I use a massive OLED monitor as my workhorse and I’d say money and expectations are better spent on established OLED manufacturers and a large screen vs. a laptop screen. Based on the common job roles HN users have, a large OLED main monitor will probably offer more value than the laptop screen that will probably spend most of its time as a side monitor or just turned off while connected to large monitors. The HDMI 2.1 and other display output gains bring more benefits with pixel output and framerate increases. Just my two cents.
This is something even defense analysts have been hammering about tirelessly. The American pivot to counter China should not come at the cost of the Atlantic relationship. Using Cold war scare tactics against China will not work, because China is not in the sphere of European countries that were under the shadow of Russia. China’s language and culture are so far removed from the rest of the world that the risk of direct conflict would not be a matter outside of Taiwan, and cultural hegemony will not take place in the same way Russia tried and at times succeeded.
It feels doubly stupid that not only did American Business sell out their nations’ economic base to Chinese competitors decades back, they fumbled again and sold out to the guy who (yet again) damaged relations of countries funding the service, finance and defense sectors of the US. So now you lost the manufacturing base and you lost the other money-makers. No wonder they are going all-in on fossil fuels to Europe.
No other company is as clear an example of this double whammy as Tesla. Move manufacturing to China to lose the technological edge, and alienate end-users, to lose the customer base.
You are correct. My country does not have the similar separation of powers the US has. I do not understand why Americans have a hard time realizing this: the President and other elected officials work for YOU. They literally run for office to get the position, and they get voted in. Why would someone let an elected official enrich themselves and their friends with your money? Why would the legislative branch allow that?
A populace with a functioning representative democracy deserves its leaders.
There is no mechanism for citizens of the united states to recall a president or member of congress. They must wait 2, 4, and 6 years depending on who they'd like to replace. This contributes to the the current woes as as many members of congress and some presidents (like this one) would certainly undergo recall battles or be immediately recalled. Since we can't though, and elections in this country are a 12-16 month barrage of lies, propaganda and ads by the time voting does come around people just check which ever box matches their team, zero thought given and are thankful the whole mess is over with so they can mostly ignore politics until its time to start complaining again about how poorly they're represented. Repeat.
Another issue is that you actually need a lot of money to meaningfully run for most federal office roles, so that's one filter which promotes rich guys who don't care about doing the job well.
To put it another way, I have not participated in a federal election where I was excited about my options, ever. I have always been triage voting in federal elections ever since I was old enough to vote.
So yes, we do vote for our clowns, but only because we're not given any decent options to vote for.
Fortunately, the US giving a lot of power to states means that our more local elections are a lot more interesting to participate in and at least in my state, I have several decent options to vote in people who will make a real difference.
>”Why would someone let an elected official enrich themselves and their friends with your money? Why would the legislative branch allow that?”
Let is a heavily loaded term here. The most an individual can reasonably do is cast their single vote in an election year. I could attempt to bring a lawsuit against a politician, but it would almost certainly be thrown out due to a lack of standing. Activism is certainly an option, but that is really just an effort to convince others to cast their single vote differently. Outside of those options, one would have to break some laws.
About 30% of our electorate consists of so-called "deplorables" who are geographically distributed in a way that gives them outsized influence. The deplorables were happy to set aside their own best interests at the voting booth because Trump promised to hurt other people more.
Promises were made, and as far as the deplorables are concerned, promises were kept. They continue to approve of his actions wholeheartedly.
There is probably no way back for us, unfortunately. Please keep in mind than a healthy majority of American voters either voted against Trump or chose to sit out the election. We are largely powerless, though, due to system-level weaknesses that have been present since the nation's founding but couldn't effectively be exploited until recently.
>Why would someone let an elected official enrich themselves and their friends with your money? Why would the legislative branch allow that?
Republicans in Congress were elected expressly to allow Trump to do as he wishes.
>A populace with a functioning representative democracy deserves its leaders.
