Along with already mentioned "Buy, Borrow, Die" strategy is the more widely practiced "Expense everything" strategy which often ends in tax disaster for the practitioner.
He expensed lavish Gatsby style parties and everything.
I remember reading a biography of his that one way in 1920s he accomplished was by having bought some big mostly useless plot of land and technically his lavish parties were sales presentations to sell this land. Occasionally some of his acquintances would actually buy a parcel of mostly useless land in middle of nowhere thus the business use was actually maintained. Again, highly unlikely to fly today with IRS and even then there were tax lawsuits.
The issue is that it is impossibly hard to pull off without going into tax fraud territory.
Another interesting case of "Expense everything" were ABBAs stage dresses and suits. They were purposely flashily impractical to avoid falling afoul of Swedish tax laws.
That said tax authorities in most countries do allow some leeway for the small fish. Basically pragmatic tax authorities give you certain limits for certain expenses that you can expense.
So in my European country you can expense a certain amount of gas, travel, clothing, eating out, etc as a self-employed. Yes you should have receipts, but if you stay within limits, it is up to you how honest you want to be about that "business" lunch.
I remember it being it common in US too, someone takes you to lunch and you are supposed to mention their business and talk a few minutes about their business, then in their eyes it was a business expense.
However, the moment you start going over these limits you will face increased scrutiny and you are in for a bad time for claiming as business expense lunch with your friends at Dorsia.
The latest clickbait style can be mitigated by custom instructions.
I use:
"Tell it like it is; don't sugar-coat responses. Use academic university level explanations unless instructed otherwise.
Do not end with teaser offers or curiosity hooks. Give the full answer immediately. If related topics exist, show them as a brief bullet list. Use professional language and style."
Now I actually often like the related topics hooks, just not the clickbaity version from last few weeks.
If not for Codex performing so well for me from VS Code I'd happily migrate to Claude or Gemini.
Hey. That's curiously similar to my instructions. Weird!
"Tell it like it is; don't sugar-coat responses. No em-dashes. Academic tone. Please do not go into detail unless asked to. Provide links for more information at the end. I am a software developer that uses Linux and GrapheneOS. I read Wikipedia, studies, and white papers to make decisions. I appreciate cited figures and facts from trusted sources."
Also brings back the irony now apparent in original Google paper: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf "To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people’s attention by taking measures meant to
mislead automated search engines."
Basically you have Cremant type sparking wines which are produced from other regions of France besides Champagne. It is just like Champagne just that other French regions like Loire, Alsace, Bordeux etc are not allowed to call it Champagne.
So just like Armanac's are like Cognac's for lower price, good Cremant will be cheaper and more enjoyable that cheaper Champagne (I've not had any really expensive Champagne).
Then you have Cava from Spain which is similar process to Cremants and Champagne.
The difference would be in type of grapes used. A friend of mine swears by Cavas just like I swear by Cremants from Loire region. However my wife hates Cava.
Then Proseccos from Italy again are similar, but quality varies more.
After that we get into more questionable cheaper sparkling wines which usually means some sort of out of bottle insertion of CO2 and even worse version include some other modifications such as sugar.
In general to avoid literal headaches you want BRUTs. Anything semi-sweet or sweet is suspicous.
Again I am not a full wine expert but this is mostly years of ahem experience.
After, RAM, SSD, GPUs, now HDDs what else is there left to sell out? Power supplies, fans?
In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs.
As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much.
So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and additional demand from the new AI centers.
I feel like the AI centers are just buying HDDs because why not throw a HDD in each server blade even if there is no need? The money is there to be spent and it must be spent.
As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.
I will end with an imperfect analogy with multiplayer gaming. It is quite common in multiplayer games for higher level players to wish to acquire some tradeskill they neglected to acquire earlier. maybe a new quest appears, or new "must have" item that requires such skill.
They (past me included) have too much game money and no wish to acquire tradeskill items slowly. So the "rich" will overpay by 2x or 10x or even 100x the usual price.
That is free market at work right?
In the process whole low level economy is destroyed due to 2nd order effects.
