Dave.

Well, its $18 for a hot dog and a drink, and also the cost of labour and transport to get them to your door, and little bit for admin costs.

So if, say, the delivery person can do one every 20 minutes, that’s $54 of revenue an hour for the company, minus, say, $10 for the actual food/drink items, $20/hr to employ the person, plus 3 x trips at, say, 5 miles per trip at like, 25 cents/mile for fuel and maintenance, so $3.75 for that… so about a 80-100% markup on cost for basic labour and expenses, which is where businesses generally need to be on markup to keep afloat.

The other option is to go get one yourself I guess, but if you value your time the costs end up being approximately the same.

bzZzzzZzt!

Damn these electric trousers!

I work with embedded devices that use canbus. Last week it was happy to read the manufacturer’s published .DCF files for a couple of joystick panel interface boards. Not anymore, conversation flagged and halted any time I get near them.

Claude. You can download these files from the manufacturer’s website. They only describe how analog and digital inputs get converted into canbus packets. I am not trying to hack Adobe here. Nope.

Oh well, DeepSeek, Mistral, GLM, Beam et. al. are all happy to read these files and continue work on the project. Anthropic’s usefulness to me has ended, it was nice while it lasted.

But yeah for early game, it seems like a simple solution, and the answer is proper delegation instead of a free-for-all.

That’s the problem. Humans would each gravitate to what they do best and organise themselves into a structure relatively quickly.

LLMs get stuck in circular patterns because they don’t have the ability to do that. They can’t think outside the box. None of them arbitrarily becomes the boss to take charge. They’re all yes men stuck in endless board meetings where even just flipping a coin would break the deadlock. But they are incapable of realising that, because they are just statistical regurgitation machines flavoured with a bit of randomness on the most probable outputs.

People in this thread don’t realise it, but they are actively discussing the downfall of the USA as a world power in real time.

A very rough timeline:

Post WWII manufacturing surplus.

“We’re #1!” American exceptionalism delusion begins.

Cold war and baby boomers, the coke-fuelled '80s and all that stuff.

Shifting away from a manufacturing base to “tech”. Detroit ain’t what it used to be.

Tech boom, more manufacturing shifts overseas.

Tech bust, manufacturing doesn’t really come back.

Agriculture stalls and needs to be propped up.

TechBros emerge.

Government becomes a bit unpredictable towards outside parties (Trump Era 1).

Government stabilises for a few years (Biden) other countries breathe a sigh of relief.

TechBros gain more power/influence over government decisions.

Government becomes worryingly unpredictable to outside parties and trade partners (Trump Era 2).

“Uneccessary funding” is dropped and the USA loses a huge amount of soft power overseas.

Full on grifitng and blatant market manipulation by party leaders begins. Reasoned political debate is long gone, you’re with us or against us prevails.

Instability upsets government income streams. Government pisses off trade partners by tariffing everything and tries to get into a tariff war with China, who says “that’s just stupid” and doesn’t call their bluff.

Economy shifts further away from primary industries towards technology, but it’s technology manufactured overseas. This becomes a problem when overseas manufacturers refuse to “just eat the tariffs” for some reason, choosing instead to pass them on to buyers in the US.

Government fucks around with Iran and finds out, pissing off the nearly the entire rest of the world who gets oil from there, and spiking prices at home.

Government props up the remaining local tech and manufacturing industry to ensure sovereignty over military supply needs.

Government feels a bit of a pinch from Iran locally and goes looking for more money and resources and drops in on Venezuela for some of that sweet oil. Via a profit sharing deal with major oil companies, of course.

TechBros inflate the market in a frenzy of circular purchasing/funding on the back of technology easily duplicated by other parties worldwide.

(We are here)

TechBros bubble pops and kills the entire market because government forced the major funds to participate in TechBro delusions.

Local manufacturing is gone. Agriculture is running at a loss. Trade partners don’t trust the USA and are actively forming other alliances with other countries. The USA is a service economy with no cash to pay for those services. Political parties polarise even further.

Inflation spikes, job losses across the board as businesses from all sectors can’t afford to do anything.

??? - your guess is as good as mine, but it won’t be everyone skipping through a field of daisies.

