Personally I feel like it would be less undignified and infantilising to have a machine take care of my basic bodily functions than a human being. There's no feeling of judgement or being shamed in front of someone else, and the machine could even restore a feeling of autonomy since it would feel like you're using a tool instead of being helplessly reliant on another person's help.
> Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way.
Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting services were a thing before AWS came around? Yes you had to pay for a month at a time and scaling wasn’t as instant, but it wasn’t like the only option before cloud computing was having to drive to the datacentre and install your own server.
> suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center.
The “in minutes” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence above.
I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days, not minutes.
AWS changed that, and the rest of the industry eventually followed.
No you could rent virtualised servers way before AWS.
AWS simply had good marketing.
The virtualised server thing was not a AWS thing, the thing that was were their other services. For example instead of renting a virtual server and installing a database on it. You could rent the database; that was sort of a new thing that AWS made in to thing.
It was never cheaper what you paid for was a promise of fire and forget. You would no longer need to worry about any responsibility to update the server or the database cause the AWS crew took care of that.
> I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days, not minutes.
VPSes and non-custom configs for dedicated servers were pretty instant as far as I know, I think the advantage of AWS was more that you could scale up and down much more easily since you weren’t locked down in a monthly contract, and that you could automate server provisioning through an API.
If you recall AWS didn't scale instantly originally either.
We had super bursty traffic, and had to go with Google Cloud (very early days! [0]) because you'd need to communicate with AWS and pre-warm the ELB capacity of your expected bursts.
We did a dead launch to 60 million customers (0 to 60 million, no organic growth phase) this way. I wouldn't want to do that on a VPS.
Am I the only one who remembers how shady a lot of those VPS/hosting companies were? Seemed to be a race to the bottom, so a 'good' outfit might suck or completely disappear a couple years later. (Also, pricing was all over the map, I had a client who was paying $150/mo for a VPS.) Hetzner survived, but for a long time they had a reputation as spamfarm. So I get the initial appeal of AWS, used tactically. But for larger companies, its something like IBM or Oracle, if you are price-sensitive, it's not for you.
Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence? What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
If the law punishes one demographic less severely for the same actions, that's injustice. No different in principle from pre-modern practices where if a noble maimed a commoner, they'd just need to pay a fine, while if a commoner did the same, they'd be put to death.
> Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence?
In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.
In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
> What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
> In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
As I've said, and @echoangle repeated, caning is used for cyberbullying, which girls do too (at a rate relatively close to boys actually). If the law was caning in response to physical bullying, and it just so happened that the vast majority of offenders were boys, I would not object on the basic of sexism (I still would not approve of schools being allowed to physically punish students).
> Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
There's no way the typical 16 year old girl is more fragile than the typical 9 year old boy, yet only the latter is subject to this punishment. Until children reach the age of 12 or so the strength difference is quite minor (and there's even a brief period where girls are taller and heavier).
Also it's absurd to punish demographics differently based on their statistical averages. Redheads are less sensitive to pain, should your hair colour determine how many strokes of the cane you get?
Girls are not meaningfully more fragile than boys, especially before puberty. Before puberty they're practically indistinguishable. If it weren't for long hair and the color pink none of us would know.
That's just something people tell themselves. Yes, we socialize boys not to cry. That doesn't mean boys are "stronger", it means that they have a pathological fear of being perceived as weak which will cause them sexual and relationship problems until the day they die.
> There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.
I'm a self-taught software developer with no university education and I too am socially awkward in front of tradespeople in my house. I don't think this is about Ivy League degrees, just being a nerdy intellectual who's bad at small talk and doesn't have any topics in common with a blue collar worker.
100%. The conversation opener is right there - baseball.
Doesn't matter whether you follow baseball or not. If you do, have a back-and-forth and talk about your respective teams. If you don't, ask questions; fans love talking about their team.
Ironically the ability to make small talk with anyone is considered a sign of good breeding. So this person's education may have failed them?
>just being a nerdy intellectual who's bad at small talk and doesn't have any topics in common with a blue collar worker
I'm an autistic tech nerd and even I never run out of things to talk to with blue collar people. Blue collar people aren't aliens, they're like you and me, they also watch Netflix, browse the internet, go outside, travel, go shopping, have relationships, raise their kids, there's a lot we have in common to talk about: the economy, politics issues, tax issues, news, cars, power-tools, CoL issues, what their kids are doing, etc.
In fact, often, their lives were more interesting than mine, with a lot of travelling the world on random jobs, since they don't give a f about "a gap in the resume" or being labeled a "job hopper", they just do what they want.
So if you can't find absolutely anything in common with blue collar people to talk about, might be an issue on your end you might want to adress.
Calling anything "large" in computing is problematic since hardware keeps improving. GPT-1 was an LLM in 2017 and had 117M parameters, when did it stop being large?
