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  Just use secret keys You mean symmetric keys? They’re great, but they aren’t terribly practical in MANY application scenarios.

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  In the early 90s I coded up a fairly massive data analysis suite entirely in C. Around 1997 I translated it to C++ - the resulting data analysis ran at 1/2 the speed of the C code, but was 300% faster to modify, expand and maintain. And processor speeds were doubling every 9 months anyway.

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  Strangely, I haven’t read a single headline about AI making breakthroughs in Quantum computing… but you know certain players are working in that direction. Back in the 80s they were teaching that cryptography protected secrets “for a time” and how long they need to be protected dictated how hard you go at the key length and other costs of en/decryption. By the 00s we could easily and quickly run key lengths so hard (for conventional computation) to crack that they were essentially protected “...

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  How long do you think it would take for “special industrial licenses” to be required to get “Linux accessible” CPUs?

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  In the 80s it was “market rate.” In engineering my TA position paid $14k a year + free tuition. The money was a little less than half of what I could earn in industry at the time, but free tuition (and an actual job offer instead of an open-ended job hunt) made it attractive enough to keep me around for a Master’s degree. They offered me a PhD, with a raise to $18k/yr for the TA-ship, again right at 1/2 of what my MS was worth on the open market - I had had enough of academia, no thanks. Onl...

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  Echo chambers work best in isolation…

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  > maybe it’s just 3d printing 2.0 3D printing was awesome. Once or twice a year, it could make something for me that was genuinely useful. It also occupied a big chunk of space in the house and mostly created mostly useless plastic junk creating more clutter - we started 3D printing in 2018 and gave the printer away to someone with a bigger house in 2020. Once since then I have asked him to print something for me. It's _that_ useful. AI agents are making software. I've got Ter...

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  I'm a C++ programmer most of the time, but I also write scripts. Claude and even Gemini write better bash scripts than I do - better error handling, better commenting, better input sanitizing, better use of parameters - because, all that bash syntax is an annoying pile of illogical junk that I have to look up every time I go to use it, and what are AI agents really fast at doing? Looking stuff up.

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  The outages have been so brief, and the speed margin is so great now, that waiting for the outages is a trivial delay as compared to "doing it the old fashioned way."

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  I've been hitting a few errors processing requests, usually just repeating the request a few seconds later will get a normal response.

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  Sometimes work requires images. Claude is pretty awesome at making .svg files illustrating - pretty much whatever you can describe.

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  The 79th/Biscayne street corner worker in Miami (in the winters of the 1990s) would head up to Chicago when it got too hot. He looked a mess, but in later years he had a Jack Russel terrier with him that looked like it never missed a meal or a grooming appointment. There were many of these "Snowbird street people" who would show up every fall - and some of them also did petty crime like stealing from cars, etc. It was too obvious: every year at the same time they show up, the break...

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  > the way there someone asks for money because they want money. Can you spare a dollar? I need a beer. In reality, the people on the streets often "need" the money much more than the others, but then there's a whole class of street beggars pretending to look needy (not as big a class as movies might have you believe), but worse than them are the people who make careers of street begging - sure, they are hard up, need the money most of the time, but they live that way intenti...

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  It's overhyped in many areas, but it is undeniably improving. The real question is: will it "snowball" by improving itself in a positive feedback loop? If it does, how much snow covered slope is in front of it for it to roll down?

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  To an extent, COVID hit some of the oldest boomers - it was a little early, if we had held of COVID for another 10 years it definitely would have been a prime boomer expiration accelerator. As things are, my parents are some of the earliest boomers and they're just turning 80. The death-rate boom should be picking up speed soon. Too bad they're giving all their acumumulated wealth to the healthcare industry instead of their kids.

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  > In other words, it’s like adding an automated security researcher to your team. Not a zero-day machine that’s too dangerous for the world. Missing the point? Hiring an elite human researcher isn't easy, or cheap. It's beyond the means of the vast majority of people out there. $20/Month Claude Pro subscription? Not so much. The question for me: How much better _is_ Mythos than Opus 4.6 or 4.7, or Sonnet for that matter? Those models and similar from other companies are already...

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  I’m still bummed the AcousticBrainz project folded - I developed a decent DJ algorithm off of that data and would love to take it further, but running my own Essentia analyses ups the bar considerably.

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  where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right That’s a remarkable level of effort, these days. Yes, I know, it’s trivial compared to pulling vinyl from the sleeve and flipping it every 20 minutes the way I used to before 1985, but… I prefer to put in my music effort with focus, and let a mix algorithm surprise me when I’m not in “music picking mode.” To me, it’s much more enjoyable to hear a song I like that I wasn’t expecting than it is to think about it, navigate...