> We're nowhere near a Fable-class model IMO, but things are going to get interesting in this next year.
I'm wondering of you could clarify your thoughts on this. I've had a hard time evaluating what Fable-class actually is capable of that sets them (or really it) apart from other models in a very significant way.
Have you tried it out? I doubt there is a general accepted definition. For me it is just more capable of deep reasoning/handling complexity. Still can mess up, still does not count as strong AI - but a level above Opus and co.
Most windows laptops will do something like this by default to enhance the sound. Part of what ships as "Dolby Atmos" is some EQ-ing and normalization, with the default not being flat. It is just necessary to make those tiny laptop speakers sound half decent and not crap out all the time.
You can actually extract the Dolby Atmos settings and run them under either EasyEffects or natively under Pipewire without EasyEffects, using the Python script at https://github.com/antoinecellerier/speaker-tuning-to-easyef.... (Tested on my Thinkpad, works great).
> Clean Air Act (CAA) Acid Rain Program (ARP) does not apply to power generation facilities that are not connected to a public electricity grid, commonly referred to as “islanded” power generation facilities.
This of course makes no sense whatever, as whether or not a power generator is connected to the grid has nothing to do with its environmental impact.
It literally is just a cartoon villain plan. The AI companies look at something called the "Acid Rain Program" and think to themselves "Fuck that, what's a bit of acid rain going to do?". I truly cannot comprehend the mindset here as hard as I try
Hoggish Greedly if memory serves. Regardless of one's politics Captain Planet is so campy it's fun to watch MST3K-style. Remember Linka from the Soviet Union? "Imperialist pigs!"
When it comes to laws, do you just look at the title of the law, or do you look at the actual statute and regulations to see what the law applies to and what it doesn’t? Does a “vehicle inspection program” meant for commercial trucks apply to your car just because the title fits?
They are technicalities, because the intent of the law is clean air. A carve out for temporary generators is clearly not intended to allow megawatts of permanent generation to operate outside of the regulatory umbrella and abuse of it is allowing the rich to skate by on a technicality.
The Clean Air Act was not designed to achieve cleaner air at any cost, but instead to achieve targeted pollution control that would have the greatest value at acceptable cost. The modern structure of the act was set in place in 1970 under Nixon, and is full of legislative compromises to balance incremental benefits to air quality against burden on industry.
> These technicalities are being exploited for the benefit of approximately 10 people
Legislative compromises aren’t “technicalities.” The exceptions are as much a part of the laws as any other part. If they didn’t exist the laws wouldn’t have passed in the first place.
> Your talking points are old and exhausted
Your talking points—treating law as just an expression of intent rather than a reticulated framework—are third world mentality.
The AI companies look at something called the "endless government bureaucracy" and they think to themselves "fuck that, I'm not waiting 10 years for all that bullshit, I'll just use the loophole." I truly cannot comprehend any other reaction because I would rather have my fingernails ripped out than deal with years of government bureaucracy.
Government beauracracy, which provides things like democratic oversight, environmental protection, enforcing power grid standards and interoperability, construction regulations, etc? Would you rather we just didn't have those things?
It should be mind numbingly trivial to stand up a solar farm and ram through some transmission lines in the desert, and mind numbingly hard to set up a temporary gas generator. We needed regulatory exemptions yesterday for clean energy, public transit, and EV charging.
Oh it would be if AI actually made money. Turns out all those companies cheap out and don't actually want to put down the 20 billion for a nuclear reactor- which should be trivial if they were really the future!
They have billions of dollars, they're short on TIME.
They want computers in racks now and (rightfully imo) look at yearslong approval processes with disgust. Look at Ashburn, VA - they extract loads of money from these companies, and they keep getting investments because constructing new datacenters is easy thanks to state laws.
It's not about the money here it's about the time.
Yes, it does. If you want solar? You need lots of panels on lots of land far away from the DC. You need transmission lines connecting the two. You need to fight NEPA/CEQA/whatever lawsuits for each element of the plan, the local town councils of wherever the hell you're trying to build, and the worst part is that they aren't even required to give you an answer - they can drag out the approvals for years until you give up and leave.
Compare that to a gas turbine, which can be trucked in, plugged in, and running inside a few days. Yeah, I think we should take measures to limit gas turbine deployments and encourage companies to spend more of their money connecting renewables to the grid, but that means that they need to be able to do it quickly and without catering too much to local interests.
> The rest of us have to follow the rules, but not them.
The rest of us are not installing 1MW gas turbines in our backyards. Even if we were, I don't think the current administration wants to enforce environmental rules on anyone unless it's to block renewables construction.
They don't care if you have to follow the rules either. Why don't you get mad about the fact that you are forced to obey all these idiotic rules instead of somebody else finding a way around them.
