Zero interest rate policy. When interest rates are Near zero you can spend money like it’s free. A lot of what we thought of as like normal engineering culture were the result of interest rates being zero.
This comment is not entirely on point with your comment, it circles around and above it looking for lift though.
If you're not doing work that requires your code to stay in home nation data centres, Claude for Deepseek, Deepclaude (https://github.com/aattaran/deepclaude) is a great way to get better at using Claude like tools for software development. It even does a pretty good job of putting together cover letters for job applications...
Using Deepclaude is very much cheaper than using claude... For hobby projects, I've found it useful. A recipe (for cooking) management app I've made took a couple of hours to put together and cost $US 0.5. Claude is far more expensive.
The downsides of Deepclaude for many are:-
- DeepSeek is a Chinese corporation so the Chinese Communist Party may ask for data if it wants it.
- DeepClaude isn't as fast as normal Claude, though it's still pretty fast and I think fast enough (YMMV).
- DeepClaude might not be as optimised for various code issues that Claude may be able to solve more quickly or effectively.
- The same safeguards are probably on DeepSeek, but you won't be "wasting" as much money as you might on using Claude.
Inference focused hardware (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvPqHoVSenE, AI generated speech) may in the medium future cause a large enough cost/energy reduction for LLM tools like Claude to make local LLMs more attractive.
Inference focused hardware would make running Open Source models like DeepSeek on local machines far cheaper and control over safeguards would return to the end user.
Hopefully this leads to a localised LLM provision market where local businesses provide varieties of these "local" LLM services. Here, local could mean on premise through to state or nationally based LLM services. Eventually, government orgs outside of the US may demand this kind of LLM use, in the same way governments legally require data to be stored within national borders for many critical government functions.
A bloke can dream I guess...
...Could affordable inference focused hardware also cause the bottom to fall out of these stock market bending valuations for AI corps and their datacentre obsessions?... Not to mention the societal costs caused by the AI super corps building these data centres. At the moment, they're nearly making a profit... They seem almost like speculative companies... Is that a term?
Having Blaise work on Windows, could be interesting... Though of course only in the long tail of already built Delphi apps... that still have source.... that are reasonably written... that don't rely on now unsupported libraries...
Hmmm... Ah yes. These may be some of the reasons people might not do Delphi as much anymore. Still, Delphi was great for me and helped me get a mortgage and things like that.
The Blaise author is progressing his development along nicely using QBE for the compiler. To me, Blaise looks like a team progressing things nicely, but I think it's mostly the original author.
Blaise could be a neat Pascal compiler with a great deal of old cruft cleaned out and is quite quick.
Besides FreePascal, I think those of us that like such languages are probably better playing with Ada or Modula-2.
Ada, as it continues to evolve as ISO standard, and there is an official open source compiler (among 7 vendors), and Modula-2 as it got added to the set of GCC frontends, and being the language Wirth actually designed for systems stuff (the uppercase keywords are a downer if not using a proper IDE though).
I get what you're saying about Gemini for coding and it's useful that you mention it.
I wonder though if Google isn't so worried about the viability of their coding AIs and have a longer term view than simply providing coding aids. This might also be indicated by their recent $40B investment in Anthropic, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/google-to-invest-up-to-40-bi...
I think google has another 'problem': Gemini needs to do a lot more than claude.
They use Gemini for personal assistent to all of their Gmail and co users/customers. They have Google Docs, they have GCP were gemini should support you too.
They also have a lot more languages to support too.
They optimize Gemini for A LOT more than 'just' coding. So its probably a balance act for them. And because they are that rich and have no issues on compute and brain, they can play the long game easily.
If they push their tpu further and continue their build out, they will be able to start training high quality topic optimized models in parallel while everyone else needs the same amount to just train one main model.
Just to get it into a GGUF file would be fairly trivial. But using that GGUF file would need a bunch of additional things. One would need to create a new architecture derived from Qwen3, and then probably adapt the speculative decoding functionality.
At the moment not even MTP is merged into llama.cpp, so I wouldn't quite hold my breath for it.
I thought that might be the case. I naively wondered.
I'll see if I can understand the paper :-)
Hope the paper gets lots of references and the technique gets a lot of use to save power and time.
There's been several potential big changes for LLM inference efficiency over the last few months. There's been Attention Sequencing (I think it's called..?) Turbo Quant and this one.
By the looks of it, it will take a couple more follow up PRs to clean things up a bit and get the most performance from MTP. I hope that by that point it will be easier to add more spec decoding types.
In the meantime I've benchmarked Orthrus some more and got some quite promising results. So I'd be glad if my prediction that it may take some time until it lands in llama.cpp turns out to be wrong.
