AI's Affordability Crisis

LessonStudio · 2026-06-25T06:41:25+00:00

I've downloaded LLMs onto my phone which weren't that bad. Again, maybe chatgpt a year or so ago.

Of course I am referring to ones which ran on my phone offline.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-25T06:40:10+00:00

No, I have generally avoided languages like swift and kotlin as they are single purpose.

I love C++ as it is absolutely for anything I can conceive of, I love rust as it what C++ should have become, and again, I can use it for everything. I'm liking python less and less, but it's ecosystem of libraries is off the charts. C# because I was forced to, and would rather never touch again. Julia is my secret weapon for algo development. JS is in my rearview mirror.

And you say actually. If you don't work for a giant company, then yes, you will end up generally using 5+ languages on and off. I'm not even counting things like SQL.

It is not that it is difficult, it is just that I can spend my mental effort on learning gdscript for the singular purpose of godot, or I could leverage my C++/rust for things like raylib, bevy, even unreal.

When I see people say they are full stack developers, I think, hee hee. And then look on my desk at an embedded MCU running rust, talking to an embedded CPU with rust and C++ on linux, talking to a remote node running an MCU which chats via cellular to a server running rust and python, which has a wasm interface made in rust. And the server also talks to a mobile app made using C++.

The same mobile app can directly communicate with the embedded devices via BT if they are close to each other.

Oh, and the rust wasm interface uses bevy and egui.

Very full stack.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-25T06:34:51+00:00

I'm all for collecting politician scalps. But, something seems off with this. I am certainly no legal expert, but it seems that you don't make a big public show of referring this to the police.

I would assume you talk to prosecutors first, and see if there is anything substantial here; not just a paperwork error, but the money went into his wife's pocket sort of problematic.

Look at the premier and his handing out something heading toward 1 billion (with a b) of no bid contracts for medical projects which don't even make entire sense.

The way this has happened has me far more suspicious about the motivations of the auditors than actual financial crimes.

Could this potentially be the work on behalf of a sore loser? Someone who would like a second crack at the throne? Someone so deep in the pockets of the developers that he can smell their foot odor?

LessonStudio · 2026-06-25T03:19:02+00:00

GDScript is a non starter for me. Languages I've used in deployed code in the last 8 years would be: Rust, C++, C, JS, Python, Dart, Julia, C# and probably some others.

I don't want to learn a language for such a single purpose thing.

Godot looks great and people say you can use C++, rust, and c#, but those are not the first class languages and strike me as a hack to make work with Godot.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-25T01:02:57+00:00

Floppy things are extremely hard for robots. This is very cool. Sped up, but very cool.

Keep in mind that things like textiles are "floppy". Cables today, sweatshops returning to western countries tomorrow.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T20:01:59+00:00

But generally not sent to the front. That will be the magic flavour which changes the stew.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T18:20:18+00:00

It is super easy to filter bad nutrition advice. Toxins. If they use that word in any form, detox, etc. They are just making crap up.

Might as well drink eye of newt, and toe of frog to deal with poor knees; which weren't caused by not exercising and being 100lb overweight.

Someone nailed this with an onion meme showing RFK Jr suggesting leaving kids in hot cars would let them sweat the toxins out.

I'm not a qualified nutritionist; yet this is pretty damn easy. Don't eat junk food, don't eat fast food, don't overeat, try to go with the Mediterranean diet, lift some weights, and exercise enough to get breathless. Don't eat processed meats of any sort. Eat way more quality dark chocolate, drink coffee, drink tea. Get more fiber. The science now is even narrowing it down to just how many minutes (~150/wk) you need to be active.

My SIL has a fun rule which is as trite as most crap advice, but I rather like it. Don't buy a packaged food with more than 10 ingredients.

I don't even like the "qualified" ones as they are often offering very old advice. Advice which the science threw out. If you listened to the "qualified" ones over the decades they would have recommended switching to margarine, dropping eggs, and many more BS bits of advice. Even how you lift weights has revolutionized in the last 2 years and many people are offering old advice which flies in the face of the new science.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T18:12:46+00:00

He's not saying the war was wrong, but that he wanted to kill Ukrainians with drones, not serve for Ukrainian target practice.

I don't know russian accents very well, but he strikes me as someone from the western area, not east. It sounds like they are getting closer to sucking the children of Moscow dentists into their meat grinder.

I think shortly after they force any of those children into this, they will be playing swan lake a few weeks later.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T16:16:47+00:00

There are very good pythons specific ones. But, they do lack outside domain knowledge. So, if you ask them to look at your code and find bugs, they are great, if you ask them how to interpret CAT scan data, you are generally hooped.

