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aurizon

738 karma · joined September 3, 2012

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aurizon··on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices
This has infested veterinary practices. Vet costs have increased 8-12% annually for 4-5 years now. The process approaches the vet saying their integrated back office system will save you local personnel and allow the vet to increase client service hours by wasting less on admin. Their system fractures a vet visit into service actions - each of which has a fee. They create a medication factory where a bottle of 100 tablets that cost $1 each becomes $5 a tablet, plus a dispensing fee. Over the past 6 years this has increased vet bills by 50-80%. Sadly, this brings people to abandon pets because they can not afford vet bills = death for the pet or a hard/short life as a stray. This private equity has also infested dentistry, which shows up as more dental bankruptcies as more people choose extraction over implants/root canals.
aurizon··on AI Boom / Bust – Boom Boom Pow
As I see it, the various players will be able to self help via AI and analyze/find/fix these problems at AI speed, much like AI is is digging out bugs in code (bug reports are huge, but are being fixed/tested by AI at light speed = bug reports ebb in a few weeks) and AI fix/test will show this ebb as the code online is run through the wringer. While it is true that small malware coders/spreaders have easy entry and dedication, they are fewer in numbers and resurces than giants like Google/Microsoft/Oracle/ et al and quite quickly their walware will be rooted out and extinguished. There are code efficiencies rising that use tokens more efficiently to make libraries whereby wheels are not invented twice and simply parsed from the flow and that code re-used. AI spontaneously?? invented this process??. Also a number of AI data centers have been cancelled as these efficiencies were made known = lower cost per token + coupled with lower useage should soften this crash into a plateau or at worst a slow decline. After all, these players know all this and can be expected to correct promptly.
aurizon··on One 'absolutely prolific' male bird is keeping his species alive in the U.K
Hopefully they can find a same species male to broaden the gene pool as this dependance on a single male shows a closing bottleneck looms.
aurizon··on Almost nowhere in California is building enough, according to the state
self interest? Retiring/moving to a lower cost state/country?
aurizon··on Almost nowhere in California is building enough, according to the state
Of course there are minimal new homes. Crooked/biased current home owners know that every new home built reduces(incrementally) the selling price of their home. So they infest local laws with restrictive limits on new homes (density, height, polydactyllic cats etc etc.) Here in Toronto they circulate questions and objection procedure forms that solicit objections - it is much the same in the USA. In California there are thickets of these rules. Many are racially based, but dare not say that, so they use creative word craft, size etc to exclude 'undesireables' by economic filtering by making huge lot sizes, large home sizes that are also single family(10-20 rooms etc). These are endless. Only a land/home crunch will break these down.
aurizon··on Generative AI Can Harm Teaching
AI can be an effective support tool for a teacher. Old way = 30 students, with teacher at the front explaining/showing/etc. Occasional questions/responses. Some are shy, some not following, many baffled, most silent. New way, 30 students each in their own alcove with dual 20 inch monitors and head phones with the same recorded explanation with AI all on their own time track so the AI can monitor responses and assess progress. AI has the smarts to query points to assess progressm and to present an alternate approach one or more times if needed, and escalate to a supervisory teacher/assistant as needed. Each student can progress at their pace, fast/slow. Poor students can be spotted and get added attention and faster ones can progress more quickly. The big problem today is lack of teacher one on one time, so many just languish, Some form study groups, others are auto-didacts and the book will do and too many drop out. The teaching community has a chance to embrace well implemented AI in the classroom. I hope they do better this time than they did with computers when they first entered classrooms in the late 80's. I recall in the early 80's when departments at U of T were not allowed to buy IBM and Apple PC's to perform modelling etc because the University had a large IBM system and we had to prepare programs, test them and them present them for the TSO system. (Time Shared Option) and the staff would run and return your batch/results the next AM. You would then assess data and fix it and run again(as there were frequent batch fails). Most of the grad students and post docs had access to IBM/Apple PC's and passed programs around, the early internet and sneakernet was in full flower. Eventually the UofT gave in to realty and soon every desk had a PC. Laptops -?? Not yet. We had luggables, Kaypro's and then Dells 25 to 40 poundsm CRT based 5.25 floppy, rare 5 Meg hard drives. High Schools had near zero computers, they slowly came in over 20 years. We had all manner of non standard ones, Commodore did bestm but the Gov of Ontario killed them by adopting their ICON system, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer) This was a form of graft for Canadian computer companies who would build and sell these and = $$$. Of course, it launched with fanfare, and fell from orbit ablaze all the way.
