> There's a lot that hosted services with extra features can give you.
I totally agree with that, but in my experience 99% of "application developers" don't need all these features. Of those you listed, I only see "backups" as a requirement. Everything else is just - what I said - features for when your application is successful and you want something streamlined.
If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud, then corporate can do what it does best and change policy hard enough to give the staff whiplash.
I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is even higher than a local solution.
This matches my own experience of what people needed to serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone, you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many layers of abstraction between business logic and bare metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that, you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to work as a server.
> If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud...
This is more than a theory, it's a trend that is already underway. The cloud remains supremely capital efficient for startups, but pricing has crept up and some customers are falling off the other side of the table.
You might save 100k in server fees, but now you have to hire three full time people to manage your own servers. And you won’t get the redundancy or the security of having the experts do it across three data centres for you.
They don't want to necessarily buy it, but they want to hedge their options from "my $guy can do everything" to "on which cloud platform can I find a competent operator tomorrow".
I'm in Norway, and I wonder if I see different prices than people from elsewhere in the world? Here it says $1.7K, and I can get the LG UltraFine 6K 32" for $2K, with the benefit of being bought from a Norwegian retailer (think guarantees and shopping security).
To be clear; I have never tried either of these monitors, so I can't tell if either is any good. :D
> I have to charge it from the right hand ports. I think that is dumb, but it did solve the issue.
I _had to_ do this for a while (around 2023, I think, not that it matters), but I no longer have to. I don't know what has changed, unfortunately; I haven't reinstalled anything, and I can't say I have uninstalled anything either. It's really weird...
> We are getting to the point that its not unreasonable to think that "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" could be included in some training data.
I may be stupid, but _why_ is this prompt used as a benchmark? I mean, pelicans _can't_ ride a bicycle, so why is it important for "AI" to show that they can (at least visually)?
The "wine glass problem"[0] - and probably others - seems to me to be a lot more relevant...?
The fact that pelicans can't ride bicycles is pretty much the point of the benchmark! Asking an LLM to draw something that's physically impossible means it can't just "get it right" - seeing how different models (especially at different sizes) handle the problem is surprisingly interesting.
Honestly though, the benchmark was originally meant to be a stupid joke.
I only started taking it slightly more seriously about six months ago, when I noticed that the quality of the pelican drawings really did correspond quite closely to how generally good the underlying models were.
If a model draws a really good picture of a pelican riding a bicycle there's a solid chance it will be great at all sorts of other things. I wish I could explain why that was!
So ever since then I've continue to get models to draw pelicans. I certainly wouldn't suggest anyone take serious decisions on model usage based on my stupid benchmark, but it's a fun first-day initial impression thing and it appears to be a useful signal for which models are worth diving into in more detail.
Your comment is funny, but please note: it's not drawing a pelican riding a bike, it's describing in SVG a pelican riding a bike. Your candidate would at least displays some knowledge of the SVG specs.
I wish I knew why. I didn't think it would be a useful indicator of model
skills at all when I started doing it, but over time the pattern has held that performance on pelican riding a bicycle is a good indicator of performance on other tasks.
The difference is that the worker you hire would be a human being and not a large matrix multiplication that had parameters optimized by a a gradient descent process and embeds concepts in a higher dimensional vector space that results in all sorts of weird things like subliminal learning (https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/).
It's not a human intelligence - it's a totally different thing, so why would the same test that you use to evaluate human abilities apply here?
Also more directly the "all sorts of other things" we want llms to be good at often involve writing code/spatial reasoning/world understanding which creating an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle very very directly evaluates so it's not even that surprising?
For better or worse, a lot of job interviews actually do use contrived questions like this, such as the infamous "how many golf balls can you fit in a 747?"
a posteriori knowledge. the pelican isn't the point, it's just amusing. the point is that Simon has seen a correlation between this skill and and the model's general capabilities.
It's just a variant of the wine glass - something that doesn't exist in the source material as-is. I have a few of my own I don't share publicly.
Basically in my niche I _know_ there are no original pictures of specific situations and my prompts test whether the LLM is "creative" enough to combine multiple sources into one that matches my prompt.
I think of if like this: there are three things I want in the picture (more actually, but for the example assume 3). All three are really far from each other in relevance, in the very corner of an equilateral triangle (in the vector space of the LLM's "brain"). What I'm asking it to do is in the middle of all three things.
Every model so far tends to veer towards one or two of the points more than others because it can't figure out how to combine them all into one properly.
> It's not nessessarily the best benchmark, it's a popular one, probably because it's funny.
> Yes it's like the wine glass thing.
No, it's not!
That's part of my point; the wine glass scenario is a _realistic_ scenario. The pelican riding a bike is not. It's a _huge_ difference. Why should we measure intelligence (...) in regards to something that is realistic and something that is unrealistic?
> the wine glass scenario is a _realistic_ scenario
It is unrealistic because if you go to a restaurant, you don't get served a glass like that. It is frowned upon (alcohol is a drug, after all) and impractical (wine stains are annoying) to fill a glass of wine as such.
A pelican riding a bike, on the other hand, is realistic in a scenario because of TV for children. Example from 1950's animation/comic involving a pelican [1].
A better reason why wine glasses are not filled like that is that wine glasses are designed to capture the aroma of the wine.
Since people look at a glass of wine and judge how much "value" they got based partly on how much wine it looks like, many bars and restaurants choose bad wine-glasses (for the purpose of enjoying wine) that are smalle and thus can be fulled more.
If the thing we're measuring is a the ability to write code, visually reason, and handle extrapolating to out of sample prompts, then why shouldn't we evaluate it by asking it to write code to generate a strange image that it wouldn't have seen in its training data?
> after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.
I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).
However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)
I totally agree with that, but in my experience 99% of "application developers" don't need all these features. Of those you listed, I only see "backups" as a requirement. Everything else is just - what I said - features for when your application is successful and you want something streamlined.
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