potential customers. It makes sense to amortize the high costs of solving the problem across all the different customers to reap economies of scale. Businesses then pay for product design, hosting, and maintenance because those costs can also be amortized, and they are cheaper than a bespoke solution for each customer. But if the bespoke solution becomes cheaper than that, because it's generated by an LLM that doesn't need to be paid a living wage, there's no reason to have the product in the first place. Just solve your damn problem and let other people solve theirs.

This is an underrated factor in the market structure of the AI bubble going on now. Anecdotally, we're not seeing new AI-based products other than the foundational models and coding assistants gain traction. Why? Because AI makes it so easy to customize the solution to your particular needs that everybody is just solving their particular needs directly. It's the opposite of the Internet boom, where the network greatly expanded the potential market, reduced the cost of reaching them, and made it economical to spend large amounts of money building a software product that had a TAM of billions. The AI boom instead enables extremely cheap customization, which shrinks the market to a single customer who uses AI to directly solve their problem rather than building a product that's generally applicable.

Open question whether this model is actually more economical than using the cloud AI service. The whole reason the industry moved to cloud computing in the first place was because computing had very high fixed costs, and the more these could be amortized over a fully-loaded query stream, the lower the unit costs.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156262

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You also can invert the relationship and run a NAS on a physical home server. My storage solution is a JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks") attached to a Proxmox virtualization host, where my home server runs as a VM inside Proxmox and then exposes selected directories via Samba to the home network. There's no second computer, I'm just running ~5 of them on one physical server. But by doing this, I get some isolation where if I've downloaded a questionable file, I can quarantine and inspect it (and roll back to a VM checkpoint if it compromises the machine) before I unleash it on the non-technical users of my home network.

When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.

When people are buying an asset speculatively, they often all enter the market at once, which drives up the price spectacularly. But then once they've all bought, what happens? That demand drops off; everyone who wants to own memory chip stocks already does. You're left with the value investors who already held and bought early, who see that their asset is now wildly overpriced and want to get rid of it. So the price then drops until that supply drops off and you reach a new equilibrium, often exacerbated by the speculators who see their position evaporate and want to get out.