aurizon··on Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers
A retrospective analysis of what was the motive behind all this? Did they want an Adobe/Oracle type stranglehold/walled garden for max revenue extraction? Did they want to own any new things/ideas anyone invented by a rush to patent/copyright/?? It seems they did not anticipate the amount of fur that would fly and they should probably try to back away as gracefully as possible before they kill their own golden goose, if at all possible after the recent forks as vigourous fan driven forks can exceed their source forks?
aurizon··on Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway
I would not discount Musk. He is an intelligent man and will draw on the expertise of other intelligent people to assess the state of the current art, where it is going, and build to create an up to date fab as an extension of that curve with the latest TSMC equipment = 3-5 years with the assorted lead times. Remember what he did with rocket science? Threw the billion dollar one hit wonders out the window and created reuseable rockets with a high degree of high end printed metal parts involved. Sure he made a lot of scrap = the cost of progress. Now all the old iron is virtual scrap = reuseable is the path. As for orbital data centers?? Why there? What is the gain/loss assessment of terrestrial versus orbital data centers?? A ground fab seems doable. Orbital data centers is a high cost, zero sum game. No gain, huge added costs.
aurizon··on Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte. I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces. Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green
aurizon··on How Passive Radar Works
Starlink can blacklist an area, but the frequent Tx/Rx emissions persist. Smuggled in terminals can be blacked once found. I am not sure how local areas discover/ID to Starlink/request blacklistimg works. I know starlink has upset many government internet rate extortion schemes in many countries in many Southern areas
aurizon··on How Passive Radar Works
I wonder if the many Starlink satellites can be used for this? True, the signals are low and are steered, but the nature of steering creates many side lobes that will be useable in this manner. It would be a complex computational task with satellites in motion as well as ground stations transmitting on offset frequencies. I suspect various research/military labs are playing with this?
aurizon··on Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era
This has all happened before, back in the day we has spinners and weavers, then we got the spinning Jenny(Engine) and this made thread so cheap we needed to speed up weaving = machine weavers(AKA automatic looms) and we had people who hated them.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite We all know how that ended up. We have an analogous hand task = coding versus coding machines. They will probably eliminate 80-95% of coding, as the spinners/weavers went away, but there remains a residual artisanal spinner/weaver industry that carries on at a lower pace. In a similar way this machine code will have the coupled ability to make some code and then test it in use with it's own AI in a repeated/recursive way to make/test/improve code at a rate 10,000 to 1 million times faster than a human. Each module can then be tested in millions of interactively monitired ways to find/fix/kill bad modules. It can also pentest in a similar manner, assaulting a system with a blizzard of attack/reset hits to find any bugs etc. Each assault that works might use a human or AI to trouble shoot. This is like the old armored night, once he was unhorsed the peasants would have at him with needles at his his joints/eyes unless his fellows save him = gone. So this might well reduce low end jobs, but they will still need high end coders to eliminate all flaws in the armor of your code. I might be simplistic, but I see a parallel in sub 5 nm chip design where the design machines have eliminated almost all of the old hand work.
aurizon··on Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem
Yes, the space is indeed deep/wide, but LLMs probably cull the herd as they proceed so they eliminate swathes as they go. Smart fuzzing in a way.
aurizon··on Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem
This is a lot like the 50 million monkeys on 50 million typewriters will eventually write shakespeare... We have all heard this, pity the poor proof readers who will proof them all in a search for the holy grail = zero errors. In a similar way, LLM's are permutational cross associating engines, matched with sieves to filter out the dross. Less filtering = more dross, AKA slop. It can certainly create enormous masses of bad code and with well filtered screens for dross, we can see it can create passable code, however stray flaws(flies) can creep in and not get filtered, and humans are better at seeing flies in their oatmeal. AI seems very good at permutational code assaults on masses of code to find the flies(zero days), so I expect it to make code more secure as few humans have the ability/time to mount that sort of permutational assault on code bases. I see this idea has already taken root within code writers as well as hackers/China etc. These two opposing forces will assault code bases, one to break and one to fortify. In time there will be fewer places where code bases have hidden flaws as soon all new code will be screened by AI to find breaks so that little or no code will contain these bugs.
aurizon··on HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
I love the way they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their actions
aurizon··on “Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server
That's a 'snatch defeat from the jaws of victory moment'
aurizon··on Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment
Google is vulnerable in search and that already shows as we see a decline as many parallel paths emerge. At the beginning it was a simple lookup for valid information and it became dominant - then pages of pay ranked preference spots filled pages that obscured what you wanted = it became evil.
