@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: For all of the stories of the Apollo computers having fewer transistors than the circuitry in a novelty keychain, it takes forever for consumer hardware to catch up to the capabilities of a distributed system like a modern AI product.
jmoiron plays the blues
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: This change in capabilities didn't happen because smaller models ran better, it happened because we've created bigger and more focused models, and they can orchestrate themselves to use more silicon to do more things.
It's scaling out, not optimization.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Small model capability is improving, but not nearly fast enough, and it hasn't kept pace with user expectations on what AI coding agents can do.
In just a year we've gone from "An AI agent can write small scripts badly" to "A swarm of AI agents can collaborate to plan and create...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: But if you get a few of them, or you buy access from some of the third party resellers, they're a lot cheaper and more capable than building something yourself.
Part of that is that hardware to run inference is still costly. I don't see this changing in 2026.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: There are non-cost reasons you might want to run local, but for a "hobbyist coder" use case, I just can't see any of them being better than the current offerings.
Yes, the $20 plans have been slowly undermined by stricter metering, because they don't actually come with any guara...
@jmoiron.bsky.social I hope local inference becomes cost effective someday, but that day isn't today. Most hobbyists who want to use AI can easily run with a $20/mo plan and there's simply no competing against that until the bubble bursts and that rug gets pulled.
www.aiforswes.com/p/you-dont-n...
@jmoiron.bsky.social I went digging regarding what we currently know about AI's environmental impact, and while the picture is not entirely unproblematic, it's not nearly as dire as often depicted: jmoiron.net/blog/on-ai-e...
@jmoiron.bsky.social I was very vocal in my opposition to the Iraq war before it started, and if this is where things are going, I'm strongly against the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and any escalation into war with Venezuela.
@jmoiron.bsky.social These claims were always transparently hypocritical projection and an excuse for thought policing, and if you reported them as anything else then you're a mark and should not be in journalism.
www.cnn.com/2025/12/15/p...
@jmoiron.bsky.social There's definitely a class of people who recognized their own dark frustrations and prejudices in MAGA's xenophobic rhetoric, relishing the thrill of validation, but seeing the horrific consequences of the followthrough laid bare they are nonetheless disgusted.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I wrote about housing preferences, suburban sprawl, and the way that centrist liberalism on the topic of housing serves to reinforce a conservative worldview tied to all sorts of problematic historical baggage.
jmoiron.net/blog/sublurb/
@jmoiron.bsky.social I've searched far and wide for a "Valencia Latte" outside of Japan and have been disappointed, so it's great to be back in Ebisu at the café where I had my first one.
@jmoiron.bsky.social My year-end shing mun river walk from Tai Wai out to the harbor is going to feel bittersweet this year.
The fire in Tai Po has now claimed 159 lives, more than twice as many live as the Grenfell Tower Fire, and it's made thousands homeless. Devastating. 💔
@jmoiron.bsky.social I have a theory that if we had cars that would not function if your abv was over the legal limit then the desirability of car centric suburbs would plummet overnight.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I went to Portugal a lot in the 90s to visit family, and it's still shocking to me when I go that it's basically a Nordic country now in terms of English proficiency.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Surely fear of the airborn pandemic was also a factor. How do you untangle them?
I live in the most dense urban environment in the country but since many there have second homes it was practically empty mar~aug 2020. They didn't all decide city life wasn't worth it.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: > In downtown Minneapolis, rent concessions are still available, but they’re not as common — or generous — as they were a year ago because demand has been strong and vacancies are falling.
The article is mostly about how the demand is continuing to increase but there's no new su...
@jmoiron.bsky.social Due to the distorted framing of US politics, centrists think they are straddling some enlightened middle, but they are actually just ordinary conservatives. You can tell this is true because there is no electoral result for which their answer is not "Democrats should move to the...
@jmoiron.bsky.social TIL that the words dale (meaning valley) and dollar ($) are related.
The late medieval silver coins minted in the mining town Joachimstal ended up being called "taler/thaler", from which we get the word dollar. The "tal" in Joachimstal is the German form of dale.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Teach a man a fancy AI text editor and they can hate it for a day, but teach a man vim and he can hate it for a lifetime.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Basically all astrophotography is not what your eyes can see but it is still pretty awesome.