PaulRobinson

What, you're all reading the books? I thought the point was to just buy them excitedly, and then let them accumulate around you and when your partner complains about them quote that thing Umberto Eco said about needing a personal library or something... :)

Recent completions:

- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick. I found it well written, but ultimately lacking in something - I kind of wanted the other boot to drop at the end.

- Poor Charlie's Almanack. Stripe Press published this collection of Charlie Munger's speeches and I've found I broadly agree with him on a ton of stuff and am slightly excited by some of his ideas that are new to me.

I'm about to have some time off recovering from a planned medical procedure and expect to have a mix of sci-fi, good quality non-fiction and at least one heavy "literary" book. I'm a big fan of Borges, so I might reread some of that work, or maybe pick up some adjacent/similar authors like Calvino too.

There's a lovely and eccentric quiz show on the BBC called Only Connect. Last year the host as part of her bit to fill time tried to fill it with reading excerpts from Paradise Lost. It was funny, and the in-joke I think was to remind us all of what Samuel Johnson once said of it:

> "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is."

"working through it" does indeed seem like the right phrasing from what little I've been exposed to. Good luck!

I've suggested this elsewhere in this thread, but the analogue nature of it might be useful to current design teams to get familiar with operationally.

Getting contemporary knowledge of the navigation, hydraulic, avionics and other systems is going to be pretty powerful if you need to build something that is as battlefield-ready in the modern era. Nobody is hacking into an SR-71, and it's going to be delivering its missions just fine if GPS is knocked out. Taking the operational (and not just academic) experience of doing that and putting it into the current generation of Skunk Works engineers is going to be useful.

I'm not sure their plan is to put it into active service, but they could - the SR-72 could just be an SR-71 with upgraded engines and other systems.

However, the process of getting it ready for active service even if just as a flying museum piece could sure help a lot of engineers learn a ton of lost knowledge.

The Russians apparently fessed up after the cold war that they knew of the SR-71 project from early on, but the only thing they knew about it in the early stages was that beautiful and distinctive outline.

The Skunk Works team knew when Russian satellites were coming up over the horizon, and so would hide the early development models they had on poles and so on. They obviously didn't want them to be pictured. However the satellites had heat-sensing cameras and so could see the heat differential the model had left as a shadow on the ground just minutes before. The Russians therefore knew there was a new plane in development, and they knew what the outline of it looked like, but nothing else for quite some time.

I bet when they first saw it, they agreed - a heck of a beautiful machine, one of my favourite aircraft of all time.

The SR-71 is mostly analogue. It has remarkable battlefield resilience including ability to operate when EMP and nuclear radiation are issues that would affect a lot of digital systems.

Worried about how to navigate if the GPS systems gets knocked out by an adversary? SR-71 has an analogue system, use that. Worried about how an adversary could use cyberwarfar against your avionics? SR-71 has you covered, use all of that.

And sure, you could take all the designs and hand them over to the SR-72 team at LM and say "yeah, all of that please", and they could figure it out, but you know what might be handy? A working SR-71 they could play with. And who knows, maybe the answer is to take an SR-71 in its entirety, and just upgrade a few parts to get the SR-72 performance (Mach 6) that you're after.

This is obviously going to be regional, because it's cultural.

I'm old enough to have adult children, although I never did have kids of my own.

My parents would have gone to school in the knowledge that if they acted up, words would be had with their parents, and there would be consequences.

At some point, something changed, and we decided that teachers were there to be put in their place by parents, and if a teacher suggested a child was doing something wrong the parent would expect to challenge that and the teacher would be put in their place.

We're now in a situation where children being taught sometimes think its their right - perhaps even obligation - to not be instructed in appropriate behaviour, and so feel free to react the way that they do.

There's a microcosm natural experiment for this in the Pennines, the North of England. There's a small town called Hebden Bridge, which for a while had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the UK. Some thought it was related to the environment - it sits in a valley, the persistent low grey cloud can make it feel claustrophobic - but I think another theory holds up: parents there didn't bother parenting. A community was drawn to the town by adults who were in essence, hippies: they believed in freedoms their parents didn't including for their children.

