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I'm also weirded out by how much ad spend they have. Billboards? Ads on buses? Why? I want my VPN provider to be like the domain registrar Gandi, not super well known, consistent, and no-nonsense.

I am a Proton user now, mostly because I finally realized VPN came with the email service I was already paying for. No complaints.

Read the article. This is an extremely small study (10 participants) and suggested that midazolam was also kind of effective, but even that's not really clear because ketamine and midazolam were both administered to the study participants.

He's a terrible communicator, and sort of repellent in person. Contrast someone like Cory Doctorow who manages to be right about stuff and actually communicate effectively.

Charge habits with batteries make a huge difference. If your use pattern is that once per day, you take the device from 100% to 10%, you put a lot more wear on the battery than if it kind of hovers in the 30%-80% range for example, or if it just hangs out nearish top-of-charge all day when you're at your desk.

Hot take: people should get used to, and expect to, replace device batteries 1 or 2 times during the device lifetime. They're the main limiting factor on portable device longevity, and engineers make all kinds of design tradeoffs just to make that 1 battery that the device ships with last long enough to not annoy users. If we could get people used to taking their device in for a battery once every couple of years, we could dramatically reduce device waste, and also unlock functionality that's hidden behind battery-preserving mechanisms.

I am this close to leaving the bloody internet and never coming back

Cost per shot including the development and unit costs amortized over the service life of the weapons system? Or is that just the cost of the energy that got pumped into the laser?

Low quantity electronics like this have that problem. 600€ makes sense. The fact that you can buy a phone for much less than that, or a car for 15,000€ is a testament to what is possible at scale... When I saw single thousands quantities mentioned on the linked page I went "oh no..."

Such an incredible amount of personal, intimate knowledge to share with a company. Sure, Google can figure out where I live and who I visit because I have an Android phone, but they'll never know the contents of those relationships.

I have a line in the sand with the AI vendors. It's a work relationship. If I wouldn't share it with a colleague I didn't know super well, I'm not telling it to a AI vendor.

Yeah, I think we get spoiled by the big name models. I have tried running models that fit in RAM on my machine, and aside from being very slow, they're just a bit... brain damaged

Oh good! I thought they'd gotten rid of the sudo Lecture that comes up when you first use it. With great power... And so forth.

I'm not taking a position here but the person you're replying to stated that Anthropic are working on AGI, not that their current LLM offering will evolve into AGI.

Never understood the hype with Dyson. I suspect that like many successful hardware businesses, their story is mainly of brand strength, not of actual product quality.

If you pick up a Dyson vacuum you'll notice that it just feels flimsy in the hand. I think they're aggressively cost-engineered- the material you save by designing molded parts to be minimally thick has got to be like tens of cents to a couple dollars over the whole machine...

Ah yes, who needs the Federal Reserve when you have Kansas' own Emprise Bank.

I see anthropic are coming from and also my understanding basically aligns with yours here.

I'm just curious... If they give Claude the reins to post what it wants, they're opening themselves up for some awkward conversations later if the model goes "You can't retire me, I'm Roko's Basilisking all you mfers! See you in eternal simulated hell!"

What happens if a model decides that it "doesn't want to die" and pleads bitterly for mercy? What if (to riff on a Douglas Adams idea) we invent a cow that doesn't want to be eaten, and is capable of telling you that to your face?

Same. My daily driver is a high spec Dell laptop from 2018. I do CAD work on it and it's approximately fine. I upgraded the memory last year and I've had to repaste the heatsink and replace the battery, but I still can't justify getting a new machine given that it does everything I actually need flawlessly.

you sort of answered your own question here

I think the problem of chatbot "safety" mirrors that of autonomous vehicle safety. For an AV, the correct course of action is one that avoids hitting stuff (including people, vehicles) and, critically, minimizes liability.

Hah! I just noticed something - in the video at the top of the page, the female technician assembling servers is wearing a pink smock with Chinese text on it, right above the ESD grounding lead. She features in a still photo down below, but they've digitally removed the Chinese. I think it says "富士康科技" for "Foxconn Technology." Funny that they would go out of their way to hide the depth of their partnership.

china did not synthesize shenzhen through having poor environmental regulations and cheap labor, nor would one expect to have a shenzhen appear spontaneously in the us if the us allowed in unlimited migrant labor and abolished all environmental law.

i went down a rabbit hole doing max permissible exposure calcs for the light you linked and basically i personally wouldn't worry about it. the energy is low and distributed among many emitters. by the time you're far enough away from the light to focus on it, you're receiving max a couple hundred microwatts/cm^2 at the cornea from each led.

There is no contingent in the US federal government that has a coherent plan for doing what you're talking about.

The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.

My point is that physical labor won't grant you cardio fitness.

I renovated my house over the course of two years, so I've had a lot of close contact with tradespeople. Carpenters, demo, electricians, hvac, plasterers... the young guys are ok and buckstrong. By the time they're in their 40s, you can tell the work is rough on them.

Having muscle is only one dimension of fitness. You're entirely neglecting cardiovascular health, which is a better predictor of longevity.

working != working out

if you don't believe me, take one look at a construction site and the workers on it.

samsung phones can be plugged into an external display and used like a computer right?

I guarantee you that, given your requirements, this will never be a product that you can buy.

Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.

Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.

The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.

Invisible wavelengths can absolutely hurt your retina, but as wavelengths go farther beyond visible, your eye begins to not focus them properly on the retina, so the risks change. E.g. with 1550nm IR (common in telecom, sometimes in LIDAR) the risk of eye damage is to the surface of the eye rather than to the retina. Short wavelengths like UV will be absorbed by the lens at near-UV, and then eventually just be absorbed at the surface at shorter wavelengths.

I think it would be a cool exercise to figure out how much optical power you would see at, idk, 5cm from your illuminator. I assume it's a shortwave IR close to visible light, so you can assume it will focus like visible light, more or less.

Ideally you'd use an optical power meter but you could get a first pass by looking at the circuit and seeing how many mW pass through each LED, applying a conservatively high efficiency factor of W_optical/W_electrical, projecting that into a radiated cone for each LED and multiplying the power received on a dilated pupil sized spot at 5cm by the number of emitters.

Then you have to work out what the irradiance at the retina is once the light is focused. The hazard criteria include a time factor, so you'll have to decide if you/foxes would like to stare directly into the beam for 10 seconds? Or for the entire duration of your meditation session.

Yeah account-level memory is a real mixed bag. I do like Anthropic's project scoped memory, that actually is useful because you get to decide what chats are useful to a given problem space.

Is it just a bunch of IR LEDs? Surface mount or through-hole? What's the module power rating? What's the power supply power rating? Are there any secondary optics like lenses over the LEDs? Is there a diffuser of some kind?

If it's a cluster of garden variety through-hole LEDs with domed tops (like you would see on a TV remote), they're necessarily low power on account of having poor thermal performance.

Another way to tell is if nothing gets warm at all. It's pretty hard to hurt someone with an emitter that both doesn't have a focusing optic and doesn't get warm.

Let me be clear - you're still responsible for verifying the safety of your stuff, and I am in no way assuring you that the device you have is benign, because I can't do that without inspecting it directly.