evilsaloon's comments

I just got an email from Groq saying that distil-whisper-large-v3-en will be deprecated by August 23, 2025. Their suggested replacement model, whisper-large-v3-turbo, is quite capable, but is also about twice as expensive to run.

I love the idea of Waymo in theory, but unfortunately the only times I've seen them in the news are when things go horribly wrong (like the fact that they've gotten almost 600 parking tickets in SF last year). I will still prefer a human driver, as fallible as we humans are, until we get to avionics level of safety. I drive a lot, and I often forget that cars aren't consumable, fun toys, but rather two-ton hunks of metal that hurtle at inhuman speeds. I'm glad the cars are deferential to pedestrians, but I fear the time when these limits will be unlocked.

The PayPal debit card lets you choose a 5% cash back category every month. Gas, restaurants, and a few other I don't remember. It's a much better deal than most of the credit cards I carry.

As someone who lived in Russia for a while, I have personal experience with these mini-exchanges. They're the Internet equivalent of those currency exchange stands at airports, I wouldn't call them full crypto exchanges like Binance.

They're a pretty interesting phenomenon. Some do KYC, some don't. Some are fully automatic and just need to be "topped up" occasionally, some are fully manual. They usually provide an easy on/offramp to/from crypto, but they usually have high fees and minimum transaction requirements on top of an unfavorable exchange rate. Sites like bestchange exist to aggregate all the different rates and slice a cut from the affiliate revenue.

It's nice to see how they work (or don't) from the legal side. In my mind they've always existed in a grey legal area, since some mini-exchanges openly proclaim their registration in e.g. the UK and some just don't say where they're headquartered.

They do work, but they've always felt a bit shady, and I've felt anxious using their services. Centralized exchanges are way better in regards to support and have a better exchange rate to boot.

> Durant, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, found the new prime number using only publicly available unused cloud storage space.

> I was able to find this number that’s astonishingly large … but I was able to do it just by using big tech’s leftovers.

Did he do this by taking advantage of spot pricing? It isn't actually mentioned how he uses those leftovers in the article.

"Green" hydrogen is anything but. Electrolysis is a fundamentally inefficient technique. Scale it all you want, but you will hit diminishing returns faster than with water desalination. Natural hydrogen is the way to go, and I hope hydrogen wells will become as ubiquitous as gas wells in 50 years' time.

Always funny seeing SaaS companies pitch their own product in blog posts. I understand it's just how marketing works, but pitching your own product as a solution to a problem (that you yourself are introducing, perhaps the first time to a novice reader) never fails to amuse me.