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Hm, Claude is a common male surname, especially in Europe. That plays into it. Also many people - including me - have personalised their AI chats, have given it names, even something resembling a personality (it's easy with prefix prompts). Why others do it, who knows, I do it because I find it a lot less frustrating when ChatGPT fucks up when it pretends to be a young adult female klutz.

Which would also render differently on every machine, based on browser settings, screen sizes, and available fonts.

Like the web was meant to be. An interpreted hypertext format, not a pixel-perfect brochure for marketing execs.


Hum, table cells provide the max-width and images a min-with, heights are absolute (with table cells spilling over, as with CCS "overflow-y: visible"), aligns and maybe HSPACE and VSPACE attributes do the rest. As long as images heights exceed the effective line-height and there's no visible text, this should render pixel perfect on any browser then in use. In this case, there's also an absolute width set for the entire table, adding further constraints. Table layouts can be elastic, with constraints or without, but this one should be pretty stable.

(Fun fact, the most amazing layout foot-guns, then: Effective font sizes and line-heights are subject to platform and configuration (e.g., Win vs Mac); Netscape does paragraph spacing at 1.2em, IE at 1em (if this matters, prefer `<br>` over paragraphs); frames dimensions in Netscape are always calculated as integer percentages of window dimensions, even if you provide absolute dimensions in pixels, while IE does what it says on the tin (a rare example), so they will be the same only by chance and effective rounding errors. And, of course, screen gamma is different on Win and Mac, so your colors will always be messed up – aim for a happy medium.)


Oh good times, the screen gamma issue got me many times back then, as I was the super odd kid on a Mac in the late 90's (father was in education). I'd pull my beautify crafted table-soup site up on a friends PC later and wonder why all the colors were all wacky!

>Like the web was meant to be.

what?


Do you not remember the good old days when people who focussed on graphics design rather than content put 'Best used with Netscape/IE5.5' on their pages?

Presumably written by a person who wasn't a web developer back then or were developing solely for Internet Explorer.

I keep wondering ... is this a good benchmark? What is a practical use-case for the skills Claude is supposed to present here? And if the author needs that particular website re-created with pixel-perfect accuracy, woulnd't it me simpler to just to it yourself?

Sure, you can argue this is some sort of modern ACID-Test - but the ACID tests checked for real-world use-cases. This feels more like 'I have this one very specific request, the machine doesn't perfectly fullfill it, so the machine is at fault.'. Complaining from a high pedestal.

I'm more surprised at how close Claude got in its reimagined SpaceJam-site.


I feel we have a RAM price surge every four years. The excuses change, but it's always when we see a generation switch to the next gen of DDR. Which makes me believe it's not AI, or graphics cards, or crypto, or gaming, or one of the billion other conceivable reasons, but price-gouging when new standards emerge and production capacity is still limited. Which would be much harder to justify than 'the AI/Crypto/Gaming folks (who no-one likes) are sweeping the market...'

But we're not currently switching to a next gen of DDR. DDR5 has been around for several years, DDR6 won't be here before 2027. We're right in the middle of DDR5's life cycle.

That is not to say there is no price-fixing going on, just that I really can't see a correlation with DDR generations.


Regardless of whether it is Crypto/AI/etc., this would seem to be wake-up call #2. We're finding the strangle-points in our "economy"—will we do anything about it? A single fab in Phoenix would seem inadequate?

If 'the West' would be half as smart as they claim to be there would be many more fabs in friendly territory. Stick a couple in Australia and NZ too for good measure, it is just too critical of a resource now.

The west is only smart at financial engineering (printing money to inflate stocks and housing). Anything related to non-military manufacturing should be outsourced to the cheapest bidder to increase shareholder value.

Micron is bringing up one in Boise Idaho as well.

What will we do with that fab in two years when nobody needs that excess RAM?

There has never been 'an excess of RAM', the market has always absorbed what was available.

Yeah right, tell that to Qimonda.

Sell it at lower prices. Demand is a function of price, not a scalar.

Tax write-off donations to schools and non-profits, too.

