Substantially smaller than building and running gas peaker plants
7,469 karma · joined March 4, 2016
Resistors used like that are notorious for being both large, and getting hot when used. Both things that are tricky to cram into a small handheld device.
You also have to wonder what the point of doing all this faffing is. Mobile phone batteries are optimised for energy density above almost anything else, which comes with tradeoffs, include much more rapid natural degradation overtime that can’t be reduced or limited by gentle charging cycles. A phones battery is basically guaranteed to be unhealthy after 4-5 years regardless of what you do or don’t do.
Just because two batteries have the same basic chemistry (Lithium-ion of example), doesn’t mean their behaviour is the same. There’s a lot of possible customisation and tweaking within that single chemistry envelope.
With consumer units, you can reasonably expect that they’ll operate with zero maintenance and zero direct supervision for a decade plus. If the cost of those units is low enough, that reduced operational burden starts looking very attractive, especially if you want to scale up your battery capacity across your network very quickly.
So they’re not dunking on that, they’re dunking on the idea that you can just trust Jev confidence scores without actually doing any validation.
Without the evals, how do you know it works magically? I think that’s the entire point of the authors article, people are using AI tools, and trusting the AI own evaluation of its performance, without making any attempt to validate if the AIs confidence actually correlates to anything meaningful.
From what I’ve seen, the result tends to be very exciting demos, followed by incredibly mediocre results when deployed into a real environment. The lack of critical evaluation then provides a double whammy, because it takes longer than it should to realise the system isn’t actually working correctly, and then the team lacks the skills and understanding needed to improve the system they’ve built. You just kinda have to hope that the next model release is going to magically result in better performance for your particular scenario, which won’t be able to measure due to the lack of evals.
The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.
This is hardly new or novel, you’ve just described huge chunks of existing engineering disciplines. There is still no complete model that explains why airplane wings work, there are lots of very useful models, but all of them have fundamental flaws where their behaviour completely breaks down in certain very possible scenarios. Notably scenarios where airplane wings don’t spontaneously either stop working or explode.
We also built the entire commercial airliner system decades before we even had computers capable of doing the aerodynamic analysis of airplanes, but none of that prevented us from creating huge engineering disciplines around the empirical data we did have, and slowly chip away at the underlying theories as maths and computing improved over time.
So we’ve always lived in a world where we extract value from systems we fundamentally don’t understand. But that’s never stopped us from working to understand them anyway, and deriving even further value from that improved understanding.
As a result Europe doesn’t culturally expect A/C every where, and has been slow to adopt it. But obviously climate change is forcing many to reconsider those cultural norms.
There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.
> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.
> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.
> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
Most of our economy is powered by human consumption, humans making things to sell to other humans, that then either transform it further and sell it to other humans, or consume it directly. I don’t think an AI needs to buy millions of iPhones a year, or consume millions of metric tons of grain each year, or buy luxury cars so they can show them off to their AI friends.
At best an AI might use all those resources to build out further compute and expand its own capabilities. But at that point nobody should be worrying about competing in the labour market, they should be worried about AI making our planet unliveable for carbon based life.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ce9yydgmzdvt?post=asset%3Aae...
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20260417-press-assoc...
There’s now even a wiki article on the usage of AI generated images in American politics, mostly dealing with the obvious slop that Trump has produced, rather than insidious edits of real images
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-generated_content_in_Americ...
I don’t think there any many people out there with the right equipment to carefully ablate the top of a sensor off, so they can directly inject their own data into the start of signing process. It’s not impossible, but it’s also not the kind of thing most people and organisations are going to be capable of doing.
> The creation of a secure digital negative begins with a secure boot of the camera sensor into a specialized reference capture mode. The mode instructs the sensor to cryptographically sign pixel data immediately after capture, and prevents the sensor firmware from modifying the data.
Is the whole point here that Apple have baked the TPM and keys directly into the sensor. So extracting the keys or injecting arbitrary data, will likely involve the destructive delidding of the image sensor itself.
That’s a significantly higher bar you need to jump, than any approach where the sensor and TPM are separate modules with no cryptographic capabilities in the sensor itself.
From the article > The creation of a secure digital negative begins with a secure boot of the camera sensor into a specialized reference capture mode. The mode instructs the sensor to cryptographically sign pixel data immediately after capture, and prevents the sensor firmware from modifying the data.
I think iPhones already do this (although without taking multiple seconds of video). iOS is capable of generating pretty accurate depth data even on devices with no LiDAR unit.
I think it would be of a stretch to actually claim that this specific incident caused loss of life, but it’s possible to see how such wide sabotage, especially conducted over a number of days, could result in compromised emergency services and result in loss of life.
