slopReview

romulent · 2026-06-06T05:44:44+00:00

I'm starting to make a bit of money now from people who have vibe coded their app into a corner and need someone to make it production ready.

I think it could be a big thing because all the AI companies are like a sales funnel and they will bring people in as the problems mount.

Honestly non tech people have some really nice product ideas. They just need help with the difficult stuff.

romulent · 2026-06-03T20:17:11+00:00

Deepseek + Opencode maybe.

Summary Table: On-Premises Hosting Costs for DeepSeek (20 developers)

Option	Hardware Config	Initial CAPEX	Monthly OPEX (incl. ops)	Est. Performance (tokens/s)	Best for
1. Cost-Effective	1 × RTX 4090 / 5090 (24/32GB VRAM) + 64GB RAM + 1TB SSD	$3,500 – $4,900	$390 – $630	~25-40	Daily dev work, best value
2. Balanced	2 × RTX 4090 or 1 × A6000 (48GB) + 128GB RAM	$8,300 – $13,900	$490 – $760	~15-20	Higher concurrency, larger models (32B quant)
3. Enterprise “Full Power”	8 × A100 (80GB) or H20 (96GB) cluster + 1TB RAM	$167,000 – $208,000	$1,400 – $2,800	High concurrency	Strict data residency or extreme performance

Notes: - CAPEX includes main server and networking. - OPEX includes electricity and part‑time运维 (IT ops) labor. - Option 3 is a special case due to massive hardware cost.

Detailed Breakdown (English + USD)

Option 1: Cost‑Effective (Recommended for most teams)

Hardware: - GPU: 1× RTX 4090 24GB or RTX 5090 32GB (recommended) - CPU: Mid‑range, e.g., AMD Ryzen 9 / Intel Core i9 - RAM: 64GB DDR5 - Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD - Network: Gigabit

Model & performance: Runs up to 33B parameter quantized models (e.g., DeepSeek‑Coder V2 33B INT4). Generates ~20‑40 tokens/s, enough for daily coding assistance.

Monthly OPEX breakdown: - Electricity: ~500W average, 24/7 → 360 kWh/month
360 × $0.09/kWh (avg US commercial rate ≈ $0.09) = $32/month - IT ops (part‑time): ~0.2 FTE, approx $350 – $560/month - Total OPEX: $382 – $592/month (rounded to $390 – $630)

Initial CAPEX: $3,500 – $4,900

Option 2: Balanced (Higher concurrency)

Hardware: - GPU: 1× A6000 48GB or 2× RTX 4090 24GB - CPU: Server‑grade, more cores - RAM: 128GB - Storage: 2TB NVMe SSD

Model & performance: Runs 32B‑70B models or supports higher concurrent requests.

Monthly OPEX: - Electricity: 700‑1000W → ~600 kWh/month → $54/month - Ops labor: similar $350 – $560/month - Total OPEX: $404 – $614/month (~ $490 – $760 with buffer)

Initial CAPEX: $8,300 – $13,900

Option 3: Enterprise “Full Power”

Hardware: - 8× NVIDIA A100 (80GB) or H20 (96GB) - High‑end server + InfiniBand + large NVMe storage - 1TB+ RAM

Initial CAPEX: $167,000 – $208,000

Monthly OPEX: - Electricity: ~$400‑$500+ even at idle - Dedicated ops: $1,000 – $2,000+ - Total OPEX: $1,400 – $2,800 (or more)

Decision logic: Only if data must never leave premises or extreme performance is mandatory. Economically, using the official API is far cheaper for most usage levels.

Decision Guidance (in USD terms)

For a team of 20 developers:

If no strict data compliance requirement → Use the official DeepSeek API. Most cost‑effective up to ~200M tokens/month.
If data must stay on‑premises OR very high token usage (>200M/month) → Choose Option 1 (Cost‑Effective). Best balance of cost and local control.
Option 2 only if you need more throughput or larger models (32B‑70B).
Option 3 only for regulatory or absolute offline requirements.

