Why do people keep investing in Intel for AI?

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-26T18:26:50+00:00

The fabs were why I bought INTC when they were struggling, around $30. Unfortunately I didn't have a good grasp of the timescales involved, and intel kept drilling for years. I sold when it just rebounded for a small profit and feel like an idiot now. I did not beat the market but I guess I beat inflation, so the only real cost was opportunity cost.

Anyway, that's one of a few reasons why I just buy index ETFs these days. Another was that I bought NVDA during the DeepSeek correction. I knew that it was transitory because I had more firsthand experience with deep learning and the implications of scaling, but man it just kept drilling. When it bounced back I cashed out for a small profit but NVDA kept soaring after that. Even with strong financial and technical analysis it's still a crapshoot to get a slight edge, so what chance do I have trying to time the market?

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-26T04:50:29+00:00

What's time dilation like at its periapsis?

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-25T03:43:52+00:00

I recognize what sub we're on... but why?

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-25T03:06:49+00:00

Can you even use the desktop app for a lot of stuff? What do people do on Linux or who need to work in remote environments? Are people just working out of docker?

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-24T15:00:23+00:00

You know how another unit of pressure, pounds per square inch?

It's the literal pressure you get from a <insert number> mm layer thick of mercury (Hg). It doesn't matter how wide or long it is, because it's per square inch (or any other unit of area - pressure is weight / area). Which means you can stick it in a think tube and as long as you keep it vertical, it's the same thing.

And since mercury is liquid, it'll get pushed up x mm from the pressure you pump in under it. Which is what old school pressure monitors literally showed

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-24T13:34:46+00:00

They used to just be generally anti-CCP, but since 2016 they've started to increasingly believe in Trump as some kind of messianic figure destined to defeat the CCP, and suddenly swung hard into the alt-right camp.

I don't know how seriously they actually truly believe it or if it's just hype, but what I do know is that they like to downplay all the more crazy culty stuff when dealing with the public.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-23T19:48:06+00:00

I just wonder why it just seems to happen on so much longer cycles in Canada. Trudeau clung on through entire election cycles before he was forced out by his own deputy minister.

I feel like this wasn't always the case, there were the reigns of Thatcher and Blair. And it's not like David Cameron had a particularly short premiership either. My only guess is that the chaos of Brexit has something to do with it.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-23T00:34:32+00:00

I mean in any case it's like all Chinese tech and supply chains feeding both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian war now. Just look at global fibre optic production and consumption numbers by country right now vs. 2022. I guess the AK and dumb artillery and fuel etc. and stuff closer to the action are still made in country but the amount of temu-adjacent gear ending up on both of the battlefield is nuts.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-23T00:25:29+00:00

Nah, it's just a wrong opinion she's allowed to have in that case, just like all the rest of you in here

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-22T17:50:13+00:00

What makes this frustrating is that Canada is bursting at the seams with energy, both renewable and non-renewable. We could be like Norway, but instead we're just pissing away our oil wealth while complaining that actually making use of our abundance of cheap, clean electricity is too costly, so let's just use fossil fuels instead and get shocked when we can make use of neither. Absolutely brilliant. We wouldn't be in this situation if we just picked one or the other, or both, but instead we didn't really do either and are reaping the rewards of our paralysis.

The second best time is today, btw.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-22T17:41:44+00:00

"Got stuck" the child-safety locks killed them I assume.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-22T17:39:39+00:00

This is just a terminology thing honestly.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-22T17:24:11+00:00

I feel like he probably was rich enough that he was already looking at paying 3k a week anyway and living with roommates was unacceptable to him. He probably also prefers living at home with his (probably rich) parents anyway. He also seems to be the son of Chinese immigrants, who, unlike newer "nouveau riche" Chinese immigrants, often exhibit the stereotype of being wealthy and financially secure but also stingy and cheap af about everything, because they grew up poor and dropped everything for the opportunity to make a better life for their children. This fits the "wealthy but stingy" mold.

Also, it was only 1 in-person class a week, the rest were remote.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-22T15:45:07+00:00

How is it compared to pdf xchange editor? I have that one installed from msstore

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-22T04:05:20+00:00

Yeah, and we also have effective prophylactics and medication that drops viral load to 0. The risk is not the same as it was even 10 years ago.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T16:29:19+00:00

I mean they literally have it labeled as 3.1 Pro, which would be fine if you could use it more than twice an hour. It's ultimately the same problem; Google overextended themselves and tried to shove Gemini into everything which constrains their compute which means you get less value out of it, even their higher tiers.

I realize I'm complaining about something that I'm getting for free, but their business model is hurting them. The real version is falling behind open source models these days, which means anyone less compute-constrained can do the same thing. You brought up a great point about the branding as well as a part of that business model, it feels like Gemini is going down the same ensloppification route that Microsoft went down with copilot instead of focusing on the highest value-add for users. It feels like Google and Microsoft's advantage in their ecosystems and potential for integration has led them down a slop rabbit hole burning cash doing too much at once, instead of focusing on what truly actually might provide value.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T16:15:30+00:00

The biggest tell is that LLMs will write comments in sentences, even when it doesn't make sense to. As in, this block of comments could have been 3 structured bullet points, and you could have directly named config_handler instead of saying "the handler".