There are multitudes of neuro research projects using animals as test subjects that could save a lot of money using a tool like this. If the research project is able to use a device like this rather than a human verified device. From my limited knowledge, these projects do their best to be very kind to the animals being tested. A device like this wouldn't need to be enclosed within the animal, so less risk of harm right away.
In Africa, clever locals built a humidy crib from car parts. It ended up not working as a product, but a great idea. In the link below, its celebrated as a commercial failure to learn from.
I think EEGs (Electro EncepheloGraph) can produce a far more detailed, brain related view of what an ECG (Electro CardioGraphs) can produce. An EEG can of course look into many other brain related functions and issues.
Creating a low cost version of an EEG will hopefully at least provide some thoughts to the engineers of commercial EEGs.
Commercial, medically verified devices are tied down in many ways...
- Full checks of the software and hardware design,
- backwards interoperability and compatibility for devices and their connections over their lifespan
- A full medically based software/hardware quality check,
- Providing very detailed documentation,
- doing a full test cycle around every device,
- Interacting with doctors and health experts to fully characterise the domain and typical device use. This is great to do as an engineer, but is expensive for the company :-)
- Older (often slower) more fully field verified/trusted chips for any logic are used, since they have a large measure of reliability, reducing the risk you'd get from new products.
The list above is from memory. Engineering around devices like this become part of the culture of the company. Each region (US, Europe, Oceania) have their own requirements and levels of completeness. The big market for any medical product is the US. It's FDA in the past has been the most important regulatory body to satisfy to allow access to the US market. Several other markets use the FDA as a base for their own standards too.
This process takes several years and millions to complete. Its a very necessary step. Think of the Therac 25, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 . The mistakes in this device design caused fatalities.
I used to work for Cochlear. Their devices have had some issues, but overall I think they have a very good record. The verification/quality checks outlined above are super necessary.
Anther Oz company Telectronics, built many pacemakers and unfortunately made a design mistake in the choice of material for a lead feeding the part of the device that fed the therapeutic current to the patient. After time, the lead cracked. Failure of physical integrity in a fully enclosed medical device is quite a bad failure mode. I believe The company lost 75% of its share price overnight when the issue was reported. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telectronics
When this device becomes fully wireless, its risk will drop somewhat.
This project is awesome also as a teaching tool for people wanting to join companies that make medical products. They'll be able to look over a modern design and discover what's involved.
Please jump in and make any additions or corrections to the above.
Interesting title. These thoughts are before reading the article, use grains of salt as required.
I believe that birds brains are kind of uniquely advanced too. Lightweight (in terms of mass) structured differently to mammalian brains... I've heard a definition of sight as "a bit of the brain popping out for a look". I wonder if the same brain density tricks bird brains use are used in some parts of their vision system. This is all as my memory serves. Feel free to correct any mistakes in my understanding.
There's some very interesting work happening to understand their calls too. If (my) memory serves, there able to identify particular call types quite well now.
If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less!
Fascinating to also think that birds are of course evolved dinosaurs. Raptors of the sky. It would be fascinating to link whats being looked at here with any kind of data that can be pulled from fossil evidence (though there might not be much...). I wonder which unique bird genetic traits were useful or super enhanced dinosaur traits.
...I think the strong but light bone structure was something inherited from the dinosaurs too? Fascinating creatures.
On the face of it, seems sensible that avian evolution has spent many genetic GPU cycles to generate advanced vision needed to fly and hunt from the air.... One wonders which "subroutines" have been reused from dino-days, as mentioned.
I had an an interesting experience with a bird brain today.
There's a robin who often sits in the fig tree in my back yard, giving friendly little chirps whenever I'm near. (I have no way of knowing whether it's the same robin from day to day, but if it's different robins then they all seem to be on the same wavelength.)
Anyhow, today a neighborhood cat came to the back door, and was aggressively friendly when I opened it. Clearly offering affection in exchange for... what? I've never given this cat anything before, apart from a friendly pat. Meanwhile the robin was overhead in the fig tree, giving totally different chirps than I'm used to. Clearly "warning!" "danger!" chirps. It was amazing how unambiguous they were.
I was puzzled who the robin's audience for this was, however. I'd never noticed it freaking out about cats before. Was it trying to warn me for some reason? Trying to warn other nearby birds? I couldn't see any. I thought that maybe it was just shouting at the cat out of general pique.
Then the cat led me to the answer. Turns out it had trapped an (uninjured) baby squirrel behind a planter box near my door. It couldn't reach the squirrel, and the squirrel couldn't escape. The cat seemed to be under the impression that since we were now friends, I could move the planter box and help it to get the baby squirrel. Sadly I had to disappoint it, and after unexpectedly acrobatic shenanigans, I facilitated the squirrel's escape instead.
