Cosine Thoughts

My take on generative AI is really not any different than my take on the current AI landscape in general; people (even otherwise smart ones) are missing the bigger picture. Current high-quality AI models have 2 very important direct factors and one important indirect factor: They are "expensive" They are trained on existing data-sets There are very few top-tier models available at any given point in time 1 - "Expensive" Models To start, I put "expensive" in quotes because they are not only costly in terms of compute power, but also still quite specialized in terms of skill in coming up with new approaches, knowing how best to select training and test data. This is the direct cause of point #3 which is more indirect, but I'll cover why that is important in a bit. The key thing being that training a top-tier model is not something most companies can afford today. Beyond stating that, there isn't much else to cover here. 2 - Trained on Existing Data T...

The latest talking point in the anti-EV world seems to be tire pollution and tire wear. I hate idiots. I really do. I hate people who throw "facts" in my face without researching themselves, refuse to understand the counter arguments or even attempt to understand the premises the arguments they are making are built upon. So, to start. The are 2 premises for this argument. The first is the tire compounds and the second is the combination of the weight and acceleration leading to increased wear. On the topic of tire compounds, this is simultaneously the more legit and the more derpy of the two. Legit because automakers are likely to slap these tires on the cars because they generally make the car perform better. But then derpy because most people just replace their EV tires with whatever is cheapest. People are shit at maintaining vehicles and tires are expensive.  The second argument is bad for a different reason; it assumes all EV drivers will drive like shit heads just becau...

Last week I repaired an LED TV that broke on me after about 7 years. The experience was... confusing. In a good way. First, some context; the TV in question is a Sony Bravia. Sony, in my experience, is really good a making things proprietary and not wanting people to tinker with them. Secondly, people (at least in my experience) do NOT have a tendency to repair TVs. So, there doesn't seem like there should be much resistance to going proprietary in this area and making TVs super difficult to repair. Thirdly, while the landscape has certainly changed, CRT TVs were historically also very dangerous to repair.  Not that the past need necessarily dictate the future. Though it sets a precedent which, once again, should seem appealing for TV manufacturers to continue.  Given all this, I was surprised at how easy the process was. First, there was the broken TV itself. When it broke an LED in the IR sensor bar flashed a certain number of times indicating the rough nature of the problem...