I suspect there will be a shortage of something else then…

And regardless, you could flip it around and ask, what will we do in x years when the next shortage comes along and we have no fabs? (And that shortage of course could well be an imposed one from an unfriendly nation.)


It's a political problem: do we, the people, have a choice in what gets prioritized? I think it's clear that the majority of people don't give a damn about minor improvements in AI and would rather have a better computer, smartphone, or something else for their daily lives than fuel the follies of OpenAI and its competitors. At worst, they can build more fabs simultaneously to have the necessary production for AI within a few years, but reallocating it right now is detrimental and nobody wants that, except for a few members of the crazy elite like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.

Why is this downvoted, this is not the first time I've heard that opinion expressed and every time it happens there is more evidence that maybe there is something to it. I've been following the DRAM market since the 4164 was the hot new thing and it cost - not kidding - $300 for 8 of these which would give you all of 64K RAM. Over the years I've seen the price surge multiple times and usually there was some kind of hard to verify reason attached to it. From flooded factories to problems with new nodes and a whole slew of other issues.

RAM being a staple of the computing industry you have to wonder if there aren't people cleaning up on this, it would be super easy to create an artificial shortage given the low number of players in this market. In contrast, say the price of gasoline, has been remarkably steady with one notable outlier with a very easy to verify and direct cause.


This industry has a history of forming cartels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal


There is also the side effect of limiting people to run powerful models themselves. Could very well be part of a strategy.

It's absolutely part of the strategy and the strategy has multiple prongs. Another prong is this obnoxious push for regulatory capture in the name of "safety".

See, there is no such thing as a 'democracy'. There's only autocratic systems that pretend better, and those who pretend worse.

The luxury of the West in 1 sentence.

Have fun telling that to yourself when a random idiot that 30% of people voted for has power of life and death over you and your family.


As if you have a say other than "that guy" or "that other guy".

The wealthy already fund politicians' careers, they fund judges, they fund campaigns. The wealthy already run the country. They fund both parties as a tactic. The parties are just "good cop/bad cop".


This is democracy, it doesn't mean it's perfect. It's just a tool to keep a lot of people in line. It's the HOW that matters, which is what life finally is about.

Being a crazy authoritarian guy with power of life and death over each of your citizens is one. No government at all is the other extreme, which finally leads always to another crazy guy.

In between there is an ocean.

...and putting everything in the same pot is mostly wrong, but lately it's cool to be anti-everything.


Is it a democracy when theres a whole class of people who can take over the political apparatus?

Is it democracy if a group of people totally coopt the electoral process by cultivating all the candidates and their policies behind the scenes and then present a few issues for us to bicker about?

Democracy is supposed to be everybody.

And you may say "but you can pick the person and representatives". But often these are already cultivated by the rich OR the political apparatus has been so corrupted that picking them does nothing.

Not only cause you can't influence policies after you vote, so that voting essentially becomes a pinky promise you make with the candidate. But also because the rest of the govt is so corrupted that an individual candidate, even if independent, is gonna have a hard time working in favor of the people.

You say in between theres an ocean, but for analogy purposes, what can the Millions of us do in an ocean if we don't have a boat?

Where's your think tank and lobbying group?


> Being a crazy authoritarian guy with power of life and death over each of your citizens is one. No government at all is the other extreme

no, the other extreme of "crazy authoritarian" is "liberal democracy"

The other extreme of "no government at all" is "everything is run by the government"


Fair enough, technically you are right.

> The wealthy already run the country

Dude this is a programming forum. Aren't you "The wealthy"?


Strictly it is capitalists who run the government.

While an individual can be wealthy, it is those who own the wealth-making-assets who control the government, AKA the capitalists. Because controlling the wealth-making-assets makes you an important element of national security, so you get a seat at the table.

While making 750k a year means you get a seat at your companies table to do what they require of you. It is very very different. It's capitalists VS workers that matters. Not strictly the wealth levels.

PS. Also I got laid off, I'm broke, lol. To all you childish mofos who think I'm a socialist because I'm currently broke: False. Some people are raised socialists.