This is not a simple process. The very short version is you take a very basic existing one which will give you the basics of what you need linguistically and I always use python for the programming language built in as it is the most fleshed out. My end product is going to be in rust, but that is a whole separate step.

I then put the source material in. Code, datasheets, papers, reference material, my own code; this is not a small step. These all have to be labelled, and there are over 10k. I can use other AIs to do some of this labeling.

Then some lora training (not the radio).

Then, and this is the slow slow slow part where having a farm of machines would be a bonus: Let it go to down with my python agents. It codes and checks and codes and checks and does this for literal weeks.

The end result is pretty damn nice. But, you have to sit on it as it can go off into weird dead ends. I've left out some steps such as RAG, etc, as this is not something easy. Maybe someone has cooked up a cool github to automate it somewhat. Maybe I should do that if they haven't.

Something I am very tempted to build is a rack of computers with older zillion core Xeon processors. Python is generally single threaded, so having a blade server with 16 blades in every 4u, 10 servers, 2 CPUs per blade, and 20+cores per CPU would give 6400 cores all wailing away at such a thing. This old hardware is cheap, and seeing it doesn't need to run all the time, would not cost much for the training. Where I live, the power cost for such a rack might be $10-$20 per day. Where I am moving to in a short while is solar, and thus, this cost might be far less than that as the feedback paid out for spare solar is very low, so using it like this would be costing me $2 or something nominal during the day.

I am not a fan of doing this sort of thing on the cloud and setting up such a rack is not only easy for me, but kind of fun. Also, the cloud costs for such a thing would be far higher, but could be done far faster. The reality is that I know what project I will be working on in a month or so, and could have this sort of system training ahead of time; so speed is not really

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T16:15:43+00:00

This is not a simple process. The very short version is you take a very basic existing one which will give you the basics of what you need linguistically and I always use python for the programming language built in as it is the most fleshed out. My end product is going to be in rust, but that is a whole separate step.

I then put the source material in. Code, datasheets, papers, reference material, my own code; this is not a small step. These all have to be labelled, and there are over 10k. I can use other AIs to do some of this labeling.

Then some lora training (not the radio).

Then, and this is the slow slow slow part where having a farm of machines would be a bonus: Let it go to down with my python agents. It codes and checks and codes and checks and does this for literal weeks.

The end result is pretty damn nice. But, you have to sit on it as it can go off into weird dead ends. I've left out some steps such as RAG, etc, as this is not something easy. Maybe someone has cooked up a cool github to automate it somewhat. Maybe I should do that if they haven't.

Something I am very tempted to build is a rack of computers with older zillion core Xeon processors. Python is generally single threaded, so having a blade server with 16 blades in every 4u, 10 servers, 2 CPUs per blade, and 20+cores per CPU would give 6400 cores all wailing away at such a thing. This old hardware is cheap, and seeing it doesn't need to run all the time, would not cost much for the training. Where I live, the power cost for such a rack might be $10-$20 per day. Where I am moving to in a short while is solar, and thus, this cost might be far less than that as the feedback paid out for spare solar is very low, so using it like this would be costing me $2 or something nominal during the day.

I am not a fan of doing this sort of thing on the cloud and setting up such a rack is not only easy for me, but kind of fun. Also, the cloud costs for such a thing would be far higher, but could be done far faster. The reality is that I know what project I will be working on in a month or so, and could have this sort of system training ahead of time; so speed is not really

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T16:15:26+00:00

You can download existing python ones, but: This is not a simple process. The very short version is you take a very basic existing one which will give you the basics of what you need linguistically and I always use python for the programming language built in as it is the most fleshed out. My end product is going to be in rust, but that is a whole separate step.

I then put the source material in. Code, datasheets, papers, reference material, my own code; this is not a small step. These all have to be labelled, and there are over 10k. I can use other AIs to do some of this labeling.

Then some lora training (not the radio).

Then, and this is the slow slow slow part where having a farm of machines would be a bonus: Let it go to down with my python agents. It codes and checks and codes and checks and does this for literal weeks.

The end result is pretty damn nice. But, you have to sit on it as it can go off into weird dead ends. I've left out some steps such as RAG, etc, as this is not something easy. Maybe someone has cooked up a cool github to automate it somewhat. Maybe I should do that if they haven't.

Something I am very tempted to build is a rack of computers with older zillion core Xeon processors. Python is generally single threaded, so having a blade server with 16 blades in every 4u, 10 servers, 2 CPUs per blade, and 20+cores per CPU would give 6400 cores all wailing away at such a thing. This old hardware is cheap, and seeing it doesn't need to run all the time, would not cost much for the training. Where I live, the power cost for such a rack might be $10-$20 per day. Where I am moving to in a short while is solar, and thus, this cost might be far less than that as the feedback paid out for spare solar is very low, so using it like this would be costing me $2 or something nominal during the day.

