This was a super interesting video to watch. I honestly thought SFP required more setup, but this explains why AliExpress is so ripe with USB3 and HDMI over SFP converters that are dirt cheap.
It's been amazing having 6 years of fiber optic HDMI & DP monitor connections, that work so so so well. I bought some no name one on Amazon in ~2019 and was flabbergasted it was real & worked.
Such a huge upgrade from the heavy thick 35 ft HDMI<->dvi cable I've used for so long.
Literally the only downside is figuring out how to roll it up, which I still haven't figured out how to do well with the 150ft cable I have.
It was astoundingly cheap too. I think the first one I got was under $60?! No one really knew the segment existed, they just needed to get some sales, I assume. I heard usb3 has been available but they've been bulky & expensive. Where-as the whole fiber optic cable seamlessly integrates the transceiver on mine. I like Cable Matters, they make some fine ones.
There is no way that this state of things survives long-term. Rationally, it's really no different than any other tool involved in production of your work product.
They’d have to pass a Senate bill modifying copyright and granting corporate-nonperson status with legal rights to hosted, certified by the bar, registered and renewed AIs only. Otherwise the work that’s markov’d as ‘legal advice’ has no origination of record from a legally-recognized entity and therefore can’t be affirmed to be legal advice (legal advice is not public domain, or else protections would be drastically weakened; and, provided by A to B test fails: no such entity A), and anyone could claim the entirety of their email as protected from discovery by ‘cc’ing AI’ for legal advice on every email for a vacation responder reply emitted by a self-hosted trepanned agent (a corrupted lawyer can still give protected legal advice).
Or, they’d have to assert that content generated by AI on behalf of a user is protected — there’s no way to tell whether it’s legal advice so it all must be treated as such (can’t trust the AI to judge this, given how hallucinatory they are in legal filings!) — at which point AI companies would be refused the right to harvest your AI conversations for further training and profit-extraction (which would subject them to prosecution for, of all things, illegal wiretap under
§2511(1)(e)(i) if not others). Google would never allow that to happen, seeing as how that’s literally their entire business.
I fully expect someone to set up the equivalent of HIPAA for legal advice AIs and for that to be found acceptable for instances hosted in protected enclaves, but the big four’s main products aren’t likely to qualify for that until they solve hallucinations and earn back judges’ trust.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice. Ironically, I wouldn’t have to say this if it was AI writing. Heh.)
Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?
At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
>At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
I see this sentiment often, repeated a couple times in here, but I don't understand why on earth that would be the case. Gas Town was released a little over three months ago. It's an ongoing open-source experiment at the bleeding edge of vendor-agnostic multi-agent orchestration.
I was using gastown for fire-and-forget prototyping of larger projects. It was flaky and scorches tokens but it was able to get larger prototypes done than I could with a single instance of my daily river (claude) alone.
> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think.
Interesting:
> Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.
I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant (https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.
This sounds like every LLM workflow, which is 'you tell the LLM what you want'.
The real distinction is of scale - whether you want a REST endpoint or a fully functional word processor.
But real, actual, complex software is at least half spec (either explicit, or implicitly captured by its code), the question is, can LLMs specify software to the same degree with Gas Town, that you get something functioning?
You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today?
I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity.
...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of using AI is earth shattering, and changes everything based on vague anecdotes that don't involve a tangible released output that they can point to.
Yeah if this can truly just autonomously make great software, then where is all the new SaaS that is able to undercut incumbents by charging 10-20% of what they are charging?
you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.
I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.
What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare.
Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
(btw I've been wondering the same thing as you and am not sure if there's another answer besides that he and people following his projects keep building projects on their projects: Beads, to Gas Town, to Wasteland, etc.)
If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.
In an era where creating such libraries is much cheaper than validating that they're useful or work, yeah you really should validate it before you expect someone to use it. Nobody is going around trying out every slop project they see, they'd be wasting hours and hours for no gain at all.
This all being said, I do find the idea interesting, but heeded it's advice when it said it's hideously expensive and risky to use. So yes, I do want someone braver, richer, and stupider than me to take the first leap
You’re very good at this! I have trouble slopping out more than a day or two!
Treat this like art. There are some neat ideas, maybe not executed particularly well. Somewhere around 7/10 IMDB score. The working implementation makes the blog post more impactful more than the other way around.
If it was art, I would find it really quite neat. However it doesn't seem intended as such:
> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
This is my experience as well. At work, our team is 50/50 on 'mastery' of current AI tools. All of us using parallel agentic workflows have our own flavor of tooling. I'm not convinced there's an agreement yet on what the 'ideal' is here, so experimentation is where it's at. Over-indexing on a massively complex system like Gastown for professional work seems unwise. Lots of us have used it for fun at home though.
