The issue with moving topics elsewhere is that the most important part of a forum is the community. Forums are not interchangeable.

Depends on how you define big, but there’s Gemma, Phi, OLMO, Mistral and GPT-OSS that are all competitive and can run on commodity hardware.

A lot of it comes down to the context and a prompting strategy tailored to the particular model. I don’t believe the current benchmarks really take those optimizations into account.

I’ve personally been getting better results with Gemini as well, but I think it’s just because I’ve used it more.

I at least respect them for reporting them. It feels like lots of cloud providers don’t, or begrudgingly.

I've actually been getting a lot of mileage out of textproto: https://protobuf.dev/reference/protobuf/textformat-spec/

Well typed, simple syntax. Maps are annoying though.

I agree on this in general. The awkward things here are that:

a) textprotos aren't really touted by the protobuf folks as a thing to use outside Google. I'm not 100% sure why this is.

b) inside Google, there's a perception that you shouldn't use textprotos for much other than hardcoding proto values inside the monorepo (where there aren't really schema-versioning concerns). I think this perception is misplaced, you just have to be aware that a given schema is used in textprotos. Which is usually an easy thing to be aware of. This is just because the schema-versioning concerns are different than with binary photos (e.g. field renames are now breaking).

c) IIRC most parsers unconditionally reject unknown fields. I think the reason for this is highlighted in the docs: you can't safely go from a textproto with an unknown field to a binary serialisation of that proto. IIRC there are some parsers that let you parse unknown fields anyway but then I think you're a bit more tied to a specific implementation than you'd like...

One strange but quite handy alternative is actually the JSON representation. You can use .proto files as a schema but then serialise the values to JSON as there's a canonical mapping. Then you get something that's human readable but with the type safety of protos. Although of course it's not really writable since... It's JSON.

Given that AWS, Azure and GCP are all recording 20-40% YoY growth, no, I don’t think they’re losing ground.

As for startup credits, they’re still handing out $100-200k like candy if they deem you a serious startup. There was a lot of abuse in the past so they started putting up filters.

When you fly in an airplane do you care what engines they’re using? Do you care what avionics subsystems are installed and what SoCs they utilize?

What makes this situation any different? It’s just that LLMs are the new hotness. That will fade.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827

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If you have a moderately successful app, sdk or browser extension you will get hit up to add things to it like this. I think most free VPN services also lease out your bandwidth to make their money as well.

This is how so many companies sell from an opaque inventory of “millions” of residential proxies.