That meant that many of the kids growing up there did so in an environment without real structure, and became adolescent in an environment with easy supply to plentiful drugs and a relaxed attitude to its use.

I'm not a parent, that was an active choice I made, and so I wouldn't deign to tell parents how to bring up their children, but I would suggest parents look at the data: children thrive with structure and rules and gentle consequences for non-compliance (the naughty step, etc.), and recognition of genuinely outstanding behaviour (winning things, not participating in them). They struggle to develop as emotionally secure people without those. Hell, I'm a data point there - took me years to realise I needed therapy, and years more to benefit from it. As the old poem starts: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don't mean to, but they do."

Anyway, teachers play a part in that journey, but they can't do the whole thing, and the sooner parents (and society in general), restore the respect to the profession it once had, the better. Are all teachers good? No, but they are professionals who have more data on more children than any parent, so maybe just respect that.

I had to go to another data centre just outside London about 10 years ago with a colleague who had never been inside one - we had some colocation kit hosted there and were going to spend most of a day swapping some cards and checking things through the KVM. He looked at me really weirdly when I offered him ear defenders on the way there. He wasn't ready for the sensory overload - the noise, the heat, the movement of air, the artificial light, the slightly weird smell, it was all a lot. 3 hours in, he wanted out. Couldn't blame him, I wasn't far off myself.

I started out in a "data centre" in 1998/1999 in the North West of England. Things are radically different now.

When I joined that ISP we had ~2000 subscribers, and one modem rack that could take 30 concurrent 33.6k dial-ins. The company had just been acquired by a small independent telco in Cheshire, headquartered in a small town that is most famous for a weekly farmers market and an annual steam rally.

We shared that headquarters at first with the founder's other business - a dating agency for rich people in later years - and slowly took over.

The building was a farmhouse of sorts. We'd turned into a rabbit warren of offices, and then, we decided to expand.

First we turned one of the offices into a "machine room". We didn't even bother with fire suppression that first time, we just ripped up the carpet and laid some laminate, put some 19" racks in and got the power upgraded. The air-con was insufficient in that room and the following summer I had to wheel in portable units and had a Cisco router in there report that the inlet fan had a temperature of ~80C. That was around the same time the chief of staff was asking us why we wore jeans and t-shirts and couldn't we wear suits? No, no we could not wear suits.

Bit by bit we took over more rooms through the building, we started working in a portacabin in the car park (where the neighbouring farmer's sheepdog would join us for lunch).

At some point we needed to install ~20k modems, (Nortel CVX1800s - 56kbps had arrived!), and the telephone switch to run it, so somebody bought a second hand DMS100 that went into another room we had converted.

By that point the dating agency had moved out.

We needed another ~100 servers as well to manage email, web hosting, and so on. Those came in parts (motherboards, cases, RAM sticks, hard drives - about £500k worth in 1999 money), and we had to build them and install BSD on them (first OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, long story). We also had to make our own ethernet cables, which is where I learned I can't wire ethernet cables if my life depended on it.

Within 12 months from when we started, we were handling 750,000 dial-in customers.

Around September of 1999 I left and that was when the company had heard about a custom built data centre that was up for sale in Milton Keynes, so decided to move everything there. Around that time they were pouring concrete under the floors of all those rooms we'd thrown racks in because the timber floor joists (!) were starting to give way under the weight of the kit.

That company got acquired and then went through a weird route, but basically it's still going as a major UK ISP. I'll keep the name private to protect the guilty. :)

2000 subscribers, and one modem rack to that and a business still operating 27 years later. A lot of sausage rolls, plenty of sticking plasters for the cuts from those shitty cases, and almost every day ending with a couple of pints in a pub somewhere.