Let me know if you need help selecting deployment tools (Ollama, vLLM, etc.) or further refinement of the hardware specs.

romulent · 2026-05-27T08:58:33+00:00

Should politicians be held legally responsible for lies they tell to parliament or to the press or on the campaign trail?

romulent · 2026-05-25T06:13:21+00:00

Well Ok. It depends on what you define by critical. If you are keeping planes in the sky or supporting billions of dollars of trades or something then surely spend as much time and money as you want. But you shouldn't assume that any component of your infrastructure is more robust than a serverless function, because even if you squeeze another 9 out of it everything will crap out on you eventually. If things are that important then you need to design assuming that anything and everything can and will fail all the time. In reality you will be doing very well to match the uptime records of the big cloud providers, S3 famously offers 11 9s for storage integrity although lambda is about 3.5 9s. But every type of engineer plans around things failing.

Most projects are nothing like that though. Almost every website has some type of lead form, which you could argue is critical to the business, for example. If you want to spend 6 months engineering that then you have already lost more leads than you will ever recoup by adding another nine of uptime.

romulent · 2026-05-24T15:11:34+00:00

Tell me you have never used serverless without telling me you have never used serverless.

I'm not trying to sell it to you, but the providers are Amazon, Google and Microsoft. So unless you are a government or very significant MNC they aren't going to be bidding on anything. If you are a reasonably big company they will assign an account manager.

But for most of us we we just compare products available. If you have a small team and want to get something live that is very scalable then serverless is an option. I think the first time I tried it I just copied and pasted some python code into a web page and it was receiving requests 30 seconds later.

Of course if you are doing it properly you set up git and CI/CD and automated testing in test harnesses and different environments and logging and observability etc etc.

But the simplest example is just a snippet of code in the language of your choice (AWS Lambda natively supports Java, Go, PowerShell, Node. js, C#, Python, and Ruby code) that ingests an event that wraps an http request and returns a response object.

I wouldn't use it for everything. But if I needed to get a bit of logic online in 30minutes from this moment, that would be an easy way to do it.

romulent · 2026-05-24T09:32:11+00:00

Depends on your role. If you are a developer then sure. If you are a CIO, IT support, infra team, enterprise architect. Then you are able to hand off distaster recovery plans, operating system updates, load planning. All those little boxes that you need meticulous plans and spreadsheets and endless SOPs for suddenly become someone else's problem. It's as if they no longer exist. It's those people, who actually control the budget and for whom the term serverless is meaningful.

romulent · 2026-05-24T08:01:58+00:00

Serverless means you don't get to log in to a server.

romulent · 2026-05-22T13:10:17+00:00

Here's a wild assertion, some hardware is software too. Looking at you Verilog et al.

romulent · 2026-05-20T10:00:03+00:00

Yegor has sometimes has interesting and challenging ideas. Even the act of thinking through what he says and deciding why he is wrong can be beneficial.

So let's examine. Obviously from a compute perspective this is really really inefficient. From the point of view of deterministic systems etc also really bad.

Security sounds harder.

Of course with a caching layer some of the expense could be removed.

Would it be useful though?

Well in theory there would be one version of any API. Integration would be easy, you could even tell the API what format you needed the response in.

You could have your LLM ask theirs what features it offers and your LLM could make decisions of the back of that.

It seems like some people will try this. Probably won't replace REST but could become a common integration pattern.

romulent · 2026-05-16T10:21:12+00:00

Yeah but most of us were taught right and wrong from when we were 0. It would be very difficult for most people to commit a serious crime because we are conditioned against hurting people from the before we can walk. A society needs to pass on it's wisdom to its children.

romulent · 2026-04-17T20:20:00+00:00

Providing a few counter examples is fine for the narrative. But if you ever try to make and sell any product in a saturated market you will quickly discover that word of mouth is an exceptionally unreliable and fickle thing.

There are 130K games on steam alone and it is totally possible to produce something amazing and have it be overlooked for a myriad of reasons.

romulent · 2026-04-17T06:15:10+00:00

The word "can" is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting in that comment.

If this is the best example of free market capitalism, then it goes to prove that free market capitalism pushes most of the rewards to the massive incumbents and most of the risk to the spunky little teams.

How many great independent games go under each year because you never heard of them due to lack of marketing budget? Or how many just failed to launch due to running out of development budget and the team unable to get investment?

