kurthr

What do you consider complex? This might do basic anatomy, or maybe the ~200 bones in the skeletal system, but would you even cover the circulatory system this way? I sure wouldn't try to do liver function with all the feedback systems (bile, pancreas, pituitary) involved.

This might work to explain how a string is stored in different languages, or different sorting mechanisms (bubble vs heap vs insertion vs quick vs merge vs Tim)? That is something covered in 15 minutes of a CS class, but what it misses is why you would choose those mechanisms, and where they are optimal! It's not going to cover a complex topic, like even basic encryption that takes a few classes. In finance it might cover interest or a mortgage payment calculation, but it's not ever going to cover option calculations like Black-Scholes.

The issue is that if all you want to learn are some sequences of words that make is sound like you understand something, but not the processes and models that actually drive the performance and limit the design of that thing, then this "works". But it is classic LLM slop! It's a not good enough to win as a high school science fair entry.

There are things like language learning that I think different techniques could greatly benefit from LLMs. I would love for them to be popularized! I'm sure there are other LLM learning tools that are less gamified, but more effective for actual understanding and depth.

I am greatly disturbed by the idea that any of the demonstrations involve "complex topics". Whether it was the silicon workflow, LLMs, or EUV, I saw nothing complex. Are these supposed to be freshman undergrad or even high school level explainers? I suppose I didn't see any glaring errors on a quick glance, but definitely lots of details were glossed over.

Perhaps basic special relativity could be done this way, or simple derivatives, but definitely not general relativity or integrals, much less PDEs. I guess I was hoping for a 3B1B type output. Oh well.

In the US deaths peaked at >450k in 2021 and then fell <80k in 2023. They have roughly halved each year since (on track for ~10k this year. There are about 30-40k deaths each year due to influenza so this isn't really news any more.

Most everyone is vaccinated except the young who seem to have relatively mild infections. Of course there are probably excess cardiac deaths due to immune response, but that's even smaller and much more difficult to measure or determine cause for.

Who solved FLT.

Crime is legal (if you're in the right group).

It's only a fraction of the effect (and of course there was also over financialization), but 20% of the US population was farm labor in the 20s, that fell substantially (and there was the dust bowl) up through the 40s as tractors replaced a significant fraction of all farm labor (perhaps 1% per year). Efficiency does not always drive consumption.

Sure seems to rhyme. Call it Jevon's Tractor Paradox.

Something else certainly happened in the rest of the world about that time too!

I worked on the early iPod scroll wheel, before there were advertisements for it and it was in common use. I found the UI interaction odd and unintuitive, particularly the "menu" button and the dead end you hit when "playing". Of course by the time the demonstrator ads came out and everyone was talking about how easy it was use, I'd already spent 10s of hours on it, and it WAS second nature. Being first and embedded in the culture of the time has huge UI advantages.

(Note that the HP Chipmunk 9836 also had a scroll selector wheel in 84)

Most people are UI bigots. Once they get used to a first something, they expect everything to work that way and hate learning anew. They get stuck on keyboards, mice, trackpoint nubs, trackpads, trackballs, scroll wheels, or touchscreens and refuse to move on. Of course there are 'objective' performance tests for each including Fitt's test of accuracy and latency, as well as, cognitive load. I guess once you have a hammer, every screw looks like a nail.

So I'd be a bit careful with the "of course!". It may well be obvious only because that is the first mental model you latch onto.

Yes, I set a calendar notification then.

Don't mind the dup, though.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

It might not always be true, but it is here.

Longer to write and generally a numerical rather than symbolic representation.

Yeah, bra-ket is arbitrary tensors (inner and outer multiplication) rather than the nice 4D of space-time (with derivatives).

I will say that seeing transformers written this way gives me a bit more intuition for what is going on (being able to identify correct equations), but there's enough complexity in actual transformer implementations, that it still feels like I'm fooling myself.

Conceivably, I think you could use Feynman diagrams to talk about phonon dispersion in (eg asymetric crystaline) solids, but even though they're a "simplification", they're overkill for the problem.

bra-ket is the (most?) general form of tensor manipulation.

Raising and lowering operators for summation notation are the beginner tools for covariant derivatives of the metric tensor.

Christoffel symbols are where it's at, if you need to write out the Ricci tensor. The more constrained the space the more concise the notation can be.

Note that MechE tensor notation has an even more compact (eigen) form for principal stresses.

Yeah, came here to say this. There are a lot of things that will affect efficiency and how clean your panels are is only one of them. How dirty your panels get is also highly sensitive to both location and installation. All of this gets horribly confounded by string inverters (especially if they're clipping the peak, which they often are).

I easily see 5% increases in efficiency after cleaning (with micro inverters), but also see ~3% increase in output on a hot day from just spraying the panels with water to cool them off, which goes away in 15-20min.

If you're going to clean once a year, do it after the "last" rain of the year before summer peak solar output. If you live somewhere rural with summer thunderstorms, with high angle panels, and without a lot of pollen (or dust storms), you may not need to clean them much at all.

If you're going to climb on a roof, do it safely! A 10' fall can kill or maim you.