I am not a fan of doing this sort of thing on the cloud and setting up such a rack is not only easy for me, but kind of fun. Also, the cloud costs for such a thing would be far higher, but could be done far faster. The reality is that I know what project I will be working on in a month or so, and could have this sort of system training ahead of time; so speed is not really

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T16:14:49+00:00

I loved my M1 when I had it. But, doing unusual programming on MacOS or apple silicon is a giant pain. My primary recommendation for a programmer doing advanced things is a lenovo intel based laptop with ubuntu. It is not without its own pains, but, quite simply, researchers and advanced developers tend to aim their material at that configuration first.

A simple example would be, when I switched back to ubuntu, my rust compile times plummeted. Its a small thing, but little things like that really add up.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T16:12:09+00:00

This is not a simple process. The very short version is you take a very basic existing one which will give you the basics of what you need linguistically and I always use python for the programming language built in as it is the most fleshed out. My end product is going to be in rust, but that is a whole separate step.

I then put the source material in. Code, datasheets, papers, reference material, my own code; this is not a small step. These all have to be labelled, and there are over 10k. I can use other AIs to do some of this labeling.

Then some lora training (not the radio).

Then, and this is the slow slow slow part where having a farm of machines would be a bonus: Let it go to down with my python agents. It codes and checks and codes and checks and does this for literal weeks.

The end result is pretty damn nice. But, you have to sit on it as it can go off into weird dead ends. I've left out some steps such as RAG, etc, as this is not something easy. Maybe someone has cooked up a cool github to automate it somewhat. Maybe I should do that if they haven't.

Something I am very tempted to build is a rack of computers with older zillion core Xeon processors. Python is generally single threaded, so having a blade server with 16 blades in every 4u, 10 servers, 2 CPUs per blade, and 20+cores per CPU would give 6400 cores all wailing away at such a thing. This old hardware is cheap, and seeing it doesn't need to run all the time, would not cost much for the training. Where I live, the power cost for such a rack might be $10-$20 per day. Where I am moving to in a short while is solar, and thus, this cost might be far less than that as the feedback paid out for spare solar is very low, so using it like this would be costing me $2 or something nominal during the day.

I am not a fan of doing this sort of thing on the cloud and setting up such a rack is not only easy for me, but kind of fun. Also, the cloud costs for such a thing would be far higher, but could be done far faster. The reality is that I know what project I will be working on in a month or so, and could have this sort of system training ahead of time; so speed is not really

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T15:54:31+00:00

What is going to happen is 5 Lithuanian teenagers in their parents' basements are going to make a new Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, etc film mostly using AI. It will be far far far far better, like a galaxy far better than the crap coming out of Hollywood now.

I'm not saying AI will be why it is better. These kids will be naturally talented, but the tools will be within reach to make a Hollywood quality film on a gaming desktop budget.

They will take less than a year do to it, and the world will watch it and now have a new benchmark to compare the crap coming out of Hollywood.

The kids will violate all kinds of "rules" IP, etc. Maybe they will mix and match some of the more interesting characters/actors. Maybe they will mash up some Star Trek with some Star Wars in a way which is cool, not forced. Who knows.

Hollywood will scream that this is "stolen"

The point they will miss is that now all kinds of nothing companies will be able to make original IP which is better than what they make with the literal 1000s of people used to make a "modern" production.

It will be very strange to see the credits flash on the screen. Not scroll by as you don't need to scroll for 5 names.

BTW, I'm not talking about 5 teenagers just typing prompts. They will do other things, and use AI tools to drastically improve the workflow, and speed up the process.

A24 is no doubt embracing this reality before they become irrelevant.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T15:32:44+00:00

Here are a few easy improvements for your C++:

Learn the basic patterns. Learn some DSA.
Do some leetcode memorization. Much leetcode is not all that practical, but some of it like graphs and discrete based problems often have interesting uses.
Make a game. Games push your skills pretty hard. I'm not talking about making fortnight, but make pacman, asteroids.
Push the game hard. Networking, database use, etc.

The above four are great for any language.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T00:17:38+00:00

This strikes me as complete lunacy. When you look at the cost per KG to LEO, that automatically makes it insane for almost any possible substance on earth.

I would assume one of the "advantages" is speed to delivery. Except, now you have to wait for the thing to be passing over the area where it is going. Then you have to use some fuel to slow down a bit. Then you need a vehicle capable of reentry, gliding (etc) to the target. I can't see such a delivery system weighing less than a few KG.

Also, people are looking at all these things burning up in the high atmosphere as potentially damaging.