GPT would have been a better term than LLM, but unfortunately became too associated with OpenAI. And then, what about non-transformer LLMs? And multimodal LLMs?
Maybe we should just give up, shrug and call it "AI".
> Local models sound great until you realize you dont get alot of the features that we implicitly expect from hosted models. Many things would require additional investment into the operations and setup to get to a comparable system. We ended up wanting things that would require us to roll our own memory system, harnesses for the model, compliance needs, and security.
That's not local models vs hosted models, that's using the enterprise services from Anthropic. Any local LLM inference engine such as VLLM gives you an OpenAI compatible API with the exact same features as a hosted model.
I'm not sure what your use case is, but I personally found Anthropic's offerings lacking and inferior to open source or custom-built solutions. I have yet to see any "memory" system that's better than markdown files or search, and harnesses for agentic AIs are dime a dozen.
AGI means artificial general intelligence, as opposed to artificial narrow intelligence. General intelligence means being able to generalise to many tasks beyond the single narrow one that an AI has been designed/trained on, and LLMs fit that description perfectly, being able to do anything from writing poetry, programming, summarising documents, translating, NLP, and if multi-modal, vision, audio, image generation... not all to human-level performance, but certainly to a useful one. As opposed to previous AI that was able to do only a single thing, like play chess or classify images, and had no way of being generalised to other tasks.
LLMs aren't artificial superintelligence and might not reach that point, but refusing to call them AGI is absolutely moving the goalposts.
There's also a difference between having no immediate use, and having no reason to exist. From what I understand, sexual differentiation works by having the Y chromosome act as a switch, and both sexes have to share the same blueprint with hormones guided the development of their organs.
For males not to have nipples, they'd need to be actively destroyed, which poses a risk for females to also not have nipples, which is much worse than males having harmless, inactive nipples.
That's true, but inactive nipples don't cost anything, which certainly isn't the case for an inactive uterus. I don't know how it works, but I assume that such developments follow some kind of cost-benefit function.
afaik they serve some purpose in regulating androgenic-estrogenic hormone production.
The amount of testosterone in women is not zero, likewise the amount of estrogen in men is not zero as well, and breast tissue does serve some purpose in regulating hormoe production, even in men.
Aren't nipples pretty recent? The egg part has been there for a very long time, nipples haven't evolved as long, maybe in a few hundred million years we no longer have nipples.
Mammalian fetuses all start out the same and sexual dimorphism happens several weeks into development. The same structure that eventually develops into a uterus can instead develop into a penis/prostate. Testicles and ovaries are the same tissue early in development, just like the glans and clitoris.
Biology doesn't generally suppress one entire set of organs in favor of another. They're built from the same precursor tissue and only diverge after sex hormones are activated. Biology and evolution modify existing structures, it does not typically erase one structure and replace it with another.
In addition, intersex humans exist. There are documented incidences of males born with uteri, external genitals can form halfway between male and female. Biology can get very messy sometimes. Sex is not a hard binary switch, it's a sliding scale just like most biological features. Only most individuals are at one end or the other, there's a lot of room between.
They would honestly have been better off refusing customers if compute is so limited. Degrading the quality leads to customers leaving in the short term, and ruins their long term reputation.
But in either case, if compute is so limited, they’ll have to compete with local coding agents. Qwen3.6-27B is good enough to beat having to wait until 5PM for your Claude Code limit to reset.
The recent Deepseek release probably has them more worried. But locally running these large models requires a lot of infra expertise. Market impact will be minimal. Not to mention the companies that can pull this off have enough cash to just pay Anthropic to begin with.
> Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already.
Find me a 0.66" OLED display for ~$1 that has hundreds of pixels on each side then.
> It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).
What train of thought led you to think people are primarily researching colorising new B&W photos? As opposed to historical ones, or those of relatives taken when they were young? You can take a colour photo of granddad today but most likely the photos of him in his 20s are all in black and white.
If you know a person who is 70 years old, they were 20 in 1975 - color photos existed back then.
Every grayscale photo of someone famous has already been colorized during the past 50 years. If there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.
1. Improving the colourisation algorithms has value, it might be that the available colourised photos of celebrities have inaccurate colours or are of poorer quality than say, one done with a diffusion model that can be instructed about the colours of certain objects
2. Don’t forget about B&W films! Getting automatic methods to be consistent over a long length is still not 100% solved. People are very interested in seeing films from WW1 and WW2 in colour, for instance.
3. Plenty of people (myself included) have relatives in their 80s or 90s. Or maybe someone wants to see their ancestors from the 19th century in colour for whatever reason?
Color photos existed but color film and processing was very expensive (and while mono film development "middle school student can do at home" for a generation, home color work wasn't a thing until late 80s/early 90s as far as I recall.) So in practice, I personally have childhood pics of my dad with his mom and sister - that were shot black and white but colorized by being hand painted, and this was pretty common...
reply