I'm not shocked at all. It's the nature of things for people - on average - to not want to learn. How many of your peers have shouted 'no more school' or something similar during their graduation?

How many people do you know who seem to be completely immune to learning? Go to any non-tech office an you will find shared passwords on post-it-notes, after 40 years of mantra-style 'Do not share your passwords' messaging.

If something goes wrong, it's not their fault, it's the machine's fault. "Why was this possible in the first place?" they ask. "Build it so this becomes impossible." That mindset let to OSHA regulations, to ever-safer aircraft, and to encryption on the web. It's not necessary a bad thing, it just throws out our - tech folks' - baby with the bathwater. How often has the increasingly regulated tech environment made you stop an easy implementation of a completely legitimate use case?

And yes, authoritarians thrive in this climate. Fear and promises of safety are the easiest paths to political power - and once in power, the demand for safety never ends. Politicians who genuinely prioritize individual freedom rarely get rewarded for it at the ballot box; the ones who win are simply better at wearing the right colours while expanding control.


Any movie with this kind of premise needs to make clear how it is not "The Birds" (which does, in fact, include a murder by a murder of crows) of Hitchcock fame.

This one involves a grudge against one human.

As someone who was mildly familiar with Bourdain ("some sort of American TV cook", some badly-dubbed shows in our private TV channels which didn't really catch on, because 'cooking show') until he decided to end it ...

... it is fascinating to me that one person, especially in a very niche profession, has had that kind of cultural impact that his random writing is being discussed seven years after his death.


He is famous for his writing, and not for being a chef.

His 2000 book, "Kitchen Confidential," was a New York Times best seller, and it's what put him on the map. It's still one of my favorite books, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The chapter on his bread baker, "Adam Real Last Name Unknown," is one of the funniest things I've ever had the pleasure to read.


He was really more of a writer then a celebrity TV chef. His travel shows caught on because of his eloquence and PoV.

A chef is not a niche profession - everyone knows what a chef does, and has consumed what they make

A niche profession is, say, artistic cycling

People talk about Bourdain 7 years later for the same reason that they talk about musicians, actors, and painters 7 or 70 years later


Kitchen Confidential is an excellent read. Any reader will come away having healthy respect and fear of the restaurant industry.

I think it is a managerial failure to have rockstar-type employees work the menial, process-managed stuff. Those should work on the unusual, the new, the moonshots. Stuff that has not yet been formalized in BPMN 2.0

Mild disagree.

The saying "you can't solve social problems with technology" usually means - at least in the places I have heard / used it - "If your workforce fights a process - be it for the process being stupid, tools being slow, incentives do not align with policy, whatever - especially a control step, no amount of mandatory tech enforcement of that process step will yield better results." At best you get garbled data because someone hit the keyboard to fill in mandatory fields, sometimes, the process now works OUTSIDE of the system by informal methods because 'work still needs to be done', at worst, you get a mutiny.

You have to fix the people(s' problems) by actually talking to them and take the pain points away, you do not go to 'computer says no' territory first.

In my experience, no org problem is only social, and no tech problem is merely technical. Finding a sustainable solution in both fields is what distinguishes a staff engineer from a junior consultant.


Another point of view on that.

I work on SaaS platform as engineer. We can have some people from customer A asking for bunch of fields to be mandatory - just to get 6 months later people from that company nagging about the fields saying our platform sucks - well no their process and requirements suck - we didn’t come up which fields are mandatory.


I've been thinking a lot about that lately, and I agree. I used to be hard in the "You can't solve social problems with technical solutions", but that's not the whole truth. If people aren't using your thing, sure, you can brand that as social problem (lack of buy-in on the process, people not being heard during rollout, ...). However one way of getting people to use your thing/process is to make it easier to use. Integrate it well into the workflow they're already familiar with, bring the tooling close, reduce friction, provide some extra value to your users with features etc. That's technical solutions, but if you choose them based on knowledge of the "social problem" they can be quite effective.

This is what I was trying to express, perhaps poorly:

> no org problem is only social, and no tech problem is merely technical.

I was going for "the intersection is clearly nonempty" but maybe the better argument is "the intersection is pretty much everything."


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