One of my old colleagues and I often think back to that being one of the best years of work in our lives. But... data centre work is horrid, dirty, hot, and underpaid for what it is. But you can - sometimes - be part of something kind of cool and fun, and something very few people get to see or understand.

But there's a reason I've stuck to software ever since. :)

I think all of these can be addressed by being able to understand which machines contributed what to the model. I know that's messy, but if I can state "this information has come from Alice and the consensus is that it's good and right as it aligns with other information from Bob and others, meanwhile this information came from Mallory and stands out as being incongruent with the rest of the information I have in the model", we can identify malicious violations. If we're then able to state either Alice or Bob is one of the copyright holders, and one of them gets paid a little more, the other a little less as the confirmation agent, well, the economics of all of this changes a little.

At the moment we have Annas Archive being paid by frontier labs and rare/second hand books being destroyed in order to support the training regime. If instead we could just pay the publishers and they could distribute royalties to authors...

Local LLMs are the future, and one of the reasons I think the data centre furore is just going to end in a market crash.

LLMs that can reliably be used for control problems are the future, and I think classic/deep RL has generally been overlooked for years for a whole host of problems by wider industry because it felt inaccessible. The first thing I thought of when I saw Jev (and then Laya), was "this might move the needle in a really, really interesting way".

Local LLMs that can reliably be used for control problems smash through a lot of barriers I'm interested in, and this intrigues me a lot. Guess I'm about to become a big Laya fan if it can run on this kind of hardware to this performance.

If you call it a teacake, and I say no those have raisins in, and you protest that's a fruit teacake, I know you're probably from Burnley: https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/

It's pretty common around Manchester. Bit like being nesh. But as you know... this is a thing: https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/

Microsoft got this right once, and it cost them big to turn up late - that was the Internet and Windows 95 and the massive u-turn. Otherwise, they've been defining stuff early a lot I think. It's hard to explain how big a turnaround they had to do back then, but then it says a lot that until they made that u-turn the leadership was so confident in their own hubris they thought they could take on the entire internet with their own crap version of AOL.

IBM invented the PC and then lost control of that identity. Figuring out how that happened is something they are going to have a meeting about, but they're still working through the meetings to plan that meeting, and the Gantt chart for those meetings takes meetings to adjust, and everybody is in meetings so doesn't have time for those meetings. They'll get to them though.

Apple consistently turn up late, but redefine and improve the status quo. They sometimes prototype early in public (for example, the Newton), but normally they show up with the version 3 that everyone else wished they'd thought of that then goes on to define a sector quite cleanly (Mac, iMac, Mac OS System X, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Mac Mini). They Newton'ed Siri, but I'm pretty sure they're going to come back strong in the next 18 months, unless the enshitification we've all witnessed over the last few years really has taken hold and Siri is just going to automate that at scale. Maybe we will all be killed by AI, but not through malevolent evil, but widely distributed incompetence.

Meta are constantly taking swings at the latest thing the founder is excited by - the Metaverse (now with legs!), pervert glasses, and so on - but they mostly prop up a bunch of expensive failures on the back of a hugely successful advertising business. I don't think they come late to the party per se, they're just not very good at anything that isn't killing & harming children, or undermining democracy. They should stay in their lane and keep doing that, I guess.

It's IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.

You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from.

I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money. They've just slunk off into a corner hugging their old architectures they have a moat around, and thrown out some audacious nonsense like Watson now and again, but nothing has stuck. When is somebody in that organisation going to try and innovate properly again?

I'm not sure this is the answer I'd be rooting for.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bobbins

You're making a lot of assertions without citations here.

If I look at a BYD at my local dealership, and compare it to a comparable spec German car (I live in the UK, so tariffs are not the thing shifting the needle here), I can see where the cost savings are and the trade-offs.

I don't think they're artificially more affordable. I just think they're more affordable.

Using public funds to invest in capital expenditure is - outside of the US - considered a wise use of public funds. If the result is a more competitive industry, whether that's ship building (South Korea), steel production (recent UK nationalisation efforts), military hardware (United States), or medical research, physics, chemistry, computing (look at the history of all the G7 there), and so on, and so on... irrelevant.

