daly

Probably. But I have children who might benefit.

That's an interesting place to investigate. The Amish don't seem to depend on technology they can't create and they tend to develop their own food source.

I'll look into it further. Thanks.

Ah, finally a blueprint we can use!

Is there any program to run text-to-speech (for reading text files) that runs locally?

Nuclear power plants have a design life. The flux from the reactor causes permanent damage to the surrounding structures. Think of putting a bullet through a wall of your house once a day. Do you still think it will be safe after 40 years? MIT has a free course on nuclear reactors and they mention this damage as a lifetime limiting factor.

So I'm not the first, nor likely the last.

The paper was published in Nature which means that ordinary mortals like me cannot read it. Sigh.

Literate Programming in the Large https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av0PQDVTP4A&ab_channel=NextD...

I see no difference between these pictures

Just got my Tesla Y last week. Drove it on FSD.

I have a fairly deep expertise in the area. Masters level work in machine vision, many years of robotics at Unimation, IBM, and CMU. Current hacking on LLMs. I have programmed for 53 years.

FSD is "indistinguishable from magic".

This thing drove from my house to the destination and back without a single event. It has never seen either path. It handled stop signs, traffic lights, country roads, a flock of birds in the road, highway entrance/exit, directional traffic lights, traffic merging, speed adjustments, lane changes, rain, etc.

I am beyond impressed.

As for the "safety issue", my Y has airbags on the steering wheel, knee, and "curtain airbags" on the windows and seats. The Y has the highest safety rating available. It won't roll over easily. The passenger compartment is well isolated from front/rear collisions. Plus it apparently has emergency braking if a collision is likely.

In all possible circumstances even humans get confused. Two weeks ago I had a turkey fly across the hood of my car. I didn't know turkeys could fly. I thought it was a boulder at first. So FSD can't be perfect. But it is damn good.

VSAM

I'll check that out. Thanks.

This is what I loved about the PDP-11 series. The instruction opcodes were so painfully obvious you could read them in octal.

I would use a hand punch to create holes in paper tape that was the program. (Just a metal block with holes drilled and a metal dowel to punch the tape).

"Patching the tape" involved finding a section of code that could be "overpunched" to be a jump instruction to the current end of tape where you could punch in a subroutine and a return statement.

If all else failed you'd create a "patch tape" that was read after the original tape and overwrote memory locations.

It was all very convenient since you could "single step" the program from the front panel and watch the registers change.

Life got really sweet when the new teletype had a reader/punch.

Good times.

When the market is climbing the steep portion of the S-curve "pausing" is death.

I can train it to sit and read all day

This was a real thing actually.

The Pentium had a FOOF instruction that immediately halted the processor until reboot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug)

There were stories of overclocking certain brands of CRTs which would catch fire.

So the game was to write a program that set the CRT to overclock and then execute FOOF. The result was that the CPU hard-stopped and the CRT caught fire.

Fun times.

Greywater generally involves cleaning products such as soaps. Your toilet bowl cleaner could probably take the paint off your walls. If you need to wear gloves to use a cleaning product your greywater is questionable. Unless there is some processing step your "greywater" is likely toxic. This isn't the 17th century.

"Better Living Through Chemistry" -- Dupont ad

Think of the things you need in your day. Now think of those things without a house.

You need a place to shower. Homeless people need a place to shower. Truckers can use showers at rest stops but a homeless person has no place.

You need something to eat. Homeless people need a source of free food. Simple canned food that can be opened and eating without heating such as ravioli works fine. Fruit is fine.

You need a place to shit. Homeless people need public toilet access with reasonable cleaning schedules, soap, and other supplies. (A great use for robots)

You need to sleep. Homeless people need a safe place to crash at night without fear. Outdoor parks that have police protection rather than harassment are needed.

You need clean clothes. Homeless people need a source of clothing. Goodwill clothing ought to be freely available. A place to wash clothing ought to be available.

You need to get selected for jury duty :-) Homeless people need a contact point. The post office should have free postal box numbers so people have an "address".

You need medical help. Homeless people need a way to get the usual medication you find in every supermarket. Homeless people need free access to urgent care like Medexpress.