Protests also tend to be more effective if the protesters involved actually make some clear demands about what they want. Simply breaking shit isn’t much of a protest.
I strikes me as unlikely that public opinion will succeed with AI where it’s failed with other existential crises.
They try to squirm out of that of course. But in general getting your money back isn’t too tricky even with a debit card.
That’s why you don’t see the same kinds of credit card deals in the EU compared to the US.
But I can guarantee you that if a companies internal data got leaked or misused, then every single enterprise customer of that lab would turn around and start suing them. As an enterprise customer you would be foolish not to, if only if figure out via discovery just how badly you got screwed.
You want to see how nasty that can get. Just go and look at what Apple is doing to OpenAI at the moment. Do you really think Apple wouldn’t find a way to sue a lab into oblivion if they discovered a lab had secretly started training on their data?
Concrete is a material that uses any binder with rock aggregate. But in everyday usage people mean to refer to cement concrete.
Asphalt is a specific type of concrete that uses a bituminous binder. So asphalt vs non-asphalt isn’t very helpful because non-asphalt either means nothing at all, or any other concrete that uses a non-bituminous binder, and there are plenty of other options.
Clearly GP was intending comparison to be to cement concrete, rather than say, toothpaste concrete, PVA glue concrete, or a number of other technically valid concretes, but obviously not practical.
It very hard for a company to do anything without leaving some kind of paper trail behind that can be discovered in court. Not without crippling their own operations by simply refusing to digitise or write down anything.
Lots of companies filled with people working very hard to obscure their shady practices have been hoisted by their own internal docs. Just look at any major Uber, Google, Apple, Microsoft lawsuit. Do really think Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna be better at destroying their paper trail before the lawsuit starts?
Concrete is a generally defined as any mineral aggregate (so rocks and stones) mixed with a binder (normally cement, but bitumen in the case of asphalt).
As for why roads are normally made out of “normal” concrete, it’s very expensive to build roads like that. Pavements are cheaper to build out of concrete because they only carry the weight of pedestrians, not lots of rolling vehicles. You need a pretty thick slab with rebar in it if you want to build a road surface from it, due to how weak cement concrete is under tension. Asphalt concrete cheats by being flexible, so minor imperfections in the surface or sub-base don’t become sources of critical failures (although they can become pot holes). Asphalt is also cheaper and easier to patch repair, but doesn’t last as long as proper cement road surfaces.
Most of them do, but they don’t get used very often. They seem to popup in vandalism cases where public artwork has been damaged by some drunk person doing something stupid. They don’t intend to damage anything, but damage results anyway due to their negligence when considering the consequences of their actions.
I think if you want to get super technical, in the UK there isn’t an offence for damage caused by negligence, but there is an offence for damage caused by recklessness, which is a higher bar than negligence. Usually it means you knew your actions risked causing damage, and you did it anyway, even if you didn’t actually intend to cause the damage.
An example would be gluing something to a public artwork, it’s kinda obvious that would likely damage the artwork when removing the glue, but you didn’t intend to cause that damage. Or perhaps sliding down a surface and scratching it in the process. Your goal was to just slide down the surface, not scratch it, but it should have been obvious that scratching could have happened.
But importantly it’s not reindexing the entire project, which is the expensive operation. So you have higher peak RAM when opening a brand new project, but much lower RAM usage while working on the project.
There is a huge international criminal industry that exists to find and hire money mules, and launder eye watering amounts of cash. Where I worked, we broadly assumed that the police weren’t interested in fraud or money laundering unless it was measured in 10s of millions. We reported everything, of course, but we only got call backs for really big schemes.
If you’re just committing fraud measured in $100ks, the odd of anyone bothering to investigate, and attempt to bring criminal charges, was basically zero.
The state being able demand a persons age, and gate their behaviour based on that, has existed for hundreds of years so far. During that entire time the requirement to be truthful has also existed otherwise the laws would be meaningless.
All that’s changing now, is figuring out how that extends into the digital realm. I personally find the argument that the digital realm is somehow special compared to the physical realm, and thus certain laws simply shouldn’t apply when “done on a computer”, difficult to reconcile.
As someone who’s implemented AML, KYC, and tax reporting functions in a bank. I think you would be very surprised at how shit they are for tax auditing at scale. Unless the tax man is specifically auditing you, and basically requesting all your transaction details, the reporting that banks do would only allow tax agencies to catch the most brazen and incompetent tax dodgers.
All of the tools however do make much harder to perform money laundering, forcing criminals to recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers to allow criminals to launder money via their personal accounts, using them as money mules. Which then gets flagged and shutdown pretty quick by banks because the behaviour is generally pretty obvious.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.