China has decided to spend it on complex manufacturing that they've been the supply chain for to Western manufacturers for the last 30 years. That's not controversial - it's been obvious this is where they were heading for some time.

Not much airport shenanigans in the small island hopping nations and the fjords this is aimed at. 125 miles in 2 hours is assuming flat, straight, high-speed, low-traffic roads. Sure, people might not use these to fly SFO → LAX or back, but they likely will use them to go ABZ → LSI, and the "check-in and security shenanigans" are, errr, quite relaxed, compared to what you might be used to at JFK...

There's a ton of small routes that just aren't getting much service now because of operating costs - the founder speaks to that in the video - that this could serve.

A slightly larger aircraft able to do ~300 miles on battery and then say 1,000 in hybrid mode, might resurrect the economically unviable but relatively fast LHR/LGW flights down to NQY. The six hour drive is pretty, but... yeah...

Yeah, you need to look away from private equity investment. Mutuals, co-ops, LLPs, there's lots of other models, but VC and PE money is not where you want to be.

I have thought about this a lot over the years and tried to spot these companies - many of them are the type of business that Berkshire Hathaway would love to find.

Some of them are a little more visible simply because they’ve scaled and developed a moat - logistics, particularly trucking in the UK, and international cargo shipping, stand out here for me. But also social care, floristry and grocery wholesaling, weird sectors in aviation (I worked in that for a while), all sorts.

And then I look at family businesses that shouldn’t be able to exist all the time. In my nearest town centre there is a grocer, a fish shop and a butchers on the high street. Common sense tells us the extra large supermarket built on the outskirts of the town in the 1990s should have obliterated them, but no.

In the UK there is a common assumption that a lot of vape shops, barbers and even some takeaways are fronts for money laundering (and that definitely happens - there is a chicken shop in one Northern town I know that to my knowledge has no ability to actually sell you chicken, nor can the 4 others next door to it). But there are definitely some that are making good money via the legal route.

As a software guy I look for opportunities to sell to them and there’s one theme that stands out across many of them that is also an invisible sector: have you noticed how many small companies make and sell touchscreen tills/cash registers? In the UK it seems to be a thriving cottage industry.

It’s sad that in the face of seeing AI content out there, so many writers are retreating to not feed the beast: it’s a white flag that speeds up the war being won by AI.

We need more human writing, not less.

I hope this trend reverses sometime soon.

Here's where we're at:

Tech companies invested in AI: AI is amazing (so good, it might kill us all, help?), and the ROI is going to be amazing.

NVIDIA specifically: We will allocate cash in strange deals that makes it looks like we're making investments but actually we're buying sales from those companies as they'll spend the money back with us, and everyone seems to think that's OK because the share price is going stinkers.

Cynics: AI is a scourge on society, and the fiscals are circular and a scourge on the economic stability of the planet.

The more nuanced argument I take is that Zitron is right about the circular finances and hyperinflation of valuations, and wrong about the utility of AI to help people. The Tech companies are just outright wrong about the finances, but right about everything else. And, NVIDIA's time will come, and it won't be pretty.

None of this requires me to believe that if Ed says something it must be true or false. It's just another data point, and he does uncover information I can't find myself that checks out. The fact he is wrong about the functional utility of AI or that he's getting super focused on hyperscalers when the real issues are in Oracle and NVIDIA, I can live with.

As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited.

However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.

First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.

For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.

But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.

Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.

We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.

All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.

Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?

We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".

Imagine if your post read like this:

> I like the idea but do not have a good use for these employees. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?

> It sounds great to have an employee which does things. Like an assistant. I have assistants. They even have email and mobile phones so you can communicate with them conveniently. And then what?

Now, the caveat, is you have to imagine that these employees have access to your email (including ability to send email when they want), and text messages, and Slack and, well, everything. And they might have access to your debit and credit cards. You're going to have to trust them quite a lot, but when you read the references you realise that a lot of people seem to think they lie and make things up. Oh, and they occasionally commit a felony - oopsie! - and will lie to you about it consistently.