Meaning a new player starting out can only be a farmer.
So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?
> As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.
We have a long way to go before the average PC costs even half as much as it did in 1989 (adjusted for inflation). And of course the performance for typical consumer use is orders of magnitude better than it was back then.
My parents love to tell me how in either late 1997 or early 1998 they bought the first PC for our family, a Compaq with a Pentium 3, 12 GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and no graphics acceleration at all beyond whatever was integrated on the Pentium 3. It cost $2000 back then so probably almost $4000 today. My high end 4090 rig cost a bit more than that to build for comparison and that machine is better than 98% of machines out there today.
>So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?
Buy used stuff? 99.9% of consumers have no need for anywhere near the cutting edge tech. I do far more than most people and get by just fine with a workstation I bought used in 2014. My newest Laptop is ~2018 and that was only because I wanted something with 4K that I could flip to tablet.
Raspberry PI's, SOCS, Microcontrollers, there's a million things today that are awesome. Are hobbyist students needing to build datacenters!?
Most of the computers I buy are refurbished or used models, I've never had a bad experience. Especially now, when computers are not getting much better whereas prices are increasing faster than performance.
This is very cool and having stalemate is nice, however how much space would it take to implement the full ruleset?
As you write: not implemented: castling, en passant, promotion, repetition, 50-move rule - those are all required to call the game being played modern chess.
I could see an argument for skipping repetition and 50-move rule for tiny engines, but you do need castling, en pessant and promotion for pretty much any serious play.
Interesting information but these are not hard numbers.
Surely the 100-char string information of 141 bytes is not correct as it would only apply to ASCII 100-char strings.
It would be more useful to know the overhead for unicode strings presumably utf-8 encoded. And again I would presume 100-Emoji string would take 441 bytes (just a hypothesis) and 100-umlaut chars string would take 241bytes.
"Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco
, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner."
POP QUIZ - Which minority partner is the key here?
What is current state of the art workflow when working with legacy code across multiple languages?
This would be a 100 kLOC legacy project written in C++, Python, and jQuery era Javascript circa 2010. Original devs have long left. I would rather avoid C++ as much as possible.
I've been Github Copilot (in VS Code) user since June of 2021 and still use it heavily, but the "more powerful intellisence" approach is limiting me on legacy projects.
Presumably I need to provide more context on larger projects.
I can get pretty far with just ChatGPT plus and feeding bits and pieces of project. However that seems like using the wrong tool.
Codex seems better for building things but not sure about grokking existing things.
Would Cursor be more suitable for just dumping the whole project (all languages) basically 4 different sub projects and then selectively activating what to include in queries?
I dont understand, the agent mode of copilot will search for and be pretty good and filling its own context afaik. I never really feed any of our 100k+ lines legacy codebase explicitly to the LLM.
One of the early adopters was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._C._Forbes the founder of Forbes.
He expensed lavish Gatsby style parties and everything.
I remember reading a biography of his that one way in 1920s he accomplished was by having bought some big mostly useless plot of land and technically his lavish parties were sales presentations to sell this land. Occasionally some of his acquintances would actually buy a parcel of mostly useless land in middle of nowhere thus the business use was actually maintained. Again, highly unlikely to fly today with IRS and even then there were tax lawsuits.
The issue is that it is impossibly hard to pull off without going into tax fraud territory.
Another interesting case of "Expense everything" were ABBAs stage dresses and suits. They were purposely flashily impractical to avoid falling afoul of Swedish tax laws.
That said tax authorities in most countries do allow some leeway for the small fish. Basically pragmatic tax authorities give you certain limits for certain expenses that you can expense.
So in my European country you can expense a certain amount of gas, travel, clothing, eating out, etc as a self-employed. Yes you should have receipts, but if you stay within limits, it is up to you how honest you want to be about that "business" lunch.
I remember it being it common in US too, someone takes you to lunch and you are supposed to mention their business and talk a few minutes about their business, then in their eyes it was a business expense.
However, the moment you start going over these limits you will face increased scrutiny and you are in for a bad time for claiming as business expense lunch with your friends at Dorsia.
reply