Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).
Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.
The ENIAC press demo, essentially the first public demo of an “electromechanical brain”, just ran parabolas to estimate artillery trajectory. (It also involved the genius addition of ping pong balls secured to each lamp on the machine, so as to be more legible to the reporters and photographers)
Yes, and very obviously so. I'm here to debunk such ridiculous and obviously untrue conspiratorial things.
There isn't a shred of reality to support the notion that software is materially different than any other industry, and 'The Silicon Valley' starts with 'Silicon' - and then went through 'Hardware' - it wasn't software dominated until the 1990s.
I would go so far to say as Software is less involved than hardware.
Defence has almost always been a 'physical' industry and most defence contracts are for gadgets, not software.
Obviously - there's a ton of 'intelligence' going on that is software oriented, but they're generally not massive contracts, but bespoke stuff.
The NSA is not spending $100B on single procurement. They're relatively small.
(FYI - one middle sized defence program is bigger than CIA/FBI/NSA budgets)
Yea how is this comment so low. There was a brief period of time where the military industry complex wasn’t deeply entwined but that period is very much over.
As a person whose graduate work in GOFAI in the early 1980's was funded by DARPA, I am somewhat conflicted by choices like this.
In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.
MCP's are great for adoption of your service outside of developer circles. Non Technical users can click a link, trigger an OAuth flow and authenticate. You can't do that with API. API still is better for developers using a AI via a CLI but MCP is easier adoption for web or desktop based clients.
I've read many comments about how good CLIs are, and they are right. But for developers.
For non-tech people, installing the CLI is a hurdle: it involves having the right dependencies installed, controlling how you handle secrets (like API keys), and handling updates (ie. npx with a private registry). But for internal tools, once you create an MCP with OAuth, the installation (in Claude) is straightforward.
I'm surprised how non-tech people in the company use it for ad-hoc integrations, like pulling emails, getting deals from HubSpot, enriching that with the internal MCP, then drafting responses. Of course, this has scaling issues, and at some point it is better to move these everyday automations to a proper system, but I saw how MCP enables what products like Zapier, n8n, or IFTTT try to do: user-friendly ad-hoc integrations.
My only complaint: implementing MCP auth in an MCP server still isn't very streamlined. Some libraries, like Cloudflare MCP, simplify all of that, but AFAIK it's tied to using their services.
We hooked up fly.io's sprites mcp to our company claude and now all employees can spin up dev envs and actually prototype, verify or reproduce something before coming to engineering; doing it directly from web or wherever and it's properly authed and sandboxed through their accounts
I run a similar setup to the one he described on similar hardware. I run bifrost and llama swap though (tailscale rocks). My local model usage is for some out of band batch processing one of my personal apps uses. Basically a personalized recommender for media, it curates stuff for me based on a database i've compiled over years, so non-interactive. For that use case, I don't really care that it might take a few minutes to run. It's free. The machine is just sitting there anyway. I have tried using qwen-coder and opencode on my M5 Max 128gb and compared to claude code it's painful. I did setup a workflow where claude plans, qwen executes (unattended overnight, again b/c it's slow) and then claude reviews. I benchmarked this several times and I ended up using MORE tokens with claude because it had to 'fix' all the qwen issues. While the code it produced was 'good enough' the fixes were worth it so I just stick to coding task using API models (codex and claude).
It isn't, the cost is included in your electricity bill, not even talking about the cost of your time to set it up. It's very possible that it costs you more than a cloud mode would, you just don't want to calculate it properly.
It sounds like they are doing something similar to what I described in my other post below. Personal media station.
That can be done on hardware that quite a lot of people basically just have and don't use 24/7 to the max - because it is their gaming machine or their programming and compiling workhorse, for example. Of course you are paying for additional electricity but even with napkin-math instead of a "proper" calculation, you are unlikely to pay more for running your own instead of something commercial (and that can be offset further with some of the "modern" electricity contracts and/or PV and battery storage). Especially if we are talking about a stack that runs most of/all the time when you are not using your machine and makes LLM calls regularly while running.
The work in software/admin to get whatever you want set up is similiar no matter which infrastructure you use.
true but if you're actually running k8s and similar workloads, chances are it might eat memory that LLM requires.
you'll also notice these articles rarely specify their context window in tokens, because it is small, usually 30k to 70k tokens and it gets slower as it fills up.
I actually have a Mac Mini M4 Pro with 48G. I gave the k8s example because this is what I was doing with it.
Was because I am back to using Linux as my workstation.
My Mac Mini is now a headless server for llama.cpp.