These particular employees are interesting enough to various groups of people that they are studied for signs of psychopathy and malicious intent (is that a warning sign for a new employee?), and there is evidence of both, but honestly, it's fine.

So, yeah, whatever you'd use employees for, as assistants to your life. Particularly psychopathic, malicious, lying, unreliable employees. You'd use them for that stuff. What's not to like?

I say this as somebody who made his living for > 10 years as a Rails dev:

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were conservatives.

DHH is at best an apologist for convicted criminal fascists like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and at worst is potentially a fascist himself.

There is a reason why some people have decided to give this distribution $8m, and not another distribution. That reason is political alignment.

Pretending it isn't, is just putting your head in the sand.

I am at a point in my career where I'm figuring out where I want to spend the last 15 years of it. I don't want to work in corporate for a long stretch of it. It seems to me, being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into...

I've been thinking about this a fair bit recently.

We make a lot of price/performance compromises for having an attached screen and keyboard on our computer. That was what got me started.

Then I remembered the days of having to go to a special corner of the house to use a computer, vs now when I have a computer with me all the time. In my bag, on the sofa, on the train. Hell, I'm writing this on the work MBP while waiting for an appointment.

And you know what, I think I got more done when I went and sat in a corner of the house all those years ago. I set up an area for "computer work", and it worked really well.

I have a home office, but it's a jumble of cables going into docking stations and all sorts of weird stuff. I think if I streamline it and turn it into a proper "computer room", I might get some of that mojo back. I might even convince my partner that surrendering the home office and having a corner of the den might be good - she can watch TV while I tinker. And I won't be balancing a laptop on my knee and trying to do two things at once.

And the price/performance thing comes back in. Hmm.

GPUs are in a weird bubble captured by weird finance tricks in the private sector. They put money into that, taxpayers are going to freak out.

If they can make progress on QOA and HHL algos, that has value.

But the main thing they're trying to avoid - and this can't be understated - is dependency on US tech firms when quantum gets good enough to be practical for those sorts of problems.

Since WW2, Europe has happily been a consumer of US produced tech. The last 10 years has caused a revisiting of that view. It's an exercise for the reader to figure out the factors leading to that, and whether they think it's sensible or not.

As the old quip goes: people don’t want to be writers, they want to have published a book.

You can turn this around as well: people don’t want to read, they want to be well read.

The difference is “effort and process” versus a status. People want the label, but don’t want to do the work to get there.

John Oliver did a piece on this a couple of weeks ago. The videos are not widely available outside of the US, but here's a Guardian write-up [0], and in the UK you can get access to the episode via catch-up if you have Sky Atlantic.

TLDR: the police do this whenever they want, pretty much.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/aug/03/john-ol...

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm glad that you've prefaced it with "temporary" - it suggests perhaps that the effects are known not to be permanent for you and that you are on the mend, which is marvellous. Godspeed.

To be clear, the people I encountered who had these interactions with me were very ill over a long period of time. At least one of them was sectioned after a failed suicide attempt (that involved trying to roll his car down the motorway and jumping off a bridge - thankfully nobody was hurt and he came away with just a few bruises). I was asked to go to the secure unit he was sent to, to convince him I was not controlling his brain, by his wife, who was acting on his request.

Another refused to get help after I urged him to talk to his doctor and became threatening enough I had to start forwarding emails and texts he was sending me to others as "witnesses" in case anything happened to me.

I am not the hero of these stories. I'm just part of them. When people you know behave like this towards you, it is deeply unsettling. Almost all cognitive changes in people you know can be disturbing. Talking about that is not me making myself the victim: it's saying how it affects me.

If I'd known PKD while all this was going on, and was aware of it, I think I'd be both saddened and terrified. That was my point.

Good luck with dealing with your own recovery, and I hope you're well soon.