Said the grumpy grandpa, shaking his hand at the cloudy sky.
I dont know what value that comment contributed, funding research is always a long shot. And often times it fails, but that is kinda its purpose, we dont know what we dont know.
It's largely fans of Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel, where some years ago sadly she shifted into just being a grifter selling conspiracy theories about the funding of particle physics.
The audience here tends to vastly overweight contrarian near conspiracy theory style stuff, so this sort of comment shows up on literally every damn post about physics research.
Dont be too harsh on the first comment, I'm Sure he's a good guy.
Interesting to see that hossenfelder thing, I was'nt aware of it.
Her videos got recommended to me but title+thumb always felt like an over the top commentary with more drama than actual problem to be aware of.
So I never clicked and at some point youtube stopped.
You could use the same argument to justify spending $1B on searching for the Loch Ness Monster. The problem is, you can only spend money once. If you're spending $1B on the FCC you aren't spending that same $1B on all kinds of other research.
With the LHC there was a very clear goal: verify the Standard Model and prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs boson - and hopefully discover some unexpected stuff along the way. On the other hand, the FCC is mainly a shot in the dark: they aren't validating a widely-accepted theory, they are just hoping that if you spend enough money on a bigger collider something interesting will fall out.
Most research gives you at least some insight. With the FCC there is a very real possibility that the insight will be "our $20B collider found absolutely nothing, now give us $1T to build an even bigger one". Sure, funding research is a long shot, but at a certain point you're just setting money on fire.
I see your point, but thats a really bad comparison. We are pretty certain that there is no giant dinosaur in a lake, but in terms of fundamental research there is a lot we cannot really explain a great many things. We dont even know if we are "looking" correctly, with the right concept in mind.
I agree that money spending must be carefully considered, but for this research there really is no replacement. You can shuffle public spending around, but an Experiment not dont will explain no part of the Universe. If the countries and Supranationals that are able to dont fund them we will be stuck with what we know now until they do.
It is a lot of money, but it is also the only way. Does that meaningfully stop the EU and all others from doing their thing? I would argue no. We can still afford it and so we should.
It's not necessarily a "waste of money," but it's certainly highly deceptive. For example, China has built a large number of unprofitable infrastructure projects and abandoned projects over the past two decades. Even though they lost money, the waste during construction still made China the world's second-largest economy and aroused envy among some ignorant right-wingers. However, this cost has overdrawn the resources for the next few decades. It has caused China's fertility rate to fall below 1, meaning there won't be enough population to repay this debt in the future, let alone enough money for maintenance (even though many of these facilities were never economically viable to begin with). China's bankruptcy is only a matter of time. Moreover, China owes not only economic debt, but also significant "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt." The Chinese government and society's attempt to raise money through illegal means and extortion by issuing "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt" will undoubtedly result in another collapse.
In Canada the police are pretty lazy and it's mostly due to who they hire, and also a LOT of political garbage as it's a federal police force throughout the country in most cases -- run from Ottawa.
Not much real police work happening any more unless you criticize the government or do something they can use as a reason to grow their budgets or otherwise further political agendas.
If there is a video of a crime they do like that...easy! Also they can show it to media for props.
Lazy cops just love centralized 'social' media and the fools who post their lives on it for them to snoop through.
I have a claude max subscription and a gemini pro sub and I exclusively use them on the cli. When I run out of claude max each week I switch over to gemini and the results have been pretty impressive -- I did not want to like it but credit where credit is due to google.
Like the OP others I didn't use the API for gemini and it was not obvious how to do that -- that said it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would? Sure you need API for any applications with built-in LLM features, but not for developing in the LLM assisted CLI tools.
I think the issue with cli tools for many is you need to be competent with cli like a an actual nix user not Mac first user etc. Personally I have over 30 years of daily shell use and a sysadmin and developer. I started with korn and csh and then every one you can think of since.
For me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible. To say nothing of the physical aliments associated with excessive mousing.
Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.
> it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would
My spend is lower, so I conclude otherwise
> I think the issue with cli tools for many is...
Came from that world, vim, nvim, my dev box is remote, homelab
The issue is not that it is a CLI, it's that you are trying to develop software through the limited portal of a CLI. How do you look at multiple files at the same time? How do you scroll through that file
1. You cannot through a tool like gemini-cli
2. You are using another tool to look at files / diffs
3. You aren't looking at the code and vibe coding your way to future regret
> or me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible.
vim is a "gui" (tui), vs code has keyboard shortcuts, associating GUI with mouse work
> Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.
Anecdotal "vibe" opinions are not useful. We need to do some real evals because people are telling stories like they do about their stock wins, i.e. they don't tell you about the losses.
Thousands of hours sounds like your into the vibe coding / churning / outsourcing paradigm. There are better ways to leverage these tools. Also, if you have 1000+ hours of LLM time, how have you not gone below the prepackaged experience Big AI is selling you?
30 years ago my boss at a large defense/aviation contractor told me estimating software projects was a very valuable skill, but all estimates were always wrong because they are simplifications and to keep that in mind -- his words.
Mainly they are useful to build belief and keep a direction towards the goal.
Models of any kind in whatever domain are necessarily always something less than reality. That is both their value and weakness.
So estimates are models. Less than reality. Therefore we should not expect them to be useful beyond 'plans are useless, but planning is indispensable' -- I think thats' Eisenhower.
I literally filled out TPS reports every week at this place down to the hour, breaking down internal project billing and customer billing. In order get the charge codes from the PM, you need to give them estimates. That was the main driver for estimates - convince the non-coders.
18 years ago I stood up at a super computing symposium as asked the presenter what would happen if I fed his impressive predictive models garbage data on the sly... they still have no answer for that.
Make up so much crap it's impossible to tell the real you from the nonsense.
