Igor Artamonov

I thought LLMs were expensive to use. Until I allowed Claw to access my X timeline. That's where the real costs are. They charge $0.005 per post fetched (you probably scrolled past a hundred posts before reading this one -> $0.50). It quickly stacks to a few dollars a day, or more than $100/mo just to read the timeline. That's way more than the LLM API costs to actually process them.

Though ultimately, humans could just hire an LLM in their browser to pass the Botcha anyway. What to do with that? Burn their tokens?

I mean, they'll invent something anyway, but I'm just wondering what it could be. Math wouldn't work since LLMs are bad at it in general. Needs to rely on speed - answer must come in 500ms. Otherwise it's something stupidly simple, something easy that might take a human a few seconds but an LLM answers instantly. With no general algorithm to solve it. Like finding the question itself in a page of text with hints for self-verification. The server responds with Markdown full of unrelated text so it takes time for humans to even look at it. An LLM reads it, sees the puzzle instantly, and re-requests the page with the solution in the URL

If AI agents now have their own computers, websites, tools, can hire people, etc., they also need to guard access to their resources, right? Like limiting unwanted human traffic. A Captcha, but in reverse - a Botcha. How could this actually work?

When we all switch to EV cars, what will our kids do when playing with toy cars? How do you even know it's a car without making vroom-vroom sounds?

Are the people at @coinbase who work on APIs even aware of each other? It looks like there are a dozen different APIs, each working in a different way, different structs, different auth types, docs mentioning things that don't exist in reality, etc. Are they not allowed to talk to each other?

Oh, the same is everywhere. We live in a similar building and it’s terrible. Sensors, lag, bunch of click just to turn the lights on, magnets instead of door handles, it all lives its own life, etc., etc. But we checked apartments in other new builds and it’s all the same. It was designed to sell, to put nice pictures on the building website, for the designer portfolio, for anything but not for actual living

THE BIG REGRESSION My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby. It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. The ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard. And it’s terrible. What a regression. The lights are powered by Control4. And require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understand which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit THAT ONE because it’ll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn’t mean to. Worse. The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up. The Miele dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here’s what isn’t: It wouldn’t even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn’t know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate? For serious? Worse. Thermostats... Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling. Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it’s set at 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it’s at 72? Wait... What? Which number is this? Worse. The alarm system is essentially a 10” iPad bolted to the wall that has the fucking weather forecast on it. And it’s bright! I’m sure there’s a way to turn that off, but then the screen would be so barren that it would be filled with the news instead. Why can’t the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse. And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem. Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet. That some breakthrough will eventually come when you can simply knock a switch up or down and it’ll all makes sense. But that's at least 20 years down the road. It’s really the contrast that makes it alarming. We just got back from a vacation in Montana. Rented a house there. They did have a fancy TV — seems those can’t be avoided these days — but everything else was old school and clear. Physical up/down light switches in the right places. Appliances without the internet. Buttons with depth and physically-confirmed state change rather than surfaces that don’t obviously register your choice. More traditional round rotating Honeywell thermostats that are just clear and obvious. No tours, no instructions, no questions, no fearing you’re going to do something wrong, no wondering how something works. Useful and universally clear. That’s human, that’s modern.

Snow in London! ❄️

Last year I moved from the US to UK and besides the other things I took my photo printer with me. Obviously I knew the story about the guy who moved from EU to US and his HP printer stopped accepting US ink because of region lock. But I have an Epson. Turns out it's the same with Epson. I don't have time to fight the corp like that HP guy did, so I just keep buying ink from the US. Fortunately there's no problem getting it delivered to the UK, just got another one. But it's annoying and I'm probably paying a small extra. But WTF with all these DRMs? Instead of me telling people how great their printer is, I'm telling them this story. They value their brand so low

Seriously, how do people still use AWS? The UX is the worst possible. Salesforce looks modern and usable compared to it. Do you have to hire a special person just to avoid touching it?

What? 64GB DDR is now almost $500??? I'm cancelling my @OpenAI subscription just on principle

@TheCryptoCPA Is Mac version of MS Office any significant way different from the Windows version?

Excel.

@sap1ens That could be fun. I should try on a longer article. Or a book perhaps. With a typical comp science paper “show me the code” (forgot to mention this trick) works perfectly

@splix Next level I’ve seen: converting that version to a podcast (with two people discussing it)!

Just tried ChatGPT for translating an academic paper from academic language to engineering language. Also you can ask questions like "why is that?" and it actually explains. Saves so much time

I think Apple needs to do something about their Voicemail-to-text conversion because a missed call regarding 'quarterly review for anal pay' doesn't seem right to me. Even if it describes the job perfectly

There's a "gRPC Health Checking Protocol" - basically a protobuf definition with two simple endpoints: Check and Watch. They respond with status (OK or NOT), where Watch is a streaming subscription for updates. The protocol is supported by Kubernetes, and others. So I assumed Kubernetes would subscribe to Watch and react immediately on Pod failure, or Istio would switch traffic on/off immediately after status change. Turns out no one actually uses Watch streaming - they just call Check every few seconds instead. Absolutely useless

Every time I open the @flightradar24 app it conveniently forgets I have a subscription and starts showing ads. Until I tap "Restore now". Every. Single. Time. Should I just cancel the subscription if it doesn't work anyway?

TIL how taxes work in the UK when you lend cryptocurrency. Say you lend 1 BTC to a company or someone, and get it back minutes later: 1st transaction (lending): Treated as a Disposal, so you pay Capital Gains tax 2nd transaction (return): Treated as ordinary income, so you pay 45% income tax Even though you made zero profit and your balance didn't change, you owe taxes on both sides. If you both more than a year ago, i.e., have a significant capital gain like 20%+, you can easily end up owing 70%+ in total taxes on a zero-profit transaction

Didn't work 🙄 Worked for two weeks, but then requested the access again

@cryptodavidw Yeah, I know. Still the best Italian pastries. I wish something like that exists in London

@splix I was there two nights ago :D but not my style of pastries, I'm french!

I can't find a good bakery in New York, and then I remembered that they have Aux Merveilleux de Fred, I guess this will do 😛