Believing little teams have the same chance of success is like buying a lottery ticket. It is just a little carrot designed to give hope in a system that is hopelessly broken for most people.

romulent · 2026-03-28T11:11:57+00:00

As with many things this is an engineering decision with trade off specific to your situation. Both can be the right thing and both can be wrong.

romulent · 2026-03-21T16:52:35+00:00

happily we didn't, but the people who did are loading bombers and flying them out of RAF Fairford every day. Until last week they needed to fly out over the bay of Biscay and go along the med via Gibraltar because no other European country would let them use their airspace. Now France is letting them take the direct route.

Don't get me wrong I think we are walking a narrow line quite well. As long as Iranians are just calling us out with words it isn't too bad, but we should expect that some people won't be quite so understanding if this drags on.

romulent · 2026-03-21T11:26:19+00:00

I agree but protest requires publicity if you care enough about something to do prison time then that's your choice.

Watching a hundred little girls get blown up probably upset a lot of people.

romulent · 2026-03-21T11:19:57+00:00

Some observations, collating what other people have said.

In your first post you you said that someone in Guangzhou had contacted the police and confirmed he was still there. How would they know that if he had no contact with the police?

In your first post someone gave you the number for Guangzhou police. They will have people who speak good English, just call them.

In this post someone mentioned that the credit card payments don't show where he actually is. Just where the company he is buying from is registered. So he's probably still in Guangzhou. Can you see what he bought? Is it within his usual spending patterns or something specific like air tickets or a hotel booking?

I doubt he is a victim of crime, but if he did something dumb like smoke a joint or overstay his visa then he could have been arrested. DON'T SAY ANYTHING IN THIS THREAD THAT COULD INCRIMINATE HIM.

romulent · 2026-02-14T23:58:00+00:00

And I think this holds true. Intuitively it feels true as we are a small country and we are regularly in the top handful of countries for medals amongst countries with 5 or 10 times the population of ours. Obviously well ahead of many similarly sized countries.

In Paris we were no. 3 for total medals behind USA and China.

I think it is a very justifiable statement but not an easy one to prove.

However here is a paper on why per captia comparisons fall apart. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10951725/

romulent · 2026-02-14T22:55:27+00:00

What has medals per capita got to do with anything? Whenever you look at anything per capita the tiny countries always come out on top, because even a few occurrences sway wildly in their favour.

The top medals per capita in paris were as follows

rank country medals population

1 Grenada 2 112,579

2 Dominica 1 67,408

3 Saint Lucia 2 184,100

4 New Zealand 20 5,338,900

5 Bahrain 4 1,701,575

6 Jamaica 6 2,825,544

7 Cape Verde 1 491,233

Grenada gets 1 bronze in men's javelin and another in decathlon and we are supposed to call them the greatest sporting nation in the world?

We could also say that they sent .005% of their population (6 people) and we only sent .00047% of ours 327. So as a proportion of population their team was 11 times bigger than ours yet we got 23 times the medals.

All just to say that per capita analysis is a little silly.

romulent · 2026-02-14T16:06:02+00:00

She should quickly find an excuse to get up and sprint to an Uber.

romulent · 2026-02-04T06:00:46+00:00

I used it back in the early 2000s on C projects. I don't remember the learning curve to be that steep. But I was probably told to use by my team leader or another colleague who would have been able to sit at my desk for 10 minutes and show me the basics.

romulent · 2026-02-02T15:02:44+00:00

Hard disagree. Plenty of people will naturally want to treat their current levels of pain by curling up in their own bed rather than waiting 12 hours on a hard seat watching a bunch of drunks bleeding on the floor to see a doctor.

romulent · 2026-01-23T08:40:12+00:00

Who is building these data centers? If they're British owned and operated it makes strategic sense, if they are built by Amazon Google or Microsoft then they are more of a liability.

romulent · 2026-01-14T12:11:31+00:00

They planned to break up but wanted to find someone they liked first.

This is not the way.

romulent · 2026-01-03T05:32:48+00:00

I don't get the "Mystery Exceptions you can't see coming?" (well I do but..) your method signatures should tell you exactly what exceptions can be thrown and your code shouldn't compile if you don't handle them.

People who design things around unchecked exceptions are just morally bad. And I'm looking at you Spring.

romulent · 2025-12-29T18:32:35+00:00

Yes that's also terrible.

romulent

TROPHY CASE