jrk

6 ms·

1.
by jrk 2mo ago
Commercial air travel is extremely competitive and has very low margins.
2.
by jrk 2mo ago
The Fed transitioned from QE to tightening almost 5 years ago.
3.
by jrk 3mo ago
It's not that you need to turn on some extra library backends and rebuild, it's that the abstractions themselves are fundamentally at odds with hitting peak performance on many things so you have to rewrite your code. Individual
4.
by jrk 4mo ago
To make "next to nothing" concrete: MIT EECS PhD students are currently paid about $4700/mo. This is substantially less than they'd make in industry, but it's around the US median personal income across all working-
5.
by jrk 8mo ago
The 1TW is the rated peak power output. It's essentially the same in space. The thing that changes is the average fraction of this sustained over time (due to day/night/seasons/atmosphere, or the lack of all of the above
6.
by jrk 8mo ago
The PyTorch version is using the GPU (with Metal Performance Shaders); this C version is currently using (in the docs I saw) a single CPU core, with AMX (via Apple Accelerate BLAS) but not yet with OpenMP for parallelism. It’s not slow beca
7.
by jrk 9mo ago
Why are GPUs necessarily higher latency than TPUs? Both require roughly the same arithmetic intensity and use the same memory technology at roughly the same bandwidth.
8.
by jrk 9mo ago
Not sure when you last tried, but Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT have all supported pretty effective PDF input for quite a while.
9.
by jrk 10mo ago
It is not only not that much more complex, it is often less complex. Higher-level services like PaaS (Heroku and above) genuinely do abstract a number of details. But EC2 is just renting pseudo-bare computers—they save no complexity, an
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by jrk 10mo ago
You know that AWS will come back up. You definitely don’t know whether your own instances will come back or if you’ll need to redeploy it all.
11.
by jrk 10mo ago
Yes but you can also do the same thing with autoregressive models just by making them smaller. This tradeoff always exists, the question is whether the Pareto curve for diffusion models ever crosses or dominates the best autoregressive opti
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by jrk 10mo ago
I think they weren’t asking “why can’t Gemini 3, the model, just do good transcription,” they were asking “why can’t Gemini, the API/app, recognize the task as something best solved not by a single generic model call, but by breaking i
13.
Substrate X-Ray Lithography, a New American Foundry(newsletter.semianalysis.com)
2 points by jrk 11mo ago|0 comments
14.
by jrk 11mo ago
I think the point was not that gem-grade synthetic diamonds are ugly, but that, as industry masters gem-grade production, presumably below-gem-grade production (“ugly synthetic diamonds”) would become cheap enough to deploy in more engineer
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by jrk 11mo ago
This is an established, though advanced, idea. Sourcegraph Amp ( https://sourcegraph.com/amp ) has had this exact feature built in for quite a while: "ask the oracle" triggered an O1 Pro sub-agent (now, I believe, G
16.
by jrk 11mo ago
It is a few generations behind: Blackwell is still on N4, which is an N5 variant. Meanwhile TSMC has been shipping N3 family processes in large volume products (Apple) for more than 2 years already, and is starting to ramp the next major
17.
by jrk 11mo ago
If you go just a few posts back in Peter's own blog he has a video of himself doing exactly this: https://steipete.me/posts/2025/live-coding-session-building-... He has posted others over the past few months,
18.
by jrk 11mo ago
People of course often do read (and even modify) the model-generated code, but doing so is specifically not “vibe coding” according to the original definition, which was not meant to encompass “any programming with an LLM” but something m
19.
by jrk 1y ago
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Dist
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by jrk 1y ago
eInk devices are very much not converging to 16:9 or wider aspect ratios. This device is intentionally the size and shape of a reporter's notebook, but there are virtually no other eInk tablets which diverge significantly from more c
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by jrk 1y ago
The OP is talking about fabrication technology, not end products. Even years into their delays getting to 10nm, Intel had more advanced fabrication technology than TSMC until N7 reached volume in 2018.
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by jrk 1y ago
Intel’s situation in 2025 is not comparable to the rest of big tech. They have lost technical leadership, bled market share, and started losing a ton of money in a hugely capital-intensive business. They are actually in need of major triage
23.
by jrk 1y ago
This is indeed a reasonable cost estimate for competitive short-term H100 rentals (source: much SemiAnalysis coverage, and my own exploration of the market), but there is a critical error (besides the formatting glitch with `*`): It was 24
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by jrk 1y ago
Simon Willison nailed exactly this 2 years ago: > I've been thinking about generative AI tools as "bicycles for the mind" (to borrow an old Steve Jobs line), but I think "electric bicycles for the mind" might b
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by jrk 1y ago
The notion that Google is worse at carefully managing PII than a Wild West place like OpenAI (or Meta, or almost any major alternative) is…not an accurate characterization, in my experience. Ad tech companies (and AI companies) obsessively
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by jrk 2y ago
Yes.
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by jrk 2y ago
They don't "have your data," even at an aggregated and noised level, due to the homomorphic encryption part. Restating the layers above, in reverse: - They don't see either your data or the results of the query (it'
28.
by jrk 2y ago
My first point was not that economics as a discipline is infallible, just that this was the opposite of a “hot take.” Regarding some costs (especially housing) growing faster than the overall rate of inflation: of course they do, just as so
29.
by jrk 2y ago
Your main point is the well-established modern consensus among economists, and nicely put. But what makes you think salaries don't keep up with inflation? In the postwar US, they absolutely have kept up over the long term. There are up
30.
by jrk 2y ago
Rust was started in 2006 and launched publicly, I believe, in 2009, the same year as Go. The point stands that these are still fairly new, but it’s not nearly that new.

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