You need transportation. Homeless people need to get to work. We'll have a couple million self-driving cars on the road next year.

You need money. Homeless people need a source of income so they can get simple needs met.

Being homeless simply means that you don't have a way to accumulate "stuff". Life continues even if you don't have a fixed location.

Society seems to look down on people without a home. This "attitude" is the primary source of problems. Jean Valjean (Les Miserable) was arrested for stealing bread. Is this the kind of treatment you'd want if you needed to eat? Is it cheaper to build a prison, hire police, judges, lawyers, and guards or just make bread free?

The Bezos and Musks of this world can create a million square foot building in a few weeks time but people have to place to go. The Navy has billion dollar hospital ships but can't help a single person. Malls are empty but people sleep outside. Cities could declare "eminent domain" over empty malls to feed, house, and help homeless. Food gets thrown out due to an "expiration date" and people starve.

A fire, flood, job loss, divorce, or illness could make you homeless tomorrow. Provide a way for your future self to survive with dignity.

Laugh out loud funny. Having hacked at the pointer 7 level bugs I can relate.

I think that the field of proofs, such as LEAN, which have states (the current subgoal), actions (the applicable theorems, especially effective in LEAN due to strong Typing of arguments), a progress measure (simplified subgoals), a final goal state (the proof completes), and a hierarchy in the theorems so there is a "path metric" from simple theorems to complex theorems.

If Karpathy were to focus on automating LEAN proofs it could change mathematics forever.

There are two "cultures" of mathematics in my particular area of interest, namely computational mathematics.

I spent an intense year of study reading several hundred papers crossing both cultures.

One culture (my "original home culture") is generally referred to as "computer algebra". Here algorithms are developed and favored because they "mostly work".

The second culture generally falls under "proof assistance". Here various logic theories are developed and then implemented to support developing proofs as approved by the chosen logic.

Of the several hundred papers the only name I can find that crosses both cultures, based on bibliographies from the papers, is James Davenport, a rather clever English chap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Davenport

I'm wasting my time trying to straddle this gap, striving for a combination I refer to as computational mathematics. The struggle is that the computer algebra culture, being ad-hoc, does not have a way to create proofs of algorithms. The proof assistant culture, being theory-based, does not, in my experience, even permit the discussion of proving algorithms.

These two cultures have 25-plus years of parallel development with nearly disjoint biblographies. This seems to align well with Gower's two cultures theory.

I have programmed nearly every day at many different companies for 54 years. Nothing, NOTHING, I've written is useful anymore. My work at Worldcom, for example, simply vanished when the company collapsed.

I created a version years ago. The original source gets converted to morse code and then a dot->space, dash->tab

So all you see is a page of spaces and tabs.

A trivial compiler front end allows the "code" to compile.

How a small change could double the size of the U.S. electricity grid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYJz2FTFIWU&ab_channel=TheEl...

It is only a matter of time before someone creates a "superman x-ray vision" app for your phone that uses AI to "look through clothing", generating a real-time nude when pointed at anyone.

Seconds after that, every male in high school will have that app installed.

On the side of humor, public speaking coaches recommend that "you picture your audience as nudes" which is supposed to reduce being nervous when speaking. I'm pretty sure someone will integrate this into AI-glasses with this effect.

I voted for his pay package.

Why? Well, he made the deal years ago with outrageous performance targets, either meet them or don't get paid. He met the targets. Pay him.

Oh, and he has to pay to get those shares. They aren't free. When was the last time you paid to get paid? And he still has to wait 5 years to cash out.

As for laying off the supercharger team... that saves nearly $1B per year in people costs. But Elon just said it will invest $500 million in a network expansion and create thousands of new chargers this year. More chargers, fewer people, more company money saved.

As for "the EV market is entering a new phase", lets look at some numbers.

The car majors are LOSING over $100,000 PER ELECTRIC CAR OR TRUCK. Tesla is MAKING about $7000 per car. How do you think the race is going?

Ford is trying to build a CATL battery plant in Michigan but people won't let him. Tesla is building several battery plants and investing in their own technology.