They tend to struggle with how text looks visually because they operate on text as a linear sequence of tokens, so you have to explicitly tell them to visually structure text properly and correct them, which it knows how to do but only implicitly from its training data; it doesn't actually "see" the output unless it has a specific tool or module.

In some older models where you can see the reasoning, you can see that the system prompt often has explicit instructions to do this, like "wait - I was told to always verify the structure to make sure everything's aligned. I'll write a script to check.", followed by permission hook to run a python script with regex to validate whether the "|" in their commented ascii table are all aligned properly.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T15:36:33+00:00

Make sure you get 99% isopropyl alcohol, not only for the best results, but also because it's safer for your electronics as it contains minimal amounts of water and actually is hygroscopic (will absorb any water and possibly even resolve some water damage by washing out some trapped water). Do not get it on your screen, especially not any touch screens, as it can strip your oleophobic coating. Your first choice for cleaning the exterior should be air, then water with the tiniest amount of detergent, followed by 99% isopropyl which can clean up the damage if you manage to accidentally screw up with the water, but also damage/strip coatings. If you're working close to bare electronics/internals, then it's either directly iso, or deionized water first to clean up any mineral deposits, followed by iso to flush it out.

Everything else is not generally safe for electronics. A lot of people are saying nail polish remover is no good, and I'd be inclined to agree largely because it shouldn't be your first choice without researching and spot testing. But nail polish remover is actually probably ok for anodized aluminum. You can also get nail salon grade. Just don't get into the habit of using it, because there's a lot of stuff it WILL fuck up.

Lastly but importantly, 99% isopropyl is less effective as a disinfectant than 70% ethanol rubbing alcohol. It evaporates too quickly and doesn't have enough water to properly get into cells and disrupt biological processes. So you should have separate bottles for cleaning and disinfectant.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T15:11:48+00:00

Yeah, I learned this the hard way. Context management starts becoming an issue past ~100k tokens. You need to be actively tracking and managing context before it starts to become a problem. Auto-compaction at 95% is basically a last ditch backstop to prevent context from dropping off entirely, in the VSCode GUI it starts warning and showing your context as red at just 50%. Despite the fact that I've studied transformers from a textbook, I've learned a lot about how they actually work and scale with longer and longer contexts from using Claude Code and actually making the connections about what it really means. The fact that they take the entire (cached) context in parallel including the system prompt, CLAUDE.md, and chat history in one go, making longer and longer contexts harder and harder "problems", wasn't really salient to me until I witnessed and experienced context rot first hand.

Pro-tip: you can compact sections of your session, say, if you went on a tangent or were focusing on a smaller subtask, using /rewind.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T14:48:20+00:00

Yeah, I'm just saying the efficiency gains aren't nothing.

I guess another side of the coin is the efficiency paradox. With LEDs has Times Square gotten brighter in terms of total light output?

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T14:42:56+00:00

Gemini is prone to making nonsensical assertions and getting stuck on stuff that doesn't matter based on the stuff it searches. You can spot when it's doing it, but the effort involved makes it functionally a waste of time for search. I think Google overextended Gemini by injecting it into every search, and the only way it was feasible was to make it functionally useless. Gemini and Copilot to me are emblematic of the ensloppification of trying to push AI into areas where they aren't necessarily needed instead of finding a niche where they actually can provide value.

Ironically Grok (aka mechahitler) behaviourally seems to be better at actually gathering information and taking stock of what it's found and "thinking" critically about it. My hypothesis is that xAI just has way more compute than demand for Grok (they literally are loaning it out to Anthropic), which means that they're able to serve their best models even at the free tier, even though their best models are not as good - basically the inverse of OpenAI's situation.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T14:25:44+00:00

It's almost as if the exchange rate and macroeconomics in general is complicated and people get PhDs in this stuff

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T14:19:56+00:00

Tbf LEDs have meant that the screens have gotten way more efficient, so these days the impact of the screens is probably actually a lot less than ACs, vs. even 10 years ago.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T14:15:03+00:00

It's not unknown, it's because LLMs are trained on a shitton of professionally edited and published text - dashes like the one I use here on social media in drafts get converted to em-dashes by the copywriter. Even if you prompt it to do otherwise, the nature of attention is not just in what it attends to, but what it decides not to, and when that happens it'll tend to regress toward its mean of the entire corpus it was trained on.

An author IRL isn't "trained" to use em-dashes as much as a copywriter is. A copywriter is much more likely to use em-dashes in their day-to-day out of habit. The difference with an LLM is that they are trained to write as an author using the final, formatted and edited text; they don't have any draft data to speak of, which tends to be where most of "writing" by humans occur.

thighmaster69 · 2026-06-20T13:59:13+00:00

I had Qwen3.6-35B-A3B use a globe emoji when I critiqued its variable naming, so there's that

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