If you don't read a book multiple times, why not borrow from a public library (if such a thing exist in the country you live in)? Here in Sweden they are free, and you can even get them to loan a book from another library if they don't have it locally (though for physical books it will of course take a few days to get it delivered). Remote loans used to cist around 20 SEK (about 2 EUR), but is now also free since earlier this year.
There are some books I absolutely buy (and I have a rather large library myself, entirely physical), but there are many cases where borrowing makes more sense.
I prefer the slim device that keeps track of where I am in the book, has a built in backlight that is easy on the eyes and doesn't disturb my wife when I'm reading in bed until long after she's asleep, and that lets me acquire the next book in a series with only a little bit more effort than it is too turn the page, over the heavy physical tome that would tire my arms.
I've borrowed from archive.org quite a bit in the past several years. but it does require you to be online to read the book, which doesn't always work out for me. Also... Libby doesn't support my preferred 4 year old android tablet any more. I'm also widgy about the data they say they want to upload.
But it's a great option if you have a modern device.
Small country side roads routinely lack a central line in Sweden. Even smaller roads can lack the side lines too. And I'm talking asphalt roads here still. The same happens on many residential streets in towns and cities.
But sure, it would be rare to have a large road or street without markings. But most roads aren't large. Most travelled kilometers happen on large roads, but that is not the same thing as most roads. And many individual journeys would involve at least a little bit of small roads at the beginning, end or both.
And of course, if they are covered with snow and ice during the winter you can't see the markings anyway.
When my GPU fans went bad and I didn't want to buy a new GPU (nothing wrong with my 1070, it still runs the games I care about) I bought some smaller noctua fans and 3D printed an adapter plate (in PETG). The connectors were non-standard, but the signals weren't, so I had to splice together some cables with soldering and heatshrink tubes.
I love Noctua fans and I don't care about their colour. For all I cared they could be pink as long as they are best in class on noise and reliability.
They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible. The point of a computer to me is to be powerful while being as discrete about it as it can be (i.e. quiet and no blinking rgb lights). I don't have a glass side panel, I run an older Fractal case with aluminum sides with sound dampening instead.
I never understood "form over function", but each to their own.
> They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible.
Speak for yourself :) My computer is pretty open, the fans are visible through the front and through the side panel.
I don't run RGB either though but I do like to style it.
And of course the "form over function" is part of that market niche that really pays a lot for something like a fan. Noctua aren't that special, as others have mentioned there are much cheaper brands with the same performance including sound level. You do pay a lot for just the branding.
Every other brans of fans I have used (which to be fair is far from all of them) have only lasted 3 maybe 4 years before they started making more noise than when new. They weren't completely broken, but any increase in noise is unacceptable to me. I live in an old quiet house, there is no noise from forced ventilation but because it doesn't have that. There is no city noise. On a still day in the winter with no wind or birdsong it can be extremely quiet.
I have some Noctua fans still going strong after a decade. Are there other brands that can also do that? Probably, I have some BeQuiet fans now too in a tower CPU cooler (couldn't get hold of a Noctua cooler during the pandemic), it will be interesting to see what happens in another 6 years or so with them.
And no, I don't change my computer every 3 years or so any more, so longevity does matter to me.
I usually look at the monitor, not the case under the desk. ;)
That said, I don't want RGB bleed, nor do i want a case where I see the insides. The computer is there to be powerful and discreet (both when it comes to noise and looks).
But sure, you could skip the walnut. I think Noctua should also go well with lighter woods. Oak perhaps but probably not all the way to birch.
We do have syntax highlighting these days. And our editors work like hypertext, where I can go to definitions, find usages, get inheritance hierarchies etc. Quite a ways from your suggestion, but also a few steps removed from a type writer.
I think any such leap would have to be a really big one to catch on though, due to inertia. Colorforth is not exactly popular, and I can't think of any other examples.
Can sketchpad do this? (relatively simple, but showing what an LLM can do with a sketch with very little prompting, full transcript of further typing included)
Yes, but there don't seem to be any current implementations which are more than academic exercises (I'd love to be wrong about that and be pointed to something which I could try).
The reason for this is that we've been trying to draw code by hand since 1963 and it doesn't really work out well except in limited domains. Maybe it'll work better with LLMs tho, I guess we'll see.
>Parametric CAD, in my view, is a perfect example of "visual programming", you have variables, iteration/patterning reducing repetition, composability of objects/sketches again reducing repetition, modularity of design though a hierarchy of assemblies. The alignment between programming principles and CAD modelling principles, while not immediately obvious, are very much there. An elegantly designed CAD model is just as beautiful (in its construction) as elegantly written code.
Obviously, it is fitting that a visual product is amenable to a visual approach/solution, so my question is, what programming environment for general purpose is most like to a parametric CAD system?
Yeah I think CAD is a perfect domain for this kind of thing, and IIRC that was one of the original target applications for Sketchpad, where Sutherland demonstrated constraint-based bridge design where the constraints were sketched in.