All of them are good except for democratic oversight. Those other things are beneficial and cheap and easy to comply with. It's the democratic oversight of what gets built and where that is nothing more than a giveaway to worthless bureaucrats, lawyers, activists, and NIMBYs.
The alternative to democracy is wealthy guys who can buy their way into anything being done forcing their will upon the "worthless" rest of the populace, as you called them. If only billionaires weren't held up by the monsters that are activists protesting their activities and lawyers acting as a check on their legal power.
Let's be clear, democracy isn't perfect and it usually isn't fast. But to date, it's the only system that has any hope of keeping the most powerful in check. Rejecting democracy is begging for someone who doesn't care about you to tell you what's right and wrong.
I get that anyway. It's just that in democracy it's a mob of millions of idiots who don't care about me. I guess I'd rather have it be the billionaires because at least they want to build things and advance our infrastructure and technology.
You're not thinking like a techbro. My startup shouldn't have to adhere to those regulations, but everyone else should. In fact, once my startup gets established we should make even more regulations
> I would rather have my fingernails ripped out than deal with years of government bureaucracy.
These are just words. What matters are your actions. Your action is that you will cause other people to suffer pollution in order to enrich yourself. Why can't you stand up like a man and just say that that is what you want to do?
And if you say "I am doing this to benefit humanity who need even more AI so badly" - Well those are also just words.
Who is causing what here? If there is no demand for those services then the data center will sit there idle and cause no pollution. You can't consume services that cause pollution without accepting your share of the responsibility.
Employees at the companies that do this stuff know exactly what these regulations are for and are violating them quite deliberately. They don't actually think it's "government bureaucracy" whatever they tell the public.
I would rather take /them/ going through fingernail ripping government bureaucracy for 10 years over /me/ having acid raid, but hey, I'm just a egoistical and don't see the Big Picture or something.
What you label "government bureaucracy" is very often environmental protections working as intended.
One AI company's "bullshit" is another citizen's "clean air and water". Since the AI companies don't care about those negative externalities, the government can act help to mitigate the damage.
"Cartoon villainy" is the best possible way to describe this administration. I'm more than willing to accept lots of policy differences, but so many decisions just seem tailor made to fuck over 95%+ of the public. Like how could any sane person defend this?
It remains to be seen if the administration doesn't successfully steal future elections, but the vitriol against data centers is a rare thing that has huge bipartisan support. Texas of all places largely has a competitive governor's race because Republicans have stated they're willing to vote for the Democratic candidate because she has supported a moratorium on data centers while Abbott supports them.
Most generators not connected to the grid are for emergency backup purposes. Granted, this carve out is now clearly being abused, but the original intent is quite rational.
If we enforced strict regulations on all generators without any exceptions at all, your sewage lift station might not have a backup source anymore.
Many non-emergency generators are used because there is no grid to connect to and/or the power requirements are not anticipated to be permanent. The cost of a grid connection can greatly exceed anything justified by the use case.
There are entire industries that live off of large portable generators for non-emergency purposes because it is the only way to get power where you need it.
If that is the original intent, why did that not get added into the law? Explicitly specififying that the exception only applies to emergency backup situations would have solved this, right?
Because congress passed the law in 1970 and did not expect we'd lose the ability to pass legislation that fixes minor problems with the original laws.
Since congress can't do that anymore, to maintain a functional civilization we have to turn minor loopholes in the original law into load-bearing aspects of an industrial society.
Would you be OK with one specific generation station temporarily emitting 3x more than legal limit (e.g., from the hours of 2pm to 6pm) if the alternative is a 5% increase in absolute probability of a multi-day regional blackout? What about a 10% increase? Where is your red line?
My reasonable guess is that they did not want to make those case that need off-grid generation too hard to build. And never considered that anyone would build any actually significant amount of off-grid capacity. At certain threshold grid just makes economic sense. So rational actors would never do that.
Sadly AI companies are entirely irrational actors so this really was rather hard to foresee...
Yep. The loophole is not hard to close, they could restrict the exemption to standby generators which only operate (1) in the event of a grid outage, and (2) for testing purposes.
For a genuine off-grid use case (eg: very rural locations), they could add a new exemption which allows installations up to X kW capacity per site where local grid connections do not exist. Set X large enough that it won't negatively impact applications like cabins or nature retreats, but small enough that it's not useful to a large operator like a datacentre.
Of course, this all requires a functional Congress... so good luck.
The law is not a set of hard coded rules. It is an agreement between humans, tied up in unspoken conventions. The principle one being, don't be a dick. The law always breaks down when it is treated as a hard and fast set of instructions that can be "hacked" by slavish adherence to precise language.
> If we enforced strict regulations on all generators without any exceptions at all, your sewage lift station might not have a backup source anymore.
No need for the FUD.
It would just mean the backup generator connected to the sewage lift station must meet emissions regulations, like in every developed country on earth.