So, you are right that for these workloads , I would not be using the Mac Mini for k8s AND llama.
Another thing going against using a Mac for Linux containers is that there are no solutions that I know that properly manages memory : memory is given to the Linux vm , but never fluctuates if the needs in the vm are less than the initial request.
I know Orb Stack does that but is it proprietary. I think UTM does it , but not sure I would use UTM instead of Lima, Colima , multipass , etc to run containers.
> It's very possible that it costs you more than a cloud mode would
...which is almost always true in a single request/reply mode and never true in batch mode. Single request usually 2x-3x more expensive than cloud and batch mode 2x-3x cheaper. Now, for narrow tasks, a finetuned tiny 8b model would dramatically outperform SOTA frontiers for a fraction of price, esp. on energy efficient hardware like Apple.
Local is never cheaper than cloud because they can do batch inference, and that means you load model weights once to produce 128 tokens on 128 sessions in parallel not 1 token on 1 session like local models. Local models rarely get to high utilization factor, they spend most of their time waiting.
If you had only batch inference and enough of it to fill the compute to 80% then you get cheaper local models.
Local models can absolutely run in batch, what are even talking about?
> If you had only batch inference and enough of it to fill the compute to 80% then you get cheaper local models.
Even if you ran sequentally, single session, a _finetuned_ tiny (8B) local model on narrow tasks would abolutely mog SOTAs, any of it - Fable, Opus, Sol you name it.
> Local models can absolutely run in batch, what are even talking about?
I think the point was that if you aren't running your local machine at 100% for 24 hours a day then a cloud - with multiple clients - that is, will be more efficient.
Can you share a bit more about your bifrost and llama swap setup? I’m facing memory constraints and am looking for a managed model solution that will help with hot swapping loaded models and stay-warm concurrency. Ideally with prioritization.
What do you want to know? Just start llama-swap with the models i have downloaded, add llama-swap as a provider in bifrost, expose the models you want and they become available in one single endpoint you can use in anything like opencode, openwebui or anything that speaks openai.
Yes, that makes sense. Some of my models currently run in ollama while others require their own inference servers. I’m curious about custom inference servers in bifrost and the ability to orchestrate keeping some models warm in memory while evicting and cycling other models. All of which span different providers in bifrost (I think). Obviously I can get the mechanics from an agent, more wondering about any experience with something similar.
I've been a software dev for 25 years. In the past year I've hand written maybe 10 lines of code. For the first 2-3 months i would read it, then I figured out how to really use AI/code gen and the amount created was more than I could read. I can work on 2-3 projects at once, or 2-3 parts of a larger project at once. More than that I can't keep task switching. The speed and complexity of what I'm able to create is 10x doing it by hand. In the hands of someone that understands system design it's a great tool, but still need fundamentals. I've seen junior's build stuff that would never deploy and would crash with a handful of users.
I think you will always need a button pusher. whether it is the CEO, the product manager or the developer themselves. You will need some sort of overseer who will take accountability of the system that is generated by the AI.
Okay. Is that job going to provide a competitive salary, with good benefits? More importantly, is it going to be personally fulfilling?
Software developers who have adopted agentic coding are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire careers future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title "engineer".
"Compositors who have adopted Linotype machines are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire trade’s future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title “printer.”"
"Weavers who have agreed to tend a fourth loom are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire trade’s future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title “weaver.”"
"Handloom weavers who have adopted power looms are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire trade’s future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title “weaver.”"
Yes. The only rational response to the coming AI wave is to get out of the business of selling intelligence for money. The machines will out-think you for cheaper.
SOC2 doesn't really prescribe anything, they require that you document what you say you do then prove it over time. It's not complicated and kind of a joke in the end. So many companies just want to see a 1 page PDF, updated yearly saying you passed your audits, some request your documentation, most don't. Those that do probably just stick it in a folder somewhere and never open it anyway.
Many gov sites allow one or the other. Really neither is a good solution. Is it "safe" to have everyone in the country, citizen or not, in possession of a login on a .gov site?
I setup an alias in my shell for --dangerously-skip-permissions after about a week of the constant y, y, y a year ago. I felt like Homer Simpson running the nuke plant and couldn't take it anymore. So far it's only deleted some files I likely would have said NO to, but in reality would have just hit y anyway. They were recoverable so no harm.
Uh? What? Shakedown? You enabled a free preview of a paid service, they are now letting you know what it will cost to continue to use a paid for service, how on earth is this a 'shake down'? GitHub deserves a lot of crap, but not for this.
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