I agree I don't think LLMs really change the equation much.
For another look at where drawing-based programming has gone, see Dynamicland by Bret Victor. No LLMs required.
If the difference is that large, it seems plausible to me that the Chinese models are subsidized in order to gain market share, this is not exactly the first time the Chinese government has done so (or at least been rumoured to have done so).
You should assume that everyone has a hidden agenda when money is involved.
Why do other model providers who host deepseek v4 have it cheaper than other offerings? Is the Chinese government subsidizing other model providers who download their models for free?
Pricing for DeepSeek V4 flash is $0.14 in/$0.28 out across basically every provider or close to it. It seems most providers just follow the model creator and set their prices to match. V4 pro was set to be $1.74 in/$3.48 out when DeepSeek first announced it; all providers have set their prices to be about that price, & now DeepSeek has set their pricing to $0.435 in/ $0.87 out. I don't know if this is special pricing, or the promise they made for dropping the price when they get more Huawei cards online. It seems that providers like ParaSail, Together, and Novita just set the price when the model comes out and don't compete.
No one has yet to turn a profit from LLMs. I don't understand why we need to intently look at everybody's pricing, when the most important number is instead their losses. That is the number that tells us what they're really doing.
Why would these 3rd-party providers be taking losses? Together, Novita, etc... are not losing money on inference services, they are profiting. You can easily do napkin math with current & last gen Nvidia cards to calculate cost to host/serve these models. I would also doubt that any 1st-party providers like OpenAI and Anthropic lose money on per token billing. There is almost undoubtedly healthy margin being made on that.
> it seems plausible to me that the Chinese models are subsidized in order to gain market share
In this case, this point is kinda moot since the entire US and SV tech ecosystem, has been subsidized first by the US defense industry during the cold war, and after by the US government funded VCs by its unique cheat-code ability to infinitely print the world reserve currency with little to no inflation consequences upon its own economy, and dump it on its tech sector or on the free market to buy foreign competitors before they become a challenge, in order to be ahead of everyone else.
Given this, I find criticisms of China's state subsidize to pale in comparison, when we talk about what is "fair".
> You should assume that everyone has a hidden agenda when money is involved.
As an European there is little difference between what US is doing and China is doing when it comes to tactics. The particulars may differ, the end result is similar. Traditionally I could at least say that US was more democratic and as such was preferable, but that argument seems to be gradually weakening.
From what I read recently (and I don't remember where it was), the current thinking is that it wasn't oxygen levels or temperatures, but the lack of predators that let dragonflies grow that big. A big dragonfly is much slower and an easier target. So unless you get rid of birds, you won't have giant dragonflies.
You need high oxygen content in the air though. Insect style circulatory systems aren't efficient enough to get oxygen to the cells without the air having a super high concentration of oxygen to begin with.
Basically like how when people can't breath good you put them on oxygen to keep them alive only getting oxygen into the blood is the bottleneck rather than into the body.
I would expect the standard library of various languages to provide an optimised implementation such as this. Then everyone downstream benefits, and benefits from future improvements when compiled for a newer version of the language / executed under a newer version of the runtime.
You see this in rust, where they replaced the hash tables many years ago, the channel a couple of years ago, and most recently the sort implementations for both stable and unstable sort. I expect other languages / runtimes do similar things over time as well as CPUs change and new approaches are discovered.
Some languages, such as C++, allow for specialisation via templates and compile time evabulation (constexpr). It would be possible to detect when the size of the data type matches one of the integer types, is a POD, is comparable via memcmp, etc to use SIMD optimised algorithms.
It is looking like C++ 26 will get compile time reflection, which would make things like this even more feasible.
NFS is more annoying on Linux than just using Samba though, at least for the NAS use case. With Samba on my server I can just browse to it in KDE's file manager Dolphin, and samba configuration is a relatively straight forward ini style file on the server. A pair of ports also need to be opened in the host firewall.
Contrast that with NFS, which last I looked needed several config files, matching account IDs between hosts, mounting as root, and would hang processes if connection was lost. At least I hear rpcbind is gone these days.
I don't think anyone sane uses NFS on Linux either these days. And it is rather funny that the protocol Microsoft invented is what stuck and became practical between Linux hosts.
First thing I have heard about NetApp. Seems to be some enterprise focused company, with more than one product. Not sure which product of theirs you refer to.
Synology, TrueNAS and Proxmox probably also have NFS support I would assume, and they definitely have Samba. Those are more relevant to me personally.
I just run a normal headless Linux distro on my NAS computer, I don't see the point of a specialised NAS distro. It too could have NFS if I wanted it, but it currently has Samba, because it is easier and works better.
So in conclusion, I'm not sure what your point is? Doesn't NetApp support anything except NFS?
There are some books I absolutely buy (and I have a rather large library myself, entirely physical), but there are many cases where borrowing makes more sense.
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