Same with BuildCache, except you also get a fast local cache so you effectively have an L1 and an L2 cache.
In fact, since you also have super fast "direct mode" caching that bypasses the preprocessor (like ccache but unlike sccache), BuildCache really has three logical levels of cache: direct, preprocessor and remote (S3, redis, ...).
Can you (err... buildcache) cache Rust proc-macros? I've been battling this with sccache and I'm now maintaining a 10-patch deep stack for the next.js build CI.
Windows builds were ridiculously poor on cache hits rates too because of non-determinism that was not able to figure out.
There was an experimental PR that treats proc macros as idempotent with the corresponding colpike speed up. I don't know what happened with it, and stabilization required a lot of design work to not break backcompat. But this is something in the team's radar.
Would it be possible to do somethign like editions for proc macros, or have crates establish "this is a v2 proc macro" or something? There are a lot of things I'd love to see change in a v2 but it'd all be breaking.
Idempotent as in if the token stream in the input doesn't change, the cached result of the previous macro expansion is used during incremental, instead of being pessimistic and rerunning the macro.
I couldn't find any information on this, but is it possible that given how nicely exponentiation and logarithms differentiate and integrate, is it possible that this operator may be useful to simplify the process of finding symbolic solutions to integrals and derivatives?
Agreed on integrals, but the derivative is relatively simple?
If f(x) = exp(x) - ln(x) then f’(x) = exp(x) - 1/x, which is representable in eml form as well.
To the overall point though, I don’t think it helps make derivatives easier though. To refactor a function to eml’s is far more work than refactoring into something that’s trivially differentiable with the product rule and chain rule.
The mostly likely quantum attack on Bitcoin will be a catastrophic transfer of large wallets to burn addresses along with a massive short position. No need to worry about washing stolen coins when you can just enjoy your "well timed" legal short position's windfall.
1) Short markets in Bitcoin don't have unlimited depth, and the centralized ones are KYC'd so there's some risk there
2) What if it doesn't tank the price? One thing people have suggested is just burning all the vulnerable coins[1]; it reduces supply so maybe the price will... go up? The point is there's uncertainty.
I’m pretty sure the hope isn’t that burning some coins tanks the price. The point is that publicly demonstrating that you can crack wallet keys is what tanks the price.
I don't see how 1 is any issue at all. Using a computer to make the intended bitcoin calculations much faster than anyone else possibly can is entirely within the rules of how bitcoin works.
It will also tank the price because by doing it, you have demonstrated you have complete control of bitcoin transfers, you can transfer bitcoins from anywhere to anywhere else at any time, and that there is no way to flag it as illegitimate because mathematically you're just providing the correct numbers.
Sorry I wasn't clear there. Because most of the short-depth is controlled by centralized exchanges, there's a risk you won't be able to actualize your short (withdraw, either in crypto or to a bank account), even if it's successful -- they could just block you from withdrawing and/or report you for fraud.
Does anyone happen to know if it is settled law in the United States that transferring bitcoins using a cracked key is a criminal act? It’s not immediately obvious to me that it would be covered by the CFAA.
It’d be money laundering because money went in on one end, and money came out at the other end. Bitcoin would’ve been the vehicle yes. Still not money though.
Something doesn’t have to be money to be involved in money laundering, obviously.
Your legal analysis is very much incorrect. The U.S. will prosecute you for money laundering if you e.g. provide an illegal service, receive payment for that illegal service in bitcoins, then use a bitcoin mixing service, and then finally exchange your post-mixed bitcoins for goods. This is money laundering, despite there being no other money (like dollars) involved any step along the way.
In fact, the U.S. has prosecuted and convicted people for money laundering simply for operating the bitcoin mixing service, which is clearly just bitcoins in and bitcoins out.
This would be the case if many people get the quantum “crack” at the same time. Since it would enable a pre-image attack, one actor could selectively mine blocks for a considerable time until others catch up. This could be going on now.
Yeah, sway better strategy than dowing the world bitcoin is bust while holding it short would be to just mine blocks here and there, to steal from inactive wallets, etc.
I'd drain as much wealth from the network without being detected instead of going guns blazing.
Interesting, considering the extra liability / (stability) volatility that bitcoin options provide when making ROI and hashrate calculations, this can be a triple threat.
Like publicly destroying ivory /poppy stockpiles while simultaneously holding puts/futures on correlating pharmaceutical financial instruments.
If you're installing Samsung Magician for firmware updates, keep in mind that you can always update your firmware without using it and it's just as safe.
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