If you’re trying to say there are simply some generators that can’t meet emissions standards, I’m going to say you just aren’t trying.
Some of the most effective emissions control equipment scales down very poorly. The bigger you can make the plant, the more viable these technologies become.
And now we will have to add more bureaucracy and regulations to the process because of the tech bro's abuses of reasonable carveouts. More bureaucracy that future tech bros/right wingers will complain about existing even though they chose to force the matter to the point of regulation.
I think its so that like people don't need to do an EPA assessment for their home backup generator right? They are very common where I live due to the instability of the power grid.
It seems pretty much how law (specifically common law) has always worked though. If Congress thinks the law should apply to them, then Congress's job is to write a law that applies to them. The president and judicial branches are not supposed to make new laws, but rather to enforce the laws as written.
My reading of the EPA's statement here is they also wanted to mildly warn the companies that if they ever in the future want to contemplate connecting to the grid (eg. to bring down costs), they should be aware that bypassing compliance now could have expensive consequences for them later. Of course, Congress (local or federal) could also change the law in the much shorter term, so there's risk to them either way if they design without any forward thought for how to comply. On the other hand, if this inquiry to the EPA was merely requesting clarity on whether they are exempt from the reporting paperwork, but are using otherwise standard and compliant designs, then maybe the law is already working generally as intended.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to this President and his EPA that they are simply enforcing the laws as intended is foolish, irrational, and against all known evidence and their own words and policies and actions.
The effects of this will be reduced by the realization that these regulations can be changed in the future. No one will make a large capital investment if it could be shut down in a few years.
> No one will make a large capital investment if it could be shut down in a few years.
They will if they think they can bribe government to give them exemptions to the new rules or they think they can cash out and leave someone else holding the bag before that happens.
This program targets acid rain. It only applies to coal and diesel. No one is building off-grid coal power plants.
Diesel generators are the standard for power generation where a grid connection is not readily available and/or the power needs are temporary (e.g. emergency backups). Cheap, easy logistics, and durable. This use case has always been allowed in practice because there is no practical alternative. Many industries rely on diesel generators for reliable site power.
It doesn't apply to natural gas power plants such as those used in data center builds at all because they don't produce this type of pollution.
I fail to see the big deal. This guidance appears to clarify the language so that it matches actual practice and intent.
burning methane does produce NO and NO2 (the N2 being oxidized at temperature). that does come down with precipitation and collect in bodies of water. over time as evaporation removes the water and its replenished with acidic rain, the concentration increases arbitrarily high.
idk how much NOx a GW or two of low efficiency (20%) gas turbine units produces, how wide that plume might be, and what the envionmental impact might be. but if we employed a few people that practice doing this kind of I'm sure they could tell us with high confidence.
CAA regulations are all based on cost-benefit analysis and also seek to exclude sources that are basically too small to be worth regulating. In this case, the governing regulations have a complex set of criteria before the permitting requirements apply: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
These criteria were last amended in 2001, so the EPA is just applying a 25 year old regulation here.
That might be a reason, but probably more relevant is the fact that when you want solar to provide all power for a data center, you need a lot of buffering capacity (batteries). And then you also need a back up for when the sun doesn't shine... Which is probably a gas generator.
AI training, not inference, seems like it would actually be a good application for a solar powered DC because you could just checkpoint and pause when it gets cloudy. It might end up worth it for the free electricity.
It doesn’t make sense to do that, hardware deprecates in 5years (it used to be 3) and is currently very expensive. So by using this approach you double the average cost of hardware per unit of compute completed.
If there wasn’t such a hardware squeeze and electricity was a higher percentage of the cost, yes, it would have made sense.
They should definitely use wind power, since you could use the fans to cool the computers at the same time!
I for one would love a nice HTTP status in the form of "due to the weather being nice and calm outside, AI services are down, go outside and enjoy the day"
If coal doesn't pencil out economically for the grid it still likely won't pencil out economically for data centers even if you remove some of the compliance stuff.
Fair enough, I don't know if it matters short term for massive buildouts, but I'm sure whatever comes out of this is not a benefit for anyone except the owners.
A number of data centres have been proposed in Alberta, including a giant Meta one. Alberta has a derelict, obsolete power grid that can't even serve the current population, so you might wonder how that is possible.
They're coupling them with dedicated natural gas power plants. Meta finally stopped the green charade and simply dropped out of RE100, as they're all just going full speed ahead on destroying the planet.
It seems likely to happen again. Many US utility coal fired power plants are scheduled for retirement and will not be replaced with new coal facilities. [1]
China is building lots of new coal generation, but also lots of new solar so coal use will be reduced during daylight (not the way a coal plant wants to run, but they'll adapt)
Give it a few more years and data centers with onsite coal will look like a genius cost cutting idea. Never mind all the pollution.
> Give it a few more years and data centers with onsite coal will look like a genius cost cutting idea. Never mind all the pollution.