Yes, I'm agreeing with you. There need to be 200 companies willing to pay $10B/yr for this. What is the ROI? That's the pay roll of ~half the work force of the largest 200 companies. Unless you can fire %50 your employees, everything else is a sunk cost you already own.

That sounds reasonable, it's "just" $1k/yr for 2B workers (there are about 1.2B total "knowledge workers" in the world including gig drivers), or $10k/yr for 200M workers (there are 70M office and technical workers in the US). /s

https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-te...

In 4 years it better be 10x more important to have than a cell phone is today, or 10x more important than having internet/monitor/pc/printer is for an office worker today.

It's super-intelligence or bust.

Asking the right questions has almost always been one of if not the most important skills. There are often an almost infinite list of possible approaches, but knowing the domain, you can get close to optimum very quickly. If you just rely on the LLM, it will give you the most common bog standard approach, including the usual bugs and usual quirks.

Ask Claude to choose a set of improvements that it would rate highly.

I don't know any Jain well, but I believe they drink milk and fermentation products, but do not consume honey. Open to correction.

I think it's often called ovo-lacto vegetarian. There are also pescetarians.

Hindu drink milk and eat cheese, butter, and honey. Not vegan.

Worse than? What has been done to Ye? I mean, he's known for being a nazi symp and hitler lover, but that's just facts. Should we forgive Hitler too, because he was neurodivergent?

Oh wait, you meant Diddy. Yeah, prison for serial rapist billionaires is beyond the pail. They need understanding.

What did any of these great Heresy Heroes of yours achieve? More expensive Nikes, more palatable child sex trafficking, or serial rape?

Milikan's name has actually been removed from stuff. He's accused of raping zero kids. I guess you could argue that he stole credit for the Nobel prize from his grad student, but I don't hear you supporting Zweig or asking for Gell-Mann to be censored.

How is this not labeled (2022)? It sure hasn't aged well.

The oppression of billionaires and owners of the media by the few non-bots left on social media is kinda hilarious. The idea that litteral nazis and racists need to have their speech normalized and platformed, but that any opposition to it should result in state threats, imprisonment, and death is a bit twee.

Poor Henry Weinstein, poor Ghislaine, poor Diddy and Ye. The powerful and famous are so censored!

I feel a little more circumspect about Milikan, Shockley, and Watson, but thats because I believe humans are complex not because their oppinions deserve fanfare.

Any sufficiently advanced satire...

I think there were big reflectors in the book, but it's been years since I read it. It's the sail that would need to be toroidal and huge. I guess the better point is that, if you can always maneuver the bombs at EXACTLY the right point relative to the sail and they are are perfectly uniformly spherical, and you can orient the sail perfectly before hand, then you can balance on top of the nuclear pin and don't need a stabilizing concentric force.

It is more similar to the Medusa method. Lots of ideas have been proposed. One problem is getting the nukes prepositioned (and they won't easily stay in one spot!) with chemical rockets is quite challenging (rather than carrying them and launching them along the way) and also they would actually need to be set in groups of 3 to provide balanced forces along an axis, or alternately along a parabolic helix to compensate for directional errors.

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/04/17/medusa-deep-space...

This is really being driven by tandem OLED with blue phosphorescent (not fluorescent which is the current commercial design) layers, most likely from Universal Display Corp. The blue phosphorescent OLEDs have (note red/green are already) longer lifetime and and efficiency, but they aren't the deep blue you need for 3 primary displays.

Samsung and LG which both demoed ultra-wide color gamut/volume displays at SID 2026, but also CSOT/TCL. This allows even greater than BT.2020 coverage (APEX pixel is 131%!) or trade off for lifetime with higher brightness/efficiency.

The original 4 color LCDs (like RGBY/RGBW) was driven by a long ago need for brightness and resolution with fewer subpixels (see Samsung's Pentile RGBG arrangement). This both solves a different problem and the technology is being driven by a different development (and marketing).

https://en.ubiresearchnet.com/sid-2026-bt2020-oled-display-t...

Well, there is a way to do it slowly, the probe(s) just need to be in a 500AU circular orbit. At that distance power and thrust are an issue, and RTGs seem like a better choice than solar. Certainly, takes longer to get to orbit than fly through a point for a pic, but you would get a lot more pics.

I'm a bit skeptical of the token cost/ROI for all models, but sunk costs are sunk.

It has the feel of self-improving super-intelligence or bust to me. If you get that, the frontier model(s) run away with a faster exponential. It's a bit like semi with Moore's Law with silicon, GaAs could never catch up. If you don't get it, the fast followers crush the high investment and there's no moat. Not like they can enforce copyright!

Part of the reason is that they used NiMH for the batteries in those (I have 3 that are 20-30 years old some predating the Phillips logo). All of mine still work. The NiMH is good for 1000s of deep cycles. The one from the mid 90s is only good for about 15x 2min brushings. Luckily, you can still get new heads for them!

Even in the 80s HPs would do derivatives (and simple integrals). But, open book tests are the worst, nothing could save you!

I still remember giving Mathematica a relational equation of the atomic radius expectation values for it to integrate by parts and collect terms... at the time it failed to find the right integrating factor and gave gibberish. Probably works now.