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> cannot understand why any sane person would

because it's not the specific action. it's the reason behind the action.

> Stop pretending normal people care about this

Stop pretending you're a normal person and it's everyone else who is wrong


> factual things Grok model does wrong

It convinced u/highmastdon to go out and be an elon musk dick rider. It also convinced them that "hid[ing] behind morality" is somehow a bad thing, which shows everyone the quality of person they are.


> employment opportunities

the 5-7 people they employ during normal operation. High skilled engineers get flown in for setup and major changes/operations.

They add little local economic value.


They can be taxed. There should be a point where the price is right for the community hosting.


The vast majority of tax revenue is calculated where the headquarters are located, not where the datacenter is located.

I've seen multiple stories already talking about how these installations are almost universally net-negative for the locales they're built in.


If this is the case why would local officials permit them?


Why do members of congress end up with more wealth than their salary could justify?


So who is bribing Malaysian officials to give tax breaks to foreign DCs? Be specific.


Obviously nobody is incentivized to do that. Nothing to see here.


I would say a combination of already being rich, being old, and insider trading. Congress can't actually take personal funds from lobbyists legally.

Maybe if someone is in Congress, they can skirt the law around lobbyist gifts due to your position of power, but 1. it doesn't sound very plausible that someone becomes a multimillionaire by squirreling away illegal gifts or campaign funds and 2. to become I doubt small town city councils making these decisions are in a similar place. Most of reality is boring and not like the movies.


Why does Malaysia give tax breaks to data centers?


Definitely not because of long-term employment, even very large DCs only employ about a hundred staff on-site.


A hundred is a lot bigger than five


Still very few for deserving a tax break based on potential employment opportunities. A DC simply doesn't help the local economy, it's very often a net-negative: it's very resource-intensive while not generating much in terms of economical activity for where it sits at.

In a sense it's purely extractivist consuming land, water, and energy without benefits to the community.


They consume land? Where does the land go?


It's because they're optimizing for a different problem.

Western Models are optimizing to be used as an interchangeable product. Chinese models are being optimizing to be built upon.


>Western Models are optimizing to be used as an interchangeable product.

But so much investment in their platforms, not just their APIs?


> Western Models are optimizing to be used as an interchangeable product

Why? It sounds like the stupidest idea ever. Interchangeability = no lock-in = no moot.


First you clone the API of the winner, because you want to siphon users from its install-base and offer de-risked switch over cost.

Now that you’re winning, others start cloning your API to siphon your users.

Now that you’re losing, you start cloning the current winner, who is probably a clone of your clone.

Highly competitive markets tend to normalize, because lock-in is a cost you can’t charge and remain competitive. The customer holds power here, not the supplier.

Thats also why everyone is trying to build into the less competitive spaces, where they could potentially moat. Tooling, certs, specialized training data, etc


Our (western) economic model forces competing individual companies to be profitable quickly. China can ignore DeepSeek losing money, because they know developing DeepSeek will help China. Not every institution needs to be profitable.


You mean like intel, tesla, spacex, openai ?


Ah yes, the Western economic model forcing individual American companies like Amazon , Youtube and Uber to become profitable after.. checks notes _14 years_ for Uber, 9 years for Amazon, many years for Youtube.


yes, they want to win the same way they won more or less every other economic competition in the last 30 years, scale out, drop prices and asphyxiate the competition.


Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I think inertia and expectations at this point? I don’t think the big labs anticipated how low the model switching costs would be and how quickly their leads would be eroded (by each other and the upstarts)

They are developing their moats with the platform tooling around it right now though. Look at Anthropic with Routines and OpenAI with Agents. Drop that capability in to a business with loose controls and suddenly you have a very sticky product with high switching costs. Meanwhile if you stick with purely the ‘chat’ use cases, even Cowork and scheduled tasks, you maintain portability.


They are all racing to AGI. They aren't designing them to be interchangeable they just happen to be.


No, they are not. If they were "racing to AGI" they would be working together. OpenAI would still be focused on being a non-profit. Anthropic wouldn't be blocking distillation on their models.


If by AGI you mean IPO, sure. I genuinely don't believe Dario nor Sam should be trusted at this point. Elon levels of overpromising and underdelivering.


If by AGI you mean IPO - I automatically read that in Fireship's voice. XD


If you want other people to know whether you're being genuine or sarcastic, you'll have to put a bit more effort into your comments. Your comment just adds noise.


What da?


AI Data-centers and AI Hardware at cost or cost plus. OpenAI's deal with Oracle is more or less at cost...

OCI's infrastructure design is just good enough to work well enough most of the time, and you can't get cheaper.


Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Oracle Cloud IaaS. CPU & GPU Shapes. BM & VM.

Resume: Upon Request

Email: hn@lykron.mm.st

Seeking: Part time work or an offer I can't refuse.

Are you stuck using Oracle Cloud? Does working with their support team make you die inside? Do you need help on IPv6, OS Image Creation, Oracle Cloud Agent, vNIC management, OKE, or why things suck the way they do and how to work around them? Bump my line.

I've learned more about how to use Oracle Cloud than I would ever like to know and I've also found and gotten fix a few major platform defects.


killer way to market a product.

Here's a blog post with interesting information that just so happens to advertise how you can use our product


It's funny, because this is just a description of content marketing. But most companies forget step 1, which is to make the content interesting.


The amount of hidden engineering in Analog systems is mind blowing. Imagine how many hours were spent in a lab figuring out the exact right timings, chemical mixtures, and circuit design needed to make modern Cinema exist as we know it.


