Nick P
@npilon.bsky.social
1.3K followers 490 following 11K posts
Dartmouth, NS dad; software engineer; fan of giant robots in many contexts, board games, RPGs. Queer rights are not negotiable. (He/Him)
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npilon.bsky.social
I don’t think there’s any evidence it’s capabilities are accelerating. If anything the pace of change has slowed. It’s better tuned for a handful of applications but “it sometimes generates the right number of fingers” is not meteorically better than it was two years ago.
npilon.bsky.social
edzitron.com
These are all flagrant lies, unsourced yet printed in a newspaper that allegedly fact checks things. The rest of it is meandering panic-bait that treats jail breaking LLMs. They don’t even describe the virus! They just said someone made one. Bullshit!
One answer is to look at the data. After the launch of GPT-5 in August, some thought that A.I. had hit a plateau. Expert analysis suggests this isn’t true. GPT-5 can do things no other A.I. can do. It can hack into a web server. It can design novel forms of life. It can even build its own A.I. (albeit a much simpler one) from scratch.
npilon.bsky.social
Oh yeah if you’re having to K8S yourself it’s not worth it. I’m most familiar with GCP’s cloud run service which is lovely - abstracts away all the ugliness but doesn’t break the bank.
npilon.bsky.social
This is “perfect weather” season 🤩
npilon.bsky.social
But folks are gonna repost the headline without reading the actual quote, and dig in their heels about it not being disinformation.
npilon.bsky.social
This week in misleading headlines being amplified by purportedly “left wing” bad faith actors: taking a statement that “it [policy] depends on being consistent with climate objectives” and cutting it off at “it depends” to create the impression of ambivalence. 🙄
npilon.bsky.social
I’m extremely skeptical of the safety of serverless execution environments like that for exactly that reason - I’d much rather a nice scale to zero containerized server environment.
npilon.bsky.social
I’ve never dealt with anything like that but it’s not impossible
npilon.bsky.social
MAN I have so many opinions about how irresponsible cloud services are when it comes to billing. At least some GCP services default to very tight quotas but way more should be, but it leads to people not thinking about the unit math of their cloud usage.
npilon.bsky.social
Krugman had a post a couple days ago looking at gold prices and explaining why he usually doesn’t think they matter but current circumstances aren’t usually: paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ingots-we-...
Ingots We Trust
Are soaring gold prices telling us something important?
paulkrugman.substack.com
npilon.bsky.social
China tariff talk absolutely finally cracked the reality distortion field around the stock market, at least briefly, though the business press is trying to talk air back into the bubble.

Crypto idk
npilon.bsky.social
Thiel used to be big into seasteading too, back in the late 2000s at least. He’s a real type of guy.
npilon.bsky.social
I can feel the burn just looking at the picture
npilon.bsky.social
Dishwashers - and modern clothes washers - are indeed incredibly efficient! If it can go in the dishwasher, it should.

OTOH water from dehumidifiers needs to be put to very limited use. It can be contaminated with lead, so should be applied cautiously.
Reposted by Nick P
mark-carney.bsky.social
Canada’s new government is starting Automatic Federal Benefits. We’re going to pre-file taxes for up to 5.5 million low-income Canadians, so they get the benefits they are entitled to — money that would otherwise be left unclaimed.
npilon.bsky.social
I’m sure the solution is seasteading
npilon.bsky.social
When I finished university and moved away my boomer parents UPSIZED to a bungalow again.
npilon.bsky.social
There's *so* much good about it; its very likely that the carbon price scheme was in part undermined because the rebates were linked to tax filing. So next time we try a price-and-rebate scheme like that, it'll be just a little bit better.
npilon.bsky.social
Dale Smith repeatedly noted it; I know I read other stories about it as well. I just dug up a TorSun article on their ties from this year, but I'm not linking it here because fuck the TorSun.
npilon.bsky.social
I saw it *repeatedly reported on* during the election.