They should fix impersonation of employees and more importantly recruiters. I've had so much fake recruiters contact me, I can't tell who is real and who is fake anymore.
It's an easy fix, just have the recruiters verify with an email every month, but they don't so it makes me think they either encourage it or they really don't care because they benefit somehow.
Are there any risks of mercury settling into the water system over time from coal power plants?
Are there risks of heavy metal and tire contaminates from vehicles leaking into the water system over time?
Are there risks of dust blown contamination from the megatons of shit humans leave everywhere we go leaking into the water system?
The answer is everything has risks, the risks from solar panels are unbelievably tiny in relation to all other pollution sources and I have to deal with a bunch of redneck solar panel haters that have bought in to massively overblown risks around them.
But more importantly it found that these solar panels are replacing diesel generators that pose a much larger pollution risk so water quality actually improved.
Maybe, but ideas like that are what you all will use to eventually turn against solar and seek to ban going off grid as you see a disparity between those who can afford to buy solar and those who can't. Why's that a problem? Those who can will go off grid and those who can't will be left on a grid that they can't pay for, and it will crumble. We are already seeing the beginnings of this in California.
Australia is leading the world in rooftop solar adoption. By June 2025, 4.2 million rooftop solar systems had been installed nationwide representing 26.8 gigawatts of clean power generation capacity connected directly to local electricity networks that serve homes and businesses.
“In the evenings homes typically consume power, which flows from large power generation plants, such as wind farms, hydroelectric, coal and gas-fired power plants. Let’s call this the ‘low-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation,” he said.
“In the middle of a sunny day, however, today about 40% of Australian homes generate their own power from rooftop solar panels. When the rooftop solar generation exceeds the power consumption in the houses, the excess power is ‘exported’, flowing back to the grid, supplying other homes and beyond. Let’s call this the ‘high-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation.”
Housing is out of range for most, but hopefully regulations will change to allow for balcony solar, which means that renters would be able to buy a tiny bit to offset their costs, and move it to their next place.
It's definitely brought up by anti-solar crowds. It's more accurate to point out that the risk is small rather than to dismiss the genuine concern. Solar panels can actually increase water quality because they replace diesel generators according to this nature article
> Because over-canal systems are subject to a more humid environment than ground-mounted systems, over-canal PV panels might have increased reliability problems45. In tropical conditions, the water content in the encapsulant can exceed solubility, which can lead to the formation of droplets of water in the modules, sometimes causing corrosion or other problems
But overall "field experiments have shown that CdTe semiconductors can withstand hot and humid environments."
WTF? People aren't allowed to ask genuine questions anymore before being labeled politically? You are absolutely fucked by politics, not everything is left or right.
Why do they bother creating effort to market all these different models.
All I want to know is how old is the model and how much does it cost. I can figure out which one I want to use based on that, assuming that newer models are always better.
Trying to convince us there is a difference between GPT-6-Sol and GPT-5.6-Terra or whatnot is ludicrous to the point of being insulting, especially when new models come out every week.
Seriously! Though I prefer GPT models to other frontier models, this shit is confusing. They keep changing the names of these models and they often don't communicate anything meaningful about the model itself, especially with these latest iterations. At least with "mini" and "nano" you understood they generally had differing speeds and "reasoning" capability, but what the hell do "Terra", "Sol", and "Astra" really mean? Which one of them is the effective successor to gpt-5.4-mini? It's hard to tell since the only objective information you'll get is token pricing. Is Terra less capable than Luna because it makes me think of dirt and grass? Or is Luna less powerful because the Earth is bigger than the Moon? Apparently that's the real answer. And why do I even have to think about this? And what comes after Astra? Galactica? Or will they start naming the succeeding models after different candy bars? Should I even care since a new model will get farted out mere days after I figured out what differentiated the last one?
What's unclear to me is who OpenAI thinks they're marketing to with this form of branding. These different models don't really mean all that much to the vast majority of people using their products who aren't developers, and developers aren't helped at all by the way they've been naming said models. Are they merely scared that they'll become irrelevant because Anthropic decided to give their models quirky names like "Opus" and "Fable"?