All of the majors buy "carbon credits" from Tesla amounting to Billions every year.

Tesla Semi pulls the same load and the same distance as deisel but saves an estimated $80,000 over the lifetime of the truck in fuel costs (forget savings in maintenance). So buy 2 trucks, get the third one free.

Tesla Model Y is the best selling car (EV or ICE) worldwide. Norway posted 95% of vehicles sold last month, including non-Teslas, were EVs.

As for the investment required to make EVs, VW and Toyota are the world's largest debt companies. They have to write off dozens-of-Billions of factory cost as a loss during EV conversion. Tesla has $20 Billion in cash, not debt.

I'm sure the horse industry thought Henry Ford was stupid, evil, and a threat to their business.

Vincent Racaniello https://microbiology.columbia.edu/faculty-vincent-racaniello

He does not think this started in a lab.

Before the meal. You have to be below this week's target weight before you can eat today.

Can I get one at home to "work" for me? I'm willing to pay $100 per week as "salary" until it is paid off. Considering the fact that it likely won't be useful and I'll end up spending all of my time just keeping it moving (like some of my relatives) the "salary" is the only reasonable option.

However, I'd love to be on the beta list (axiomcas@gmail.com). I've been working in robotics since I worked for Unimation back in 1976.

As I understand it, Musk has worked for years without getting paid. The "paycheck" you refer to is actually the OPTION to buy stock at an agreed upon price. So he has to pay to get paid. That set of stock options required him to lead the company to massive profit, otherwise he doesn't get the stock options. He did that. Having fulfilled the conditions of the agreement, vest his options.

If Musk leaves then the Tesla company will become "corporate", meaning they will only make decisions that appear to improve the next quarterly report. The thing that keeps Tesla ahead of everyone else involves massively risky decisions that require long-term goals, such as building out a charging network, moving away from the traditional linear conveyor construction for car factories, "inventing" giga-casting to eliminate parts, steps, and vendors, improving battery technology, use Ethernet rather than individual CANBUS wires, move to a 48 volt architecture to reduce copper use, etc.

Rest assured that a "corporate Tesla" will die. I suspect that's the whole point of this exercise. All of the major car companies need Tesla to go away because they can't compete. Only Tesla and BYD make a profit on each EV sold. You have to sell over 50,000 EVs to break even and the majors can't seem to do that. So the next best thing is to kill off Tesla.

Musk realized that you don't need a 500 person team working on chargers. Why have a whole "charger research team" if you can already make the best, lowest-cost to build, lowest-cost to install, chargers? You only need a small factory and an install team. Oh, and as for laying off 500 people, do you think a Union would let Tesla recover the nearly 1-billion dollars a year it costs to employ 500 people doing nothing valuable?

Musk doesn't need Tesla but Tesla needs Musk.

My kids call it my "Dad-kins" (a pun on Atkins) diet.

Buy a scale. Record your weight. (e.g. 200.0lbs)

Week 1: you can eat anything you want in one sitting if the scale shows less than 200.0lbs

Week 2: you can eat anything you want in one sitting if the scale shows less than 199.9lbs (200.0-0.1)

Week 3: you can eat anything you want in one sitting if the scale shows less than 199.8lbs (199.9-0.1)

...

Week X: you can eat anything you want in one sitting if the scale shows less than (last week's goal - 0.1)

So losing a pound takes 10 weeks. Losing 10 pounds takes 100 weeks, etc.

The subtle part is that

(a) you can only eat when the scale says so which means that grabbing junk food gets ruled out unless the scale agrees.

(b) you don't feel "deprived" because you can anything you want in one sitting.

(c) you discover that eating junk food at your "one sitting" just means it will take longer before you can eat again.

(d) because you're SLOWLY changing your eating habits using external measurable control your body will lose weight and keep it off, gradually starving those fat cells.

(e) this is a "diet" in the sense of changing your eating habits, not in the current perverted meaning of trying to "diet" by "crashing" your weight loss.

Eventually you'll discover that if you skip anything containing high fructose corn syrup you tend to get to eat more frequently. That HFCS really hurts.