LibreOffice can also read and write markdown. I discovered this after installing Ghostwriter and mucking around with it for a few weeks and then accidentally hitting LibreOffice Writer in the “open with…” menu.

haven’t gone through the trouble of registering copyrights with the government or with copyright policing services,"

This is country specific, of course. For example, in Australia the act of committing a work to media of any form is enough to register and assert copyright for that work.

So as an Australian resident I am quite within my rights to assert the following immediately, with the legal backing of the Commonwealth of Australia:

This post is copyright ©️ dgriffith. I grant the Fediverse and its users/instances permission to duplicate as necessary as part of the normal mechanisms of participation, all other rights are reserved.

Especially not with Finns. They like their forest, about 3/4 of the population goes and disappears into the forest during summer holidays.

And then, they are also quite strict on The Rules Being Followed To Maintain Polite Society, so a corporation both destroying forest and breaking The Rules, well, that’s not gonna end well.

One way, I set the numbers local, can’t be changed otherwise.

Its simple (as am I), why does it need to be on the “cloud”???

That’s fine when you have one fridge.

Then you need to look after four thousand of them.

Oh, it’ll be fine, we’ll just set things once while installing them.

Oh look! New food, or efficiency, or store standards have dropped, now you need to update those settings in those 4 thousand fridges spread across the whole country. Well, we can do a couple of stores a day, I guess it’ll only take a month of a service tech’s time and travel costs to do it.

Orrrrrrr… we could hook these fridges up to the Internet and do it remotely, and update the settings on those 4000 fridges before lunch.

That’s the draw, convenient mass update. The main issue here is that they put the fridges on an unsecured network, and then on device auth was laughable, allowing any bored teenager with time on their hands to tinker with things.

Just because we stumbled through a whole bunch of world-ending things in the past mostly unscathed doesn’t mean we’ll continue to do so.

It seems that after the initial AI-generated patches there’s been good discussion amongst the kernel devs about sorting out the issues, and a few revisions already that have tidied things up a bit.

So if after all that there ends up being a good performance improvement directly from a revised AI-created patch, what do I do with my pitchfork? Still raised angrily? Half-mast? Do I just let the torch smoulder?

Nice! Although I do wish everyone would get with IPV6 at some stage. But it seems everyone is OK with the current coping mechanisms in IPV4, so maybe I should pin my hopes on IPV7 or 8.

So why should they apply air gapping to their agents?

Because if they don’t, they could face jail time personally or their company is fined to death? That’s how you apply corrective pressure to those thinking about “going rogue”.

~$ groups crank0271 docker

~$ docker run -rm…

No joke, this is exactly what LLMs will do if they can’t do something directly.

Most ISPs charge insane fees for static IPs

The joy of living in the US I guess. My ISP in Australia charges $5 a month for a static IPV4 address.

There may have to be fundamental engineering breakthroughs before what these systems do can be more than a very expensive and inefficient worldwide proof of concept.

Controversial thought after reading this sentence: It’s cryptocoins all over again.

What are you expecting to break down? A modern internal combustion engine plus continuously variable transmission is one the world’s most complex pieces of engineering in common use today.

An electric drive system is trivial in comparison.

WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.

All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven’t materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.

And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.

Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate

Models on local hardware that give adequate performance and the availability of non-US models mean that path is doomed to failure. If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere. While they might not get frontier-level performance out of the alternatives, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s good enough for 1/4 to 1/10th of the cost. Or just the cost of power, if you’re willing to pay for some hardware and are operating on a small scale.

The only play the AI companies have got now is twofold :

• Regulatory capture, hence all the press releases of basic and frankly embarrassing sandbox failures and “we need to slow down” talk to try and get that rolling, and
• Banning of those nasty, evil, non-US models in the name of national security.

And then what? The rest of the world will just move on to the next most useful thing on the list. There will be ~330 million US citizens to extract wealth out of, to service trillions in data centre debt. That shit’s not gonna fly.

All they need to do is get governments high on AI mass surveillance and they’ll be golden

All they have to do is be the last AI company standing, then just absorb everyone else’s hardware for cents on the dollar.

This recent “we should slow down” talk is basically just them stalling until the collapse. They’ve spent all they dare to try and be the one on top, now it’s just waiting until the bubble pops.

Meanwhile China is out there being the black swan of the whole field. If they manage to get models with efficiency and/or utility above what these guys are doing, they’re fucked and they know it. So it’s a ticking time bomb, and there’s not that much time left.