Ollama vs. llama.cpp is like Docker vs. FreeBSD Jails, Dropbox vs. rsync, jujutsu vs git, etc

> far-fetched

Remember Google?

Once it was far-fetched that they would make the search worse just to show you more ads. Now, it is a reality.

With tokens, it is even more direct. The more tokens users spend, the more money for providers.

> Now, it is a reality.

What are the details of this? I'm not playing dumb, and of course I've noticed the decline, but I thought it was a combination of losing the battle with SEO shite and leaning further and further into a 'give the user what you think they want, rather than what they actually asked for' philosophy.

As recently as 15 years ago, Google _explicitly_ stated in their employee handbook that they would NOT, as a matter of principle, include ads in the search results. (Source: worked there at that time.)

Now, they do their best to deprioritize and hide non-ad results...

Only if you are paying per token on the API. If you are paying a fixed monthly fee then they lose money when you need to burn more tokens and they lose customers when you can’t solve your problems within that month and max out your session limits and end up with idle time which you use to check if the other providers have caught up or surpassed your current favourite.

Indeed, unlimited plan seems like the only way that makes sense to not have it be guaranteed to be abused by the provider

Measuring programming productivity is hard. For example, take testing. It is certainly useful. At the same time, you can waste time on it in some situations.

When, what, how to test may be important for productivity.

I don't know whether LLMs are in the same category.

It might explain why there is a stereotype the more beautiful woman the crazier she is. (everybody tells her what she wants to hear)

Gedankenexperiments are valid scientific tools. Some predictions of general relativity were confirmed experimentally only 100 years after it was proposed. It is well known that Einstein used Gedankenexperiments.

There is Org Babel in Emacs that can be an alternative to jupyter notebooks for literate programming (research/devopsy tasks). It is more powerful in some aspects and weaker in others.

The same can be said about driving but self-driving cars exist.

So is the "bitter lesson" that fuzzy overlords will be practically preferable to hand coded legislation?

I see fabric python library (open source ssh automation) https://pypi.org/project/fabric/

No connection to microsoft.

> cartel continues to profit

It doesn't follow. The reverse is more likely: If you end prohibition, you end the mafia.

Usually, a simple function is enough:

    def make_counter(start=0):
      count = start
      def incr():
        nonlocal count
        count += 1
        return count
      return incr

Example:

    >>> c = make_counter()
    >>> c()
    1
    >>> c()
    2

But it hides nothing:

    >>> c.__closure__[0].cell_contents
    2
    >>> c.__closure__[0].cell_contents = -1
    >>> c()
    0

"private" in Python is cultural, not enforced. (you can access `self.__private` from outside too if you want).