rainy59's comments

Florida law defines anything under the age of 18 as "child porn" - so if your catgirl doesn't look at least 30 you are probably heading to prison or an expensive court battle or both

Florida defines child porn as anyone under the age of 18 so all they need to do is say the AI image depicts a 17 year old. Vaguely written laws are very expensive to fight

... with temperature = 0

true they could be fiddling w things as the EU AI Act moves forward

The more they force the model into politically-fashionable responses, the further they get away from rational thought process. CodeT5+ looks promising though

Context windows are continuing to grow. Yes I would put almost all text columns into a vector store. However I am sacrificing flexibility. It's much much easier to administer a database sitting in context memory as shown by the below video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEop2gIXuaA

Why bother connecting an LLM to external systems when you can get a lot of work done directly just with hallucinations alone in context memory. I expect this trend to accelerate as context memory and accuracy continue to improve

Obviously I wrote that before learning about Paul Schmidt

Oakland and San Jose usually had more violent crime than SF but founders knew better than to put an office there, knowing ppl will be regularly working well past midnight

Vancouver is just as gorgeous as SF and much safer (downtown was kinda sketch years ago) but kinda tech hostile

All of the west coast suffers from high structural costs. People really only endure SF for the venture money and trips to GG bridge, otherwise it makes little sense as a founder to operate there. My dream tech scenario would combine Sand Hill or London VC with Eastern Europe operating costs and lifestyle. But SF is a hotbed of AI now and so ppl literally risk their lives to work there

If you could fund and run an AI startup on the Croatian coast, I imagine SF might empty out pretty quick

NOLA used to be quite terrifying. Yet downtown French Qtr is a different world now. You can walk Warehouse to Frenchmen Marigny 3am just fine. Canal St. is really the only dicey area

Both Manhattan and SF are now more dangerous than downtown NOLA imo, but NYC is tame compared to SF. SF is getting next level - almost comparable to Johannesburg ZA

Yep same here. Estonia is a dream compared to Bay Area even with the cold winters and old Soviet buildings (which means lots of cheap rent btw). San Francisco has a powerful marketing and promotion engine - and yes it really is a gorgeous city in the late summer - but the weather otherwise is pretty miserable - almost as cold and rainy as Seattle

I'm sure - given the option - any US west coast tech startup would much prefer to operate in some quaint old town in Eastern Europe with the cafes etc. and no need to hassle with a car. Unfortunately the venture community infrastructure / legal etc. is stuck on west coast - and AI is only reinforcing that

SF is very very good at marketing itself

Crime was pretty crazy during dot com days, just tolerated more. Maritime Park next to the Hyatt / Embarcadero was always hip deep in homeless people at night. Very scary. Even worse when the freeway was still there. Market always had overly bright lights at night and looked like a sci fi dystopia. Absolutely no one wanted to be in SOMA at night which is a real problem for a startup working late hours. Hence small startups preferred renting private homes in Menlo Park etc. (Silicon Valley HBO)

It's literally across the 101

The Facebook / Sun campus is there because it was cheap land

I thought we were gonna avoid politics

I've lived in SF PDX SEA and I've lived in Europe

In the past decade, US cities enjoyed a renaissance / gentrification in otherwise formerly decaying downtown urban areas, mostly led by tech companies tired of car culture and suburbia

Now that money flows are slowing, these areas are reverting back unfortunately

IMO most US tech startups would kill to be in a cheap sunny European city say along the Adriatic coast but are hampered by funding regs etc

Yes Eastern Europe is much cheaper

The nice thing about Bay Area is that everyone is on the "same page" (call it an echo chamber maybe)

You can go into any meeting and mention some technical thing like LangChain and everyone knows what u are talking about. No need to waste 15 minutes getting ppl up 2 speed. Outside the Bay Area, Europe etc. you'd mostly get blank stares, even in an accelerator or hub

If startups were really worried about avoiding crime, they would be in high rent Mill Valley Sausalito etc

In startup world, you tolerate the crime to get cheap office space

Salesforce went downtown for the cheap rent. Otherwise it was always foggy chilly and a commute mess. Amazon's original offices in Seattle were near some really spooky stuff too. In startup grind you do what you do

In fairness, downtown SF SJ and Oakland were always a tad dicey even back in dot com days so most startups preferred to be in more expensive PA MV

Even East PA was the hood. Oakland was famous for riots

SF governance has always been terrible. Real estate has gotten so expensive that startups anxious to conserve runway are pushing deeper into bad neighborhoods that were once unthinkable