Torkel

How does it work if I have a US credit card and use it abroad? Do I still get the kickback even though the merchant fee is capped?

This feels like a potential arbitrage opportunity... I live in Sweden, but if I can use a US credit card I can get high rewards?

Is that actually the silicon that's on top of a cpu?

I've always assumed the silicon is super thin - "wafer" thin. And then some material is added where the bonding wires etc are embedded in and the pads or pins are attached to.

For sure it's like this on newer CPUs, where there is not a single piece of silicon bit rather multiple ones with interconnect between them.

There are products in this space, eg https://www.crysound.com/

Very cool stuff, can be used for drone detection at up to 200m. Accuracy is not super good, unless you make mic spacing a bit large.

Yeah, I was looking at the same chart and was very surprised at where the curve is relative to opus... Feels like sonnet 5 is "what if opus had an extra-low effort level"?

"Internal power supply, AC power 110-240V"

I wonder if they mean that? Japan is 100V.

Fun fact: back in 1600s the Swedish government wanted to make our old history grander than perhaps it had been. As part of that they instituted a law that if you find gold or ancient things on your grounds you would be paid more than the worth of it if you brought it in: https://www.icomos.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/1666-Placat...

It lead to many treasures reaching museums etc instead of being melted down! It's still in effect, and still pays higher-than-melting prices: https://www.raa.se/kulturarv/arkeologi-fornlamningar-och-fyn...

It's a couple of months since I did the calculations, but I do believe 2035 is for all energy, not just electricity.

It's easy to drag out a flat line in an exponential graph - but the line better start bending soon or we'll end up with a truly mind boggling amount of solar energy.

The growth of solar is astounding. I dug into data a while back and tried to do some visualizations of it, mainly for my own understanding:

https://torkeldanielsson.se/solar-energy-forecasts/

Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.

*yet

See, this is why I put "inmates should have decent drinking water" first in my comment, and "inmates should have clean water" as the very last words.

It seems to me you are making the exact error in argument I react against. Stop making everything a "human right". You see, in the end, when you've made everything "human rights", the whole "human rights" concept will cease to have any meaning whatsoever and you will have lost.

Of course inmates should have decent drinking water.

But I strongly disagree with "human rights" that are defined this way - something someone has to go out and bring to you.

A human right is something that someone cannot take away from me. Free speech is a human right. The right to life.

A "human right to water" combined with a "human right to housing" implies that if I walk aimlessly into a desert and decide to stay there, it is my human right to have people bring we water and a place to stay. Other people not doing so is against my human rights.

That's just... dumb.

And, again - inmates should have clean water.

Here's a study from 2023 where they apply external electricity to improve healing rate of wounds:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/LC/D2LC0...

It enabled healing of diabetic wounds that are otherwise hard to heal.

I.e.

No pain, no gain.

I asked gpt5, and it worked really well with a correct result. Did you expect it to fail?

So the messor male line is without sexual reproduction. Essentially a clone army, all with identical genes?

I find it interesting that this has not led to all the clones knocked out by diseases, as happens to eg our banana plantations.

Does it depend though?

The water (heat) leaking out is what you need to add back. As water level drops (hotend cools) the leaking will slow. So any replenishing means more leakage then you are eventually paying for by adding more water (heat) in.

I saw this post from a professor this morning:

https://x.com/lxeagle17/status/1899979401460371758

Students are not asking questions anymore.

Small assignments work well!

But then the big test comes and scores are at an all time low.

So it's a fisheye lens?

If you plot pixels per degree over the field of view of a fisheye lens you will see that vastly more pixels are dedicated to the center "eye". And also the field of view is large. Which is what this novel lens claims to also do.

And the talk itself is in English.

+1 on the podcast, it is excellent. I only wished he would have dug deeper on details on what they are building at Terraform.

Agree. This text relies heavily on traditional mathematics to define and work through things. It's quite good at that! But it does become weird when it starts out by declaring that it won't do what it then does.

It also felt like this could be a good topic for a 3b1b video... and... here's the 3b1b video on gaussians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_qvLDhkg00

I thought the same, screamed out "ouch that doesn't look good!" right before the catch.

The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.

Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.

+1

My BS-meter also went off on this.

Just turn off the screen with youtube video playing and there's no difference from a podcast?

I listen to Perun at the gym every week, audio only.

Yes. Exactly this.

Monument Valley was awesome!

And I had the exact same experience with Journey - good the first... 10 minutes? Then nope.

The Witness was also wonderful, that one worked. A Monster's Expidition was ok.

I have feelings about Stray... What an awesome game it could have been!

I played it with one of my daughers. Lovely father/daughter playing session. Guiding the cat through the maze/puzzles. Cat can't fall, it's just calm and nice.

And then, out of nowhere - blinking screaming wildly stressful and awful rats come chase us.

My daughter dropped the controller, I played it through. But after that the game lost its charm. The second time the rats came, she left. We never played it again.

I checked if there was some "please don't ever give me rats" setting, but nope. I checked with a friend and they said the rats appear throughout the game.

So I'm really sorry, but stray is a 1/10 game for me. Remove the rats and its 9/10.

What is the purpose of the rats? It's an arcade moment in a game that was nice, calm, cute and relaxing. Totally breaks the contract that I felt was established with us as players.

Multimodal models are not limited by semantic understanding though, right?

They are given photos, video, audio.

After I started my first startup, I had dreams of an inbox full of love from users, wild tech crunch reviews, and a bank account trending exponentially up.

Alas, that’s all it is. A dream.

No one will use your startup's products or services.

“One of the biggest ironies about this business is that there are lots of people who want to start companies, but that doesn’t necessarily equate with the number of people who are voracious users of new products or services,” says Ben Dover, news director at Startups Weekly.

The only thing a founder can do

Chris P Bacon first launched Sofa So Good as a side hustle using his own blog, then as a bootstrapped business seeling on Amazon, then as a traditionally VC backed company.

There is no algorithm that suggests that sofas with built in motivational coaches cheering on you will be successful. Even Big Tech are unable to predict which products users will love and which they won’t.

In his final advice to me, Bacon offers this: “I would say to try the traditional route first. If you can’t get traction with angels or VCs, then consider doing it small scale self funded. If your startup does well from word of mouth, you can go back to angels or VCs and say ‘look, it’s a proven seller.’”

Guess I’ll get to work.

Yes, please! To me it feels like 90% of road works I pass actually has nobody there working at all. Some go on for years it seems.

Another option is what they do in Japan - just get 10X the number of people on it, with all the tools for the entire job and then do it all overnight.

Also, nice to see good old "dude with shovel" in there, a tool that would have looked the same back in the 19th century.