The robin, meanwhile, ceased its warning chirps the moment it saw that I was aware of the baby squirrel. Then it watched the ensuing affair unfold, from the safety of the fig tree. Once the squirrel was safe and the cat had left disappointed, the robin looked at me, gave a few of its usual happy chirps, and flew away.
> If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less!
(source - worked at a raptor conservancy). It depends on which bird. Some are really smart and can learn tricks (e.g. retrieving specific objects) for food rewards. They can work out simple puzzles, such as finding food hidden under sliding blocks. Crested Caracaras are examples in my experience.
Others are much less intelligent, in particular owls, who aren't particularly wise. They have great instinctive behaviours but can't solve puzzles. This is partly because, for their vision, a lot of their skull is filled with eye rather than brain - owl eyes are tubular rather than eyeballs and can't move in their sockets, hence the 270 degree neck turning.
when pigeons are navigating their brainwaves oscillate around 150 - 200 Hz
a 60 fps computer display for pigeon vision is like a sequential slideshow it's much too slow to blur into what they would perceive as motion
many species of birds when they switch posture the motion is so fast it is imperceptible to the human eye it's like switching from one still frame to another
humans have perhaps 1/10th the temporal granularity that pigeons have
this leads me to the conclusion that if birds have a subjective experience it has a very different tempo than for humans or indeed most mammals
Birdsong also occurs at a far greater rate / tempo than human ears are used to distinguishing. To fully appreciate most birdsong it must be slowed considerably. This is similar to many rodent calls (also rapid and high pitched), and contrasts with, say, whalesong, which must be sped up not only to raise it to a (human-) audible pitch, but for the patterns to be sensible to us.
Some human musicians and composers have played with similar themes, increasing or decreasing tempos by huge amounts. Examples of slow pieces include As Slow As Possible by John Cage, with a performance begun in 2001 due to end in 2640, and Longplayer by Jem Finer, which lasts 1,000 years. Musician and YouTube Adam Neely has an episode addressing the fastest tempos discernable by humans. At the upper range, the inter-beat range simply merges into a new soundform, at about 15--20 Hz, the lower bound of human audio perception.
Cats also seem to have faster reactions that might be overlooked by our perceptive frame rate (imo, tested after recording interactions and reinterpreting them). Beyond eyesight, I suspect human breathing can be too noisy for their ears (consistent hissing).
The thing I find fascinating about birds is that they’ve independently evolved warm-bloodedness in a completely different lineage from mammalian warm-bloodedness.
There are similarities between the warm-bloodedness of mammals and birds that might not be coincidences.
An alternative possibility is that some ancestor of all extant amniotes already had some kind of warm-bloodedness.
Later, in the ancestors of crocodiles, turtles and lizards (including snakes), the capacity for generating heat has been abandoned, in order to save energy and allow them to survive with much less food than birds and mammals.
There is some evidence in favor of this hypothesis, besides the similarities in temperature regulation between birds and mammals.
For instance, in contrast with the amphibians, the lizards, snakes, crocodiles and turtles are dependent on high internal temperatures for their bodies to function correctly. Because they cannot generate internally the required heat, they must take it from the environment, so most of them can live only in warmer climates and they may need every day to do things like basking in solar light, before any sustained activity.
It is also known that already the ancestors of pterosaurs and dinosaurs had their bodies covered by some kind of hair, which might have had the purpose of thermal insulation. Later, that hair has evolved into the feathers of birds and of those dinosaurs more closely related to them, while in the biggest dinosaurs the hair or the feathers were lost, like also in elephants and other such big animals where cooling becomes the problem, not heating.
At least for some dinosaur or pterosaur fossils bone growth patterns are consistent with high body temperature. In the line of synapsid amniotes leading to mammals, high body temperature also appeared earlier than any ancestor of the extant mammals, but it is not known when exactly this happened.
In conclusion, perhaps warm-bloodedness (homeothermy) has appeared independently in the ancestors of birds and of mammals, but perhaps not, it could have also appeared before the split of amniotes into these 2 branches.
In general, this is the most difficult in guessing the past evolution, when you have a feature that exists only in some of the descendants of a common ancestor, is this because of independent gains of that feature, or because all the groups that do not have the feature have lost it.
Most mistakes made in the past about the evolution of living beings have been caused by underestimating the probability of multiple losses, because it was wrongly believed that evolution goes from simple to complex. Now we know that losses and simplifications are extremely frequent, typically more frequent than the development of complex features, which happens independently more seldom than assumed in the past.
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