The numbers keep getting worse. Building "onsite coal" is more expensive than solar and storage, but now it needs more expensive fuel and you need to dispose of the toxic coal ash which won't be free either.
The hope is in a few more years, we'll not have a cult hell bent on accelerating the apocalypse in charge of the largest economy in the world, or are you guys planning something different?
This thing does a much better job at cleaning their nano-texture displays compared to a regular, smooth microfiber lens cleaning cloth, so there is actually a reason for it to exist.
That being said, while I haven't tested this, you can get other "suede" style microfiber cloths that I suspect are functionally the same thing as the Apple Polishing Cloth.
I hear that often but to me it does not feel like it. I built my own framework around pi.dev harness and run all kind of different LLMs with it. Sometimes also use the vendor harnesses and they don't feel better adapted.
One thing I found was tool calling in GLM 5.2 on github using Claude Code was mostly failing then fixing. But I didn't compare to z.ai's harness. (Nothing to do with Deepseek, sorry.)
I use OpenCode and I like knowing the direct token spend for doing tasks. A healthy repo can get a lot done with Luna + fresh context. Then I can spend $1-$2 a day when I'm doing development, and costwise honestly it beats a $200 / month plan.
I also just do a bit of hand-coding to guide the agent still.
I worry the $200 / month plans are loss-leaders encouraging you to maximize token usage to churn out slop, rather than thoughtfully use coding agents in a way that still engages your brain, and produces good software.
i've been using Cascade (a third party harness) since the 3 week period in 2023 when it was hot. I think it's called something else now. Devin? Things got confusing there for a second and I stopped paying attention.
Anyway very happy with it, I use it as a plugin to RubyMine and Webstorm.
One of the primary advantages is being able to choose your model - and it often has free deals for newer models that are running promotions. Whenever I switch to Claude Code it seems clunky. Would rather use Claude with Cascade.
I'm glad he posted the video. One thing he didn't mention that is striking to me is how high his hand is on the page, essentially resting above the line he is writing, with his thumb parallel to the line. Whereas as a right-hander, my hand is essentially centered on the line, with my thumb at a 45 degree angle to the line.
Do most left-handers learn to hold their pen/pencil like that? If not I imagine it would be quite a transition to adapt to as all the motions are rotated - the portion of the stroke previously done by moving fingers in and out would instead be done by moving side to side, and vice-versa.
Edit: Or from trying it, I guess you could just write as normal and end up with everything italic/slanted.
From what I've read, lefties are typically classified into "over-writers", "side-writers", and "under-writers". That video caught my attention too, as it shows pretty clearly that he's an over-writer.
I myself am probably somewhere in between an over-writer and a side-writer lefty, edging slightly closer to an over-writer. Maybe a 20 degree angle to the line as my thumb wraps around my other fingers?
I've never found a fountain pen that I've liked because every time I've tried one, I ended up tearing the paper as I go as I'm essentially pushing the nib across the page and so the nib snags on the paper, digs in, and makes little holes. And I left pencils behind as soon as I could in school because every day I'd come home with the side of my left hand silvered with graphite.
These days, my preference is a Pentel EnerGel, a Uniball Signo, or a Pilot G-2 (i.e., gel pens like the article mentions). They can write easily without much force and dry quickly enough so that my hand doesn't smudge. For my daily pocket carry, I've also learned that I always want the capped variants rather the click kind, or else I'll end up with stained inner pockets and scribbles on my thigh. This makes the G-2s nice for home and desk use, but not for daily carry.
(And though the article suggests using cursive and not getting hung up on legibility, somewhere back in grade or middle school I switched to using either print style, or an engineering-hand-like small caps style, depending on mood. Both in the interest of legibility, despite my left-handedness.)
Actually, paper orientation was a big help too. Used to tilt the sheet so you write almost bottom-to-top, that way you at least don't smuge the writing right away, and hopefully the ink dries quick enough for the next line
I'm left-handed and always tilt paper at least 45° clockwise, effectively writing from below. Never had any smudging issues, even with fountain pens, as my hand simply never goes over any ink. Left-handed people who write from above by bending their wrist have always confused me, as it's both less comfortable and does not completely avoid smudges.
I think I would write mirrored. Especially in this day and age, there is no reason to write LTR over RTL by hand. You basically never have to write legibly for official reasons.
I agree with this but for a different reason than what the author gives.
When you write in a notebook you can see where what you are writing is within the notebook (e.g. ~1/3 of the way through, etc). That seems like a small thing but I think it really helps with anchoring the memory when writing, as well as with referencing it later. And of course you can also add all sorts of tabs and page markers to help even more.
I'm wondering of you could clarify your thoughts on this. I've had a hard time evaluating what Fable-class actually is capable of that sets them (or really it) apart from other models in a very significant way.
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