If OpenAI really wants to give their models names, they should name the generation of model and then have the different sub-models named by purpose or capability level. After all, I wouldn't use Mini for a job that Nano could easily do, and I wouldn't use Nano for a job that the full version of GPT-* necessitates. Similarly, I've had to discover exactly how Luna, Terra, and Sol are appropriate for different complexities and task types. OpenAI could help me skip a lot of those steps and just tell me what each model distillation is good for without causing me to look through their pricing page and make educated guesses. After all, shouldn't they not want me to pay attention to how much they're charging me?
All of this makes the days of frontend framework churn seem quaint and actually preferable.
What models are good at is so subjective it isn't OpenAI's place to really say "Use Sol for X and Luna for Y". They are publishing benchmarks so you can figure out how to best utilize each model. I get that it sucks to have to do this yourself, but eventually there will probably be some type of benchmark that help with discovering a model's strengths and weaknesses
The issue that OpenAI had when they had mini and nano models is that ambiguous the differences between those and everyone just used the base model anyway. I have no idea what type of job mini can do that nano couldn't or vis-à-vis.
I do wonder if it would just be better if they were named 6-small, 6, and 6-big?
> I have no idea what type of job mini can do that nano couldn't or vis-à-vis.
In my experience, Nano won't reliably handle complex open-ended tasks and is mostly suited for very explicit instruction that it can't screw up. It's no different from how there are some chores you can give to kids and there are other tasks you need at least a teenager for. If the decision tree of the task is very clear and conventional, Nano can be cheaper than giving the task to a relatively overpowered model, especially if it's something where the output is rigidly structured. This makes it well suited for skills that essentially run CLI commands and generate output, especially because it is usually faster. Mini is more like a discount version of the base model, and Nano is the dollar store version. Mini is more of a generalist and a fairly good deal if you have a moderately complex task that is conventional, but can be less conventional that what Nano can handle. I mostly used gpt-5.4-mini this year for my side projects because it's a pretty good generalist while significantly saving on costs. It is, however, somewhat dumber than the base model and more prone to ignore or forget rules you give it. I'd have just used a base model, but the low cost of Mini and Nano made them appealing to me. Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but I have hundreds or possibly thousands more in my pocket than many other users because of that.
This workflow I settled into with Mini and Nano didn't map cleanly on to the current generation of model tiers. With the price of Luna, you'd think it would be a replacement for Nano. In a sense it is, yet I didn't find that Terra became the new Mini. Terra is more powerful, better at explaining its own decisions, yet I've also found it to be relatively stupid while charging me more to use it. On the other hand, Luna with its reasoning set to "high" is what I consider to fill the role of Mini, and is good enough such that I no longer use Mini. Sol and Astra are great, but they're pricey. It could be my own brain and its bad perception, but so far I don't get the point of Terra. Luna succeeded at reverse engineering some abandonware with a very complicated licensing and virtualization scheme, and did so over SSH into a Windows VM with only PowerShell on the other end. Terra did such idiotic crap to my flashcards app that I stopped using it for anything after that.
This is why I find OpenAI's naming unhelpful and kind of pointless. I don't really care about the benchmarks that all these models are commonly run against. They're not that useful, IMO. OpenAI could easily give early access to these models, get a ton of feedback, and provide better insight to customers on how these things behave. Even calling Terra "gpt-5.6-overpriced-cheating-dumbass" would be better than wasting my time and money figuring it out myself. But that wouldn't make OpenAI as much money.
There’s a song on YouTube that my kid and a bunch of his classmates used to memorize the first 100 digits of pi. When they were 6 the entire class memorized the periodic table similarly using a YouTube song as well.
Funny thing is that another kid memorized pi to over 500 digits just from pure memorization.
I assume my daughter used that song as well. I remember us sitting at the dining room table and her peeling off 100 digits of pi. I explained to her that that would provide an accuracy such that a circle the size of the observable universe would be accurate to within a Planck length.
Fun memory from 16 years ago. Next month she'll be obtaining her PhD in physics.
I worked on enterprise software around the turn of the century. There was no database/os combo more bullet proof than Oracle on Solaris. Solaris was a great OS but the speed and ferocity that Linux killed Sun was something I will never forget.
I went to the Menlo Park offices to see a demo of their 64-cpu (I think) system at the time but it didn’t take long for Linux on intel killed the entire market.
Yes, that's called Quantitative Easing after the Global Financial Crisis. The peak in the graph was 2008 after which the US issues a shit ton of debt which was bought by the Fed. China used to be the biggest holder of US Treasuries but now it's the Federal Reserve and Japan.
