Actually, in the 2000's CERN was the biggest internet exchange point in Switzerland, while the physical datacenter was not in Switzerland but in France xD
I was too, and I was going to ask whether this is a good use of taxpayer money, as the ICANN fee for registering a TLD is $227,000. But given the fact that the Web was invented at CERN, I could imagine that they got a special deal.
Happy to learn about details if someone knows more!
surprised at the responses to this post. While I thought the title was dumb, the underlying thesis is not the ragebait I was expecting, and I actually agree with the author.
LLM's work best when they can call a tool and observe the success/failure of a change. If you're HITL then you're the tool, but the result is the same. only slower.
I'm working on a 2D game (pixi.js) with claudecode, and after I moved some logic into a webworker the LLM created a headless simulation exercise of it and would run this to test performance changes against (or in exploration of an issue), which I was surprised by.
I also created some robust graphs & metrics which were easy to screenshot and upload to claude. this was a HITL but it gave claude a lot more insight into what's actually happening instead of guessing when the browser plays the game and has FPS drop.
LLM's do best when they can see what their code is doing. If you can't remove yourself from that cycle of testing you should at least optimize it so you can give rich errors.
Serving barely useful GLM 5.2 costs what? $15k? Actually useful is like $50k? You’ll never recoup the cost unless you ‘locally’ means ‘inference provider is not the model provider’?
$15k or $50k is pretty cheap all things considered (a year ago it would have been more expensive, one person can spend that in a month or two)
I bought my spark and the models have already improved in that time (qwen3.6, speculative decoding 2x tgen, diffusion gemma 4x tgen) and I expect this to improve. Look out another 2-3 years, local is going to be very competitive.
When a low speed of the order of one token per second is accepted, any open weights LLM can be run on an ordinary PC (with the weights read from SSDs) and the cost becomes negligible.
Such a low speed would be annoying for a chat, but I do not believe that it is "barely useful" for a coding assistant. There are plenty of tasks for which it is fine to get results some hours later or even overnight, and batching multiple tasks can complete them in about the same time as a single task.
I don't know. Even the frontier models do dumb things sometimes. Being able to iterate (and iterate quickly) is really important. If you get 1 try a day, you're probably back to it being better to just code by hand. Also, you're going to get absolutely outpaced by anyone who uses AI that goes faster.
So maybe for a hobby project this is fine, but for something you have to take to market and compete with... I think it'd be a really rough sell.
EDIT: also, just to be clear: if there was a practical path to using local AI, I'd take it in a heartbeat. I hope it gets to the point that it's better to use local than paying someone $200/mo. But right now, that $200/mo is the clear best option. I get making compromises for ideology but the compromises are too big for me right now.
This is probably the dumbest possible way to do it. Just buy tokens through open router and you could run it all month 24/7 at 100tps for practically nothing. There are tons of ways to pay for things without giving your personal information.
glm-5.2 is available for $20/month on ollama.com and is IMHO more functional than the $200/month claude max subscription. you can even use the same claude harness [0]. You get about 20x more token usage at 10x less the price.
That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.
It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.
Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that.
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
I feel like you missed the point pretty aggressively here if you're trying to claim waymo's existence in any way justifies burning roughly the GDP of Luxembourg on R&D. This should be a fairly alarming indicator of how utterly divorced the tech industry is from any kind of real world outcomes and just one of countless examples of tech industry hype resulting in embarrassingly miniscule returns when actual results are considered.
The cars exist, and they drive themselves. In the real world. Here's the latest city list:
San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Metro Phoenix, AZ
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Dallas, TX
Houston, TX
San Antonio, TX
Nashville, TN
I don't know why comparing it to the GDP of Luxembourg is interesting but sure. 1.9 million people die annually in car crashes.What would you spend it on?
pinches nose in frustration Yeah and they fled the Atlanta metro area because it rained. The point (the actual point here) isn't to relitigate Waymo's arc of existence. I merely hold them up as one of countless examples of the market's apparent disinterest in examining basically any of the tech industry's claims vs reality and how this leads to deeply perverse outcomes that absolutely would not be tolerated from any other industry segment. I'm guessing I'd get less pushback if I'd instead mentioned techbros attempts to reinvent trains badly from first principles being a smoke screen to sabotage mass transit projects, or pretty much anything involving social media or computers in classrooms.
While I have you I'm honestly curious what it is about Waymo that attracts all the devotion? That's super not a thing where I live so I'm guessing it's got to be some kind of regional cultural thing or something?
I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
That very much depends on how you group your terms. Mediocre code has existed as long as programming languages, and it was something organizations trained juniors to avoid mass producing. What's revolutionary is now your boss is throwing money at tokens instead of paying for ass-seat-hours.
I feel like comparisons with the industrial revolution are reductionist in dangerous ways. The industrial revolution first shifted and then increased overall demand for labor. This made the labor movement possible and eventually ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity for the working classes. AI (by it's own marketing claims) is poised to vastly reduce demand for traditional labor without creating any new demand to replace it. Given the deeply interconnected nature of the modern economy it's not hard to imagine this proposed reduction in labor demand collapsing the economy in ways that fucking with interest rates and printing money don't fix.
I'm really struggling to get a handle on your position here. You appear to be arguing the worst positions from both sides of the debate around AI at the same time. If you're claiming the future is here and it is deeply stupid then we're in violent agreement.
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.
Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s
What makes it particularly bad too, is it does a style of saying
“The X was Y”
for non-trivial concept X, without any previous attempt to introduce or explain what it is. It reads like it’s intentionally trying to bamboozle the reader
I had long discussions over whether we could just not use tons on npm libraries and use the native browser feature for things like that. I typically lose these discussions because I'm considered the backend guy. My knowledge about HTML, JS and CSS dates back to times when there was no npm...
People often forget how good tablet and mobile datepickers have gotten as well. They may not match your sites weird style exactly, but they'll feel native and handle lots of things like ADA compliance that your crappy custom one likely won't.
"you're" here referring to higher ups not you personally
Which ones? Because there are a lot of instances where genuinely good, productive and useful programs were cut.