MPSimmons

>Boeing, for what it's worth, has learned from their mistakes with this project

okay, learning is good

>they will never accept fixed-price contracts again

Yeah, that's not the lesson they should take from this fiasco.

Given how Boeing was reportedly acting regarding the development of a new crew vehicle[1], the hubris shown seems to be systemic, top to bottom. I have no empathy for the Boeing management that got them into this situation, and if their takeaway is "we're just not going to accept contracts like this", and not, "we need to deeply change how we engineer solutions", then coupled with the 737-max tragedies, Boeing can go bankrupt for all I care.

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Starliner/comments/1f0g0ow/some_int...

Looks nice. I've owned 3 Teslas, and I'm almost definitely never buying one again.

I've personally burned out a couple of times. First was a Fintech startup back in 2011 or so. Second was at an aerospace startup that you've heard of.

In both cases, the unique factor was an extended period of time where I was the sole person who could some considerable piece of work that the business relied upon for day to day operations, which meant that I couldn't take effective breaks and I lived constantly on call and in the critical path.

I had to quit both jobs in order to both grant myself the space to not feel captive and also to show management that more than a single person was necessary to perform the tasks that I had been performing.

It's actually that microgravity allows you to create much more effective drugs.

https://www.varda.com/science/gravity-as-a-knob-for-tuning-p...

I miss having a blog. I used to blog at https://standalone-sysadmin.com/ but it's been many years. I should get back into it.

We see opportunity cost as such a danger, and you're right, it probably holds us back from enjoying life quite a lot.

This reminds me very much of Sidney Dekker's work, particularly The Field Guide to Understanding Human Failure, and Drift Into Failure.

The former focuses on evaluating the system as a whole, and identifying the state of mind of the participants of the accidents and evaluating what led them to believe that they were making the correct decisions, with the understanding that nobody wants to crash a plane.

The latter book talks more about how multiple seemingly independent changes to complex loosely coupled systems can introduce gaps in safety coverage that aren't immediately obvious, and how those things could be avoided.

I think the CAST approach looks appealing. It seems as though it does require a lot of analysis of failures and near-misses to be best utilized, and the hardest part of implementing it will undoubtably be the people, who often take the "there wasn't a failure, why should we spend time and energy investigating a success" mindset.

Cool, now all I need is the tiny encoded message and a 7+B weight model, plus some electricity.

This is more like a book cipher than a compression algorithm.

It seems useful to have peer reviewed processes for comparing benchmarks that other research can reference, though.

it turns out it CAN play Doom. That's impressive

"A space station" is desireable. The lunar gateway, though, as designed, is very much about Artemis. The Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit[1] was designated because of constraints on the Orion capsule that will be attached during crewed operations, at least this was relayed to me directly by NASA personnel during a Q&A.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-rectilinear_halo_orbit

Agreed. When it comes to flying people, the volume of a habitable starship is approximately equivalent to the entirety of the habitable volume of the ISS.

I really look forward to the heavy-lift future where full reusability means actual cheap spaceflight.

I have an HDR monitor and OMG it's so bright it's almost painful. So beautiful!

I dislike Elon as much (or maybe more) than the majority of this site, but I am actually not able to adequately express how small a percentage of total highway deaths 51 people is. But let me try. Over 40,000 people die in US road deaths EVERY YEAR. I was using full self driving in 2018 on a Model 3. So between then and October 2024, there were something like 250,000 people who died on the highway, and something like 249,949 were not using full self driving.

Every single one of those people were tragedies, no doubt about it. And there will always be fatalities while people use FSD. You cannot prevent it, because the world is big and full of unforeseen situations and no software will be able to deal with them all. I am convinced, though, that using FSD judiciously will save far more lives than removing it will.

The most damning thing that can be said about full self driving is that it requires good judgement from the general population, and that's asking a lot. But on the whole, I still feel it's a good trade.

Just because transformer-based architectures might be a dead end (in terms of how far they can take us toward achieving artificial sentience), and the outcome may not be mathematically provable, as this author seems to want it to be, does not mean that the technology isn't useful.

Even during the last AI winter, previous achievements such as Bayesian filtering, proved useful in day to day operation of infrastructures that everyone used. Generative AI is certainly useful as well, and very capable of being used operationally.

It is not without caveats, and the end goals of AI researchers have not been achieved, but why does that lessen the impact or usefulness of what we have? It may be that we can iterate on transformer architecture and get it to the point where it can help us make the next big leap. Or maybe not. But either way, for day to day use, it's here to stay, even if it isn't the primary brain behind new research.

Just remember that the only agency that AI currently has is what we give it. Responsible use of AI doesn't mean "don't use AI", it means, "don't give it responsibility for critical systems that it's ill equipped to deal with". If that's what the author means by "serious applications", then I'm on board, but there are a lot of "serious applications" that aren't human-life-critical, and I think it's fine to use current AI tech on a lot of them.

Print Shop is what we used in my 1994 elementary school "special topics" class to do the student newspaper. One of the factoids was like, "the world record for balancing golf balls on top of each other is 8" and the person making that part of the paper inserted and visually stacked all 8 golf balls, and I remember thinking, "this is so cool!"

What a world!

Pictures of the main waiting room of the old Penn Station remind me a lot of Chicago's Union Station, which is very beautiful. I wish NYC still had the original Penn. I'm glad they still have Grand Central Terminal.

I also take your perspective.

During the last AI winter, we relied on things like Bayesian filtering to categorize spam without a lot of ado, and it was a product of the previous AI surge.

Transformer based inference and generation are already useful, and there's no going back from that, even if the architecture will never get us artificial super intelligence.

e-fuses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse) are typically etched into the silicon as an exactly-once operation, meant to irrevocably set a configuration. Some devices, for instance, have an e-fuse that makes it impossible to change cryptographic trust signatures after the e-fuse has been blown.

Came here to say this

It sounds like this is very definitely targeted at high speed personal-area-networks.

I enjoyed her Star Wars hotel review enough that I watched a ton of her other videos. The thing that bugged me about her channel, and the reason I unsubscribed, is because I couldn't see any evidence that she ever really liked anything. She never had a positive review of a thing. Every video was taking something apart and criticizing it. I think her take down of the SW hotel was probably just, but it's exhausting hearing from someone who only finds flaws in things.

I seem to recall that Intel was talking about the same kind of split. Maybe the Intel child company and AMDs would merge, or maybe they'll stay separate and the parents will merge?

Man, that's so weird. Thanks for the clarification.

oooooooh I think I'm starting to see...

sum::{} is the creation of a monadic function (which I just learned about because I don't have a CS background)

:" is a comment

sum([...]) is calling the function with a list, and the function will iterate over the list adding each of the elements

count::{#x} is another monadic function that returns the number of elements, which then gets called

I thought I knew python, but then I saw this:

    ?> sum::{+/x}  :" sum + over / the array x
    :monad
    ?> sum([1 2 3])
    6
    ?> count::{#x}
    :monad
    ?> count([1 2 3])
    3

What?

I've been in higher than 10,000 cleanrooms and it's not the dust on the desks they care about.

There are entry protocols around what you can take in, how you swab it, and so on. Also, specific instructions around how often to go from sitting to standing, clothing materials under your smocks, and everything else.

>the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD

Oh man, the risk in that is extreme. We are moving away from x86 in general, but wow, that's... a big jump in risk.

Was just thinking about some of the docs we have at work, and how most are relatively short ( probably < 10 pages) and some are like... 200+ page government things

Does anyone know if the average document length mentioned in the document length normalization is median? It seems like it would need to be to properly deweight excessively long documents, otherwise the excessively long documents would unfairly weight the average, right?