But the idea that you look at that graph as say it's "unappetizing" is dumb. Most foreign governments besides China have INCREASED their UST holdings. The only reason why the % is dropping is because of the massive amount bought by the Fed which messed up the %.
Basically the article linked above is dumb, and they either are stupid and don't understand what they're talking about or trying to cast a false narrative
China also has not gone down, they are merely shifting their ownership structures. China accumulated over a trillion in dollar denominated assets last year, but rumors are the big players have been Chinese regional banks. It's a byzantine mess of hidden ownership structures over there.
If true, this would change the narrative. But I wouldn’t base anything on rumors. China is also rapidly building its supply of bullion and is attempting to shift trade away from the USD, so it would make sense for it to be drawing down on USD reserves. (Not that it will ever eliminate those reserves completely.)
It doesn't matter whether it is Chinese regional banks, or SAFE, or any other instrument. Brad Setzer tries to do a heroic job decoding this stuff at his CFR blog (https://www.cfr.org/blogs/follow-the-money) but at the end of the day, all that matters is total foreign holdings of dollar denominated assets - that measures their exposure to the dollar.
Everything else is portfolio allocation choices between treasuries or agencies or BAA corporates or AAA corporates, there are so many different instruments to invest in, you can shift your holdings back and forth however you like, all while keeping your dollar exposure exactly the same. And you can set up a fund in the Caymans and hold your assets there. And China does all of that. So really it is all fungible once you are in the "foreign ownership" bucket.
Your point about dollar exposure is true, we just have limited insight into foreign private ownership, as the article points out. If nations are using these vehicles to conceal their dollar exposure (or for some other purpose that results in the same effect), then we will have trouble understanding the functioning of the global economy and the risks present in the system. That seems important.
Also, equities and treasuries are not equivalent. If foreign holdings are moving to equities over treasuries, the added risk will be a serious problem in a crisis. It could also be a sign that some nations are being “encouraged” to prop up equity markets, either by the US or large domestic holders of US equities, which is a rumor that I’ve come across.
(If they are just shifting from treasuries to other types of bonds, that’s less risky but still moreso than treasuries. And it may affect yields.)
Exactly. Same as when Bessent wanted to buy 6B in long bonds but only bought 5.XB, people said that it failed but anyone who understands knows that it's the opposite. The oversubscription rate is normally 3X or more but this time it was 2X which means that people would rather keep their long bonds, which shows confidence in them.
I feel the opposite of sad, I am very very excited. I love programming and I love technology, but the stuff I'm doing now is beyond what I could not do on my own, and now I'm spending a few hours building complete end-to-end stuff. This is the golden age for builders.
I created a fully working house simulator, I made a math test creator for my kids, I fixed up some other side projects that I had and added observability, as well as installed Prometheus and Grafana and built grafana dashboards all using AI. It's wonderful.
I plan on building real-time stock price monitors with personalized alerting, taking images from my security cameras and making time lapse videos, trying to do real time predictions on football games/individual plays by having AI monitor the game and based on previous history predict plays/outcomes specifically for sports betting. I need to find the time to figure out how to do all this stuff but what used to be a pipe dream is now 100% possible and accomplishable within days.
I think the “I’m sad” camp are mainly worried about their livelihood. You’re having fun but all of those things you listed are mere hobbies that won’t generate any money, particularly in a world where the next guy can spin up some AI agent, point to whatever you built and ask it “build me this”.
This is exactly how I feel. I can roughly understand why people feel sad, but I cannot relate. I feel more capable than ever before and am simply excited. LLMs have been a great learned tool for me especially to venture into new programming domains in my personal projects.
For me, I've honestly never been much of an engineering builder - I'm focused on learning for myself. Which is useful - AI has accelerated that a ton - but it's still bottlenecked by, unfortunately, me.
There is a difference between laptop and a phone. Hopefully in the future phone can be switched to a full desktop mode and OS when it beams to large screen. Well that is unless by then we have chip in our brains or what's equally bad everything rented and leased and can be used from any physical location. Convenient but deadly.
It's an easy fix, just have the recruiters verify with an email every month, but they don't so it makes me think they either encourage it or they really don't care because they benefit somehow.
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