avsteele

Interested in the evaluations of anyone actually using this.

I tested over the weekend and Astra can

- create and modify schematics from instructions - place components and route traces

out of the box, just via normal 'computer use'. I'm not satisfied with the routing but it isn't terrible.

I use it.

It is useful for anyone who has a personal domain from which they'd like to send/receive without needing to migrate off Google entirely. My registrar gives a few email addresses with SMTP support. Then I use GMail's send-as to remain in gmail but still use my name@mydomain.com mailbox.

What does this have to do with Alibaba? Are you saying Alibaba is the reseller?

If not it sounds like you are describing a separate phenomenon.

It is even worse than the article says. You can, though these dialogs, wind up having folder on your hard drive moved around, have your desktop or other folders which you do not intend to be, cloud-synced. Then you get home and all of a sudden two PCs you mean to keep separate have new apps installed, background changed, etc...

I HATE this window.

Obviously ~nobody has read this yet... But I did have a question based on the opening:

"If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence. Authoritarian leaders and technology oligarchs are deploing [sic] AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity"

So in the first two sentences we have hyperbole and typos? Hardly seems like high-quality academic output. It reads more like a blog post.

I haven't had much success yet with this. My ratings follow.

Reading and interpreting datasheets: A- (this has gotten a LOT better in the last year)

Give netlist to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss, but useful because catching ANY errors helps)

Give Image to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss)

Design of circuit from description: D- (hallucinates parts, suggests parts for wrong purpose. suggests obsolete parts. Cannot make diagrams. Not an F because its textual descriptions have gotten better. When describing what nodes connect to each other now its not always wrong. You will have to re-check EVERYTHING though, so its usefulness is doubtful)

Lots of this is right, but

> and PRC's was to peak emissions by 2030s

This appears to be wrong. Peak is supposed to be before 2030. They will not hit it.

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/targets/

This is not energy output (production, usage), it is that plus an adjustment for the in->out energy efficiency. It would only == production if all energy sources in the mix has the same factor.

Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.

Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.

ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.

That metric doesn't answer the same question. It isn't saying 18% of their needs are being met by renewables.

Beautiful pictures. To be clear: China runs on coal and will for the foreseeable future.

https://www.iea.org/countries/china

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...

If you want a consequentialist answer:

If, for ethical reasons, fewer people were willing to take these jobs, then either salaries would have to rise or the work would be done less effectively.

If salaries rise, the business becomes more expensive and harder to scale. If effectiveness drops, the systems are less capable of extracting/using people’s data.

Either way, refusing these jobs imposes real friction on the surveillance model.

If you want a deontological answer:

You have a responsibility not to participate in unethical behavior, even if someone else would.

> Article Context-free raw #'s

"Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for national chain

> Dad journalism

"Bad" Typo, sorry

> You should not update on this article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference

> (…) a national report found that (…)

The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad. Whether or not this is correct necessarily depends on a comparison with other stores.

Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism.

You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry.

I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%).

https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verif...

Why is this worth doing? What wrong with the status quo? The author does not give any examples of Oracle threatening people for using the JavaScript (tm) name.

Interesting line to draw:

- you can record all manner of video in your store...

- but you can't process it in this particular way.

The authors largest bullet point is on author identification. What are the arguments against this and do people really feel they outweigh the benefits?

My view: I would think given how many code supply chain attacks we've see recently this would be be regarded as (at worst) a necessary evil. How much software used by large numbers of people does the open source community think will be done by anons?

Sidenote: The author implies SyncThing development was stopped due to author ID but the post linked does not say this and gives a completely different reason (forced updates)

Malpractice slightly hyperbolic.

But anybody relying on Gary's posts in order to be be informed on this subject is being being mislead. This isn't an isolated incident either.

People need to be made be aware when you read him it is mere punditry, not substantive engagement with the literature.

Papers make specific conclusions based on specific data. The paper I linked specifically rebuts the conclusions of the paper. Gary makes vague statements that could be interpreted as being related.

It is scientific malpractice to write a post supposedly rebutting responses to a paper and not directly address the most salient one.

This doesn't rebut anything from the best critique of the Apple paper.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09250

Many people drive places other (further) than work multiple times a year. "75 mile battery" wouldn't even be good enough for a one-way trip of this kind let alone there and back again.

The authors don't say anything like this that I can see. Their conclusion specifically identifies these as weaknesses of current frontier models.

Furthermore we have clearly seen increases in reasoning from previous frontier models to current frontier models.

If the authors could /did show that both previous-generation and current-generation frontier models hit a wall at similar complexity that would be something, AFAIK they do not.

People are drawing erroneous conclusions from this.

My read of this is that the paper demonstrates that given a particular model (and the problems examined with it) that giving more thought tokens does not help on problems above a certain complexity. It does not say anything about the capabilities of future, larger, models to handle more complex tasks. (NB: humans trend similarly)

My concern is that people are extrapolating from this to conclusions about LLM's generally, and this is not warranted

The only part about this i find even surprising is he abstract's conclusion (1): that 'thinking' can lead to worse outcomes for certain simple problem. (again though, maybe you can say humans are the same here. You can overthink things)

This is about way more than software. It's all R&D

It's effectively 6 years too. You only get to depreciate 10% in 1st year. This might have killed my company if it was around during first years.

See my comments on the previous discussion (Nov 2023) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145630

That isn't the reason. They sunset in the bill so it has a lower CBO score (which calculates costs out to 10 years). If you sunset in the bill after 5 years, even if you know it will get renewed, the apparent cost goes down. Get it?

NOT in professional communication. If you want to run your lab that way, feel free.

We have certain professional communications standards in the scientific community. This isn't a corner bar.

Profanity should not be in the title of scientific articles. Most unprofessional. In addition, titling your article for shock value should be discouraged. The end point will be a degraded discourse.

TSMC's approach here sounds sensible but I don't think it speaks much to QC. It is a pretty different problem domain. The trapped-ion QCs can use much more expensive / less practical lasers and optics and still be useful.

I mean in this case the upside for me is no tariff. I don't mind paying some premium for assembly in USA.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I haven't ever had to 'go over' the board with PCBWay. Maybe why they are so cheap, but I've only ever had one quality issue.

I send the gerbers and pick and place and take it from there. I approve photos If they have any question (which is rare) its over email. I don't even mind sourcing the parts/pcb/stencil myself. Its the components which make the tariff painful.

OK, can you name one you've used/been happy with?