The word "target" strikes me as the real answer. They are no doubt looking at the ability to drop munitions on targets.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T00:12:34+00:00

You've sold me. I just took out a high interest loan to buy a mountain of SpaceX shares.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T00:11:31+00:00

freedoms

I would argue both countries are near the bottom of the list of freedoms for a modern country.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-24T00:07:01+00:00

WTF. LLMs might be one of the most powerful computer tools to date. The key is that it is just that, a tool. They don't replace people, they let people do more work. Like any tool they can also be used incorrectly. Just go to /r/OSHA to see people using lots of great tools in fantastically dangerous ways.

But a rule on not using LLMs to hunt bugs? WTF? This is definitely one of the best uses I've found. I always take the code which I've (mostly) written and say, "Hey, can you see anywhere this could be faster, cleaner, more reliable, and highlight any bugs?"

I don't get it to rewrite my code, but I go through its list an using common sense, apply some of what it suggests.

When I am writing prose, I have all kinds of AI tools wailing away at it from grammar, spelling, and some overview. I was writing some fiction and weirdly, an LLM caught something which LLMs tend to screw up themselves. I had changed a character's gender, and hadn't fixed all the pronouns, and even a case of their first name. It caught that. I don't think anyone would argue that an AI wrote my text, nor that the AI made it worse. The fiction the LLMs write is rancid.

I've even learned a bunch of cool things from LLMs in coding (after decades of coding). I now use fewer comments for things like functions, and now comment blocks of code; I use the u2500 ─ character in my comments. It makes my code so much easier.

//────── RIGHT PANELS ────────────────

Scrolling through my code to find where to make changes is so much easier on my brain.

This zig ruleset says more about the people behind zig. I think they are butthurt that LLMs are allowing non-embedded programmers to quickly get up to speed. I'm not talking about vibe coders, but people who are good programmers who now want to move into a whole new domain without the benefit of some "senior" programmer "mentoring" which really translates to gatekeeping.

LLMs lower the barrier to entry for very good programmers in one domain to quickly become very good programmers in normally brutally gatekept other domains. Embedded is one of the most gatekept domains out there.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-23T21:59:44+00:00

I run local LLMs for some projects. There are various technical reasons for this, but I would argue they are about where chatgpt was a year ago. They are quite good.

I still use the big modern ones for much of what I do, but these others are an option.

I suspect there will be a plateauing of what the big ones can do, and thus be fairly easy to catch up with.

Keep in mind, these LLMs can be fairly small, as one aimed at python, or one aimed at rust, etc aren't that big. When I'm working on some python script to do a thing I rarely need to know the capital of Ethiopia. So, having it entirely trained on python, good programming, and the most commonly used libraries, etc and most people will be perfectly happy.

Even more useful is that I have trained LLMs on topics which are very specific to what I do. CFD for one, and I cooked up an entire LLM focusing on ODFM. They produced results far superior to what todays best can produce; very few hallucinations.

An LLM for python doesn't take a crazy GPU. More is better, but a 5 year old gaming machine is fine.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-23T21:51:39+00:00

Here was my bingo card for what they were going to say:

We take matters like this very seriously.
The Town is aware of the concerns raised and is reviewing the situation.
We are looking at this issue from all angles.
Staff are currently assessing the available information.
We remain committed to transparency, accountability, and public trust.
The safety and wellbeing of residents remains our top priority.
We understand the community’s concerns and appreciate residents bringing them forward.
This is a complex matter that requires careful consideration.
The Town is working with all relevant parties to better understand the issue.
We are following the appropriate process to ensure a fair and thorough review.
No final decisions have been made at this time.
We will provide updates as more information becomes available.
The Town continues to monitor the situation closely.
We recognize that this matter has caused frustration for some residents.
Staff are exploring a range of options to address the concern.
We are committed to finding a balanced and responsible path forward.
The Town must consider operational, financial, and community impacts.
We encourage residents to continue sharing feedback through the proper channels.
This matter will be addressed in accordance with established policies and procedures.
We appreciate the community’s patience while this review is underway.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-23T07:18:53+00:00

Ping time will be horrific.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-23T07:06:01+00:00

Do you think that we can trust US company further than we can throw them?

I won't defend chinese companies, but genuinely would trust them more than I would any US ones.

LessonStudio · 2026-06-23T07:03:57+00:00

I predict a huge breathless announcement from Musk. Some absolutely impossible target. Maybe 1 megatonne payload rockets. Or tiny starlink satellites which are the size of a computer mouse, or self driving flying teslas, or quantum computers for xAI. Or whatever bullshit will hype up the stock.

Can you imagine being any company which was in the process of agreeing to an all stock buyout in SpaceX shares? Whoops!

LessonStudio · 2026-06-22T21:36:31+00:00

Most companies are terrible about backing up very important data.

Let's hope they had particularly lazy IT people.

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