aurizon··on Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment
I wonder how the huge slug of memory that might now have to re-direct mid-ramp as this (and other AI pullbacks) ramify forward? Will Crucial re-enter the desktop market? Or will it create a slow/fast subsidence in memory? We will live in interesting times..
aurizon··on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
Get a 50 meter car
aurizon··on Soldering Prototypes with Enamel Magnet Wire (2020)
Yes, urethane decomposes liberating longer chain organic acids which fluxes
aurizon··on Soldering Prototypes with Enamel Magnet Wire (2020)
I used to work for Schenectady Chemicals in 1968 we developed solderable self fluxing polyurethane coated enamelled wire, it was an immediate hit and soldered well. Times have changed and I left them in 1978, but it might be an item to look for as I found it very handy.
aurizon··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
AI is a house painter, wall to wall, with missed spots and drips. Good coders are artists. That said, artists have been known to use assistants on backgrounds. Perhaps the end case is a similar coder/AI collaborative effort?
aurizon··on What Singapore Teaches Us About Building Prosperity from Scratch
Looks like a detailed plan to be anti Russian. From news/web/blogs etc, Russia has steadily driven it's economy down-hill. It also is a plan for the common SF theme of belter colonies, stations. In most of these SF colonies corruption is rampant, de-facto autocracies predominate(the Company Store syndrome)
aurizon··on US Government overhauls the childhood vaccine schedule in unprecedented move
Can JFK Jr be charged with murder because more infant deaths occurred after his anti vaccination policy was promoted? R0 = Basic Reproduction number. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/1/17-1901_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

Measles has one of the highest R0 numbers. A virus has a number of processes that run molecular assembly lines.(some have only one) these processes should run perfectly = each cycle = one virus. Some do not run properly and create a failed product. The virus takes control of cellular processes to make viruses, as time goes by the cell is filled with virus particles and bursts at which time all the good/bad virus particles are released. A virus with a well tuned processes make the exact number of components and subcomponents to make only perfect viruses, with no wasted parts that then all perfectly assemble into perfect viruses. These have the higher R0. Some are helter skelter = badly tuned = low R0. They say a single measles particle can infect a human, and it has one of the highest R0 numbers. An R0 below one is probably 'sub critical' and will not propagate.

aurizon··on What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)
With all this gold, Spain went on a buying spree, weapons, art, churches etc - and the sellers(rest of Europe) industrialized as the gold trickled down into THEIR economies. When the gold no longer arrived, Spain went into a steady decline as their rich upper crust of RC Churche, Kings, Queens, Lords, Ladies etc. and eventually became democratic after Franco.
aurizon··on 89 years ago, an SF-to-Hawaii flight changed the world forever
There was a WW2 flying boat that went a huge distance to get home across the Pacific after being isolated by the war declaration. An epic journey https://www.facebook.com/groups/513995116436286/posts/885540...
aurizon··on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
Move fast with AI, and break things, many, many things really fast
aurizon··on Declining unions could be making working-class Americans less happy
Yes, here in Ontario, Canada, the salary rate is quite low, but over time ramps to $60-80K. This tends to limit new enrollments at the low end via Teacher Colleges, but is so large at the top end that budgets are starved. As a kid in HS in the 50's the scale was a lot flatter. This has led to a lower presence of teacher staff in halls and stairwells (where we had a teacher in every hall segment and stairwell). Now the halls/stairwells are under supervised and this has tended towards many teacher free areas where it becomes 'Lord of the Flies' territory. I can see a growing role for AI in subject supervision on an individual basis to follow detailed student progress with explanatory input/repetition, as needed, perhaps with a dual screen setup where the teacher is able to monitor and have input above and beyond what the AI is capable of. My reason for this POV is teachers are spread thin and often are not aware of the people who might be lagging(and who often lose heart = drop out). I expect this idea has already begun to grow, and I hope AI pushback does not limit this concept.
aurizon··on Sabine Hossenfelder loses affiliation after criticising other scientist's paper [video]
Sabine doing what she does best = goring sacred cows = she needs to wear one of these as she does it....https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_helmet
aurizon··on How do you spot a Brilliant Jerk?
This brings to mind high functioning autism spectrum people(of which I am a fringe one), although the spectrum is wide/deep and probably encompasses many.
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