Yes. Despite Trump himself being a fascist, the government continues to operate as a representative democracy. Most Congresscritters have their thumbs up their asses waiting for things to get much worse, which mirrors the vast majority of voters.
Is it national apathy? Decadence? Addiction to the drama, anger and depravity of Trump TV?
This is the same guy that had his followers preach about how cars in tunnels for public transit is better than… trains in tunnels… Do not expect logical arguments when dealing with this guy and his followers.
Maybe they know more than we do. It may be possible to tamper with files at a deeper level. I wonder if it is also possible to use some sort of tampered compression algorithm that could mark images much like printers do with paper.
Another guess is that perhaps the step is a part of a multi-step sanitation process, and the last step(s) perform the bitmap operation.
I'm not sure about computer image generation but you can (relatively) easily fingerprint images generated by digital cameras due to sensor defects. I'll bet there is a similar problem with PC image generation where even without the EXIF data there is probably still too much side channel data leakage.
Did you take any steps to decrease the dimension size of images, if this increases the performance? I have not tried this as I have not peformed an OCR task like this with an LLM. I would be interested to know at what size the vlm cannot make out the details in text reliably.
The performance is OK, takes a couple of seconds at most on my GPU, just the amount of documents to get through that takes time, even with parallelism. The dimension seems fine as it is, as far as I can tell.
Any guesses why some of the newest files seem to have random ”=” characters in the text? My first thought was OCR, but it seemed to not be linked to characters like ”E” that could be mistakenly interpreted by an OCR tool. My second guess is just making it more difficult to produce reliable text searches, but probably 90% of HN readers could find a way to make a search tool that does not fall apart in case a ”=” character is found (although making this work for long search queries would make the search slower).
Helper scripts for APIs for applications and tools I know well. LLMs have made my work bearable. Many software providers expose great apis, but expert use cases require data output/input that relies on 50-500 line scripts. Thanks to the models post gpt4.5 most requirements are solvable in 15 minutes when they could have taken multiple workdays to write and check by hand. The only major gap is safe ad-hoc environments to run these in. I provide these helper functions for clients that would love to keep the runtime in the same data environment as the tool, but not all popular software support FaaS style environments that provide something like a simple python env.
As others have noted, the article is analysing the actual financial markets angle.
For my two cents on the technical side, it is likely that any Western-origin shakiness will come from Apple and how it manages to land the Gemini deal and Apple Intelligence v2. There is an astounding amount of edge inference sitting in people’s phones and laptops that only slightly got cracked open with Apple Intelligence.
Data centre buildouts will get corrected when the numbers come in from Apple: how large of a share in tokens used by the average consumer can be fulfilled with lightweight models and Google searches of the open internet. This will serve as a guiding principle for any future buildout and heavyweight inference cards that Nvidia is supplying. The 2-5 year moat top providers have with the largest models will get chomped at by the leisure/hobby/educational use cases that lightweight models capably handle. Small language and visual models are already amazing. The next crack will appear when the past gen cards (if they survive the around the clock operation) get bought up by second hand operators that can provide capable inference of even current gen models.
If past knowledge of DC operators holds (e.g. Google and its aging TPUs that still get use), the providers with the resources to buy new space for newer gens will accumulate the amount of hardware, but the providers who need to continuously shave off the financial hit that comes with using less efficient older cards.
I’m excited to see future blogs about hardware geeks buying used inference stacks and repurposing them for home use :)
>when the numbers come in from Apple: how large of a share in tokens used by the average consumer can be fulfilled with lightweight models and Google searches of the open internet
is there any reason to expect that this information will ever be known outside of apple?
Accuracy wise we won't know the exact numbers, but insiders and industry experts usually are able to find ballpark figures that they share with the press. The alternative is the usual find out the estimates through competitors' lost MAU numbers in apps like ChatGPT for iOS.
I have never before felt pressured about what I can or cannot protest about in Europe by China, but I can’t say the same about our most powerful ally, who has threatened every sector of our society – political or non-political – with consequences if we do not act and speak as they do. China absolutely does not care about our society the same way as that.
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