Yeah, I read stuff like this and think the engineers back in the 50's were some of the smartest. I certainly would not have been able to cut the muster back then.


Numerous examples in early digital era as well, see e.g. fast inverse square root, cga color hacks (also entire demoscene) and endless tricks in software that has been outrunning hardware for a while.

Later these were declared wrong, considered harmful, having bad smell, not passing code review and it all became a boring task of combining lego blocks. Sure these analog guys had insane tricks in their sleeves, but our “collective industry” would probably stigmatize them immediately if met today.


Different circumstances call for different trade-offs.


Exactly. Their era called for getting things done no matter how. Our era calls for iterability.


Phrase tidbit: it’s “pass muster” or “cut the mustard” that you could or couldn’t do.


Hey, don't spoil it. I was enjoying the image of him standing alone, pulling out a sword and charging at a battalion of soldiers arrayed on a parade ground.


Pass the mustard?


Certainly I think we should ignore the trope that we've left that analog crap behind up and realise that those are just some of the giants whose shoulders we stand upon.

Every generation has its challenges, but we can be greatful that the generation before us gave us new ones. It has not always been the case.


It's possible for analogue engineering to be incredibly challenging impressive and, to put it crassly, a bit crap.

I certainly don't miss the days of adjusting tint settings, headroom, over-scan and interlacing. Digital isn't without its issues of course, but even a lot of those trace their history back to analogue hacks - article case in point.

There is this side effect of digital lowering the bar though. Back in the analogue days, you needed to be a wizard to get anything done, which meant a lot of the people then seemed to care about the details more than they do now. Digital makes everything so easy that anyone can do it, which can go both ways.


The difference is that analog is EVERYWHERE.

Spinning rust drives store analog magnetics that get error corrected to digital. Same with electron potentials in ram. Same with SSDs. Signals over HDMI are converted to analog to display.

Sure, it's nice to deal with crisp neat digital signals... But to get there, you always need to deal with analog.


It's often in retrospect as well. It can take time for the impact of certain innovations to unfold, and it often begins with a small group of people. The breadth of human innovation is now so wide that a scientist/engineer from the 1950s simply doesn't have the same scope of problems and areas of study to work on.

That's why people like Leonardo da Vinci could exist, the scope of human understanding was much smaller and so their work was much more wide-reaching and foundational. Today, you can dedicate your life's work to some hyper-specific problem in a very specific field. Tomorrow, this work might seem fundamentally primitive or foundational in the way that previous generations are perceived.


Sometimes it makes me sad how "boring" digital transmission is. Just pack up your data and send it over IP. Life is too easy.


Only because you are sitting on top of a million prebuilt tools and products. Essentially the same as someone who just purchased the hardware and plugged a video feed in from the camera.


The digital data in many cases is still transformed into sine waves before being transmitted and received. There is a bunch of rf involved.


There are plenty of difficulties hiding in the OSI stack. MTU is a fun one.


OSI stack is dead, TCP/IP won.


Usually the protocol stack is PHY/MAC/IP/TCP/TLS/application which is 6 layers. It's the same as the OSI stack except for the lack of a session layer, which is somewhat split between TCP 3-way handshake and TLS authentication/authorization.


Tcp/ip is only 1 layer (transport) of the osi stack..


TCP and IP exist as part of the Internet stack. The OSI stack consisted of an alternate set of standards (like LAPB and X.400) which were not widely adopted.

Even if you map Internet protocols to the OSI model -- which is imprecise at best -- TCP represents the transport layer, and IP the network layer. They're not a single component.


You made me stop and question myself for a second, but this definitely isn't right. Usually when people talk about "TCP/IP" it's shorthand for the whole "Internet Protocol Suite", but even naively TCP and IP are two different layers.


Yep, the slash is meaningful. I think of writing "TCP/IP" that way as in a fraction -- "TCP over IP" or "TCP on IP". At least, that was how my brain learned it.


There are still a ton of complications for digital video. Compression, color spaces, transfer functions, etc.


10G-BaseT is pretty complicated though, getting 10Gbps over copper takes some pretty involved signal processing.

We’ve just moved it.


Except now we have to deal with codecs, DRM, color space, and not knowing if your cable meets the spec. Definitely not easy.


Don't worry, various encoding format, containers and other crap got you covered on complexity.

Hell, just look at ffmpeg commandline if you miss some complexity in your life


It's a shame that they can't transition it to a read-only archive type site, where everything is still accessible and playable- jut no new updates or content.


That's what kongregate did I believe. They disabled the forums, the chats, no new games, no new achievements and that's it. It's a strange sensation to enter kongregate which had such a thriving community and see everything so... static


What would it take to do something like this?


Literally nothing? Just leave it as is. There is a browser extension called Ruffle that lets you play older (AS2) Flash games, and eventually it will support newer (AS3) Flash games too.

Edit: most users won't have the Ruffle extension, so the one great thing they could do is add it to the site with a single <script> tag :)


False. Bandwidth and hosting and keeping site working is not nothing.


As long as they're breakeven keep it running? I guess that also takes employees and not many are interested in just maintaining a website


I never heard of the site until now, how hard would it be to convert it to static?


Flash games are static content (except for high scores). A Flash game is just a SWF file, typically a couple MB (or KB!).

If you'd like to experience the games that were available on Miniclip back in the day, your best bet is FlashPoint, a big offline archive of Flash games (ships with integrated FlashPlayer and a nice UI to search for games).

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/


Someone’s already been working on it.

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/


Man. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it was on linux.

Good luck! It looks like an amazing product.


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