lambdaone

At today's prices, that's around 1400 tons of gold. It's made out of lots of individual gold bars, and they can certainly move it in increments, by road then air or sea, unless the American government stops them doing it.

People ship million-dollar assets all the time. It would be a huge task to make 160,000 such trips, though.

Very insightful. One key sentence sums it up: "He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade."

This is going to get worse, and eventually cause disastrous damage unless we do something about it, as we risk losing human institutional memory across just about every domain, and end up as child-like supplicants to the machines.

But as the article says, this is a people problem, not a machine problem.

False positives can be eliminated mechanistically by testing if they actually work, in a sufficiently isolated automated test apparatus.

The hard thing is reducing detected crashes to well-formulated test cases that help rather than hinder maintainers.

What a fantastic company HP used to be, back in the day. They led the way in scientific equipment and calculators, and even desktop computers for a brief moment.

They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.

Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.

The article says "I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from."

The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.

This company sounds like it has months to live, or until the VC money runs out at most. If this idea is good, Anthropic et. al. will roll it into their own product, eliminating any purpose for it to exist as an independent product. And if it isn't any good, the company won't get traction.

Of course, the trained model they use to do the code generation may itself have been trained on the very open source code they are trying to replicate 'cleanly'.

Amazing hyperbole, and a deflection from the real issues. You can fight against wrongdoing without actually advocating people being killed.

Right now, climate change is an undeniable fact, its causes well-known, and the evidence for it now part of everyday life. If anything, its effects have been underestimated to date, and 'non-believers' in it are either fools or acting based on morally repugnant principles.

Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.

This is terrifying, and those fighting against stopping or reducing global warming should at this point be regarded as hostis humani generis

This is a great description of something I've been thinking about in terms of concepts like regression to the mean, clustering and median filtering - the space of LLM output is much smaller than that of the input, precisely because the LLM works so hard to extract minimal-information patterns from its input.

It's a sign of how far we've come that this article says "Break Free from Google and Apple", not "Break Free from Google, Apple and Microsoft".

None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society.

What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?

A large industrial robot running an insecure protocol - what could possibly go wrong?

You can use ssh with the None cipher, thus disabling encryption entirely while still using the rest of the protocol.

It's certainly one way to do arena-based garbage collection.

Multistory DCs are commonplace in major cities.

Right now vibe coding is more like training cats. You are constantly pushing against the model's tendency to produce its default outputs regardless of your directions. When those default outputs are what you want - which they are in many simple cases of effectively English-to-code translation with memorized lookup - it's great. When they are not, you might as well write the code yourself and at least be able to understand the code you've generated.

The thing I find most notable is the lack of any concrete information on how these things are to be cooled, other than quotes like "space cooling is free".

If you want to radiate away the heat, you are either limited by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which requires extraordinarily large radiators at any reasonable operating temperature, or have to develop a "super-Planckian" radiator technology, something which while it may be theoretically possible doesn't seem to actually exist yet as a practical technology.

The only other plausible technology I can think of would be to use evaporative or sublimation-based cooling, but that would consume vast quantities of mass in the process, every bit of which would have to be delivered to space first.

Has anyone seen any published work that suggests it is actually anywhere near economically feasible to dissipate megawatts of power in space, using either these or any other technology?

I'd say that figure was more like 99.99% or higher. Email is very, very complex these days, and SMTP is just the beginning.

Wonderful. And this is now part of the training set of the world's LLMs.

People always vastly overestimate what can be done in the short term, and vastly underestimate what can be done in the long term.

I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap, at a cost far less in inflation-adjusted terms roughly that of a ZX80, connected by gigabit-speed links to a world-spanning network of similarly unimaginably fast servers connected by near-terabit optical links. And all this has changed the world in ways impossible to anticipate in the 1980s, ways that look like the most extreme cyberpunk fiction of that time. Who could have anticipated, for example, that politics is now substantially driven by covert bot farms, or that LLMs could seduce people into suicidal psychoses?

Yes, robots are going to be underwhelming for quite some considerable time, just like the ZX81 represented almost no improvement over the ZX80 and so on - each generation represented only a marginal increase over the previous. Solar panels were crap 20 years ago; toys useful only for powering pocket calculators. But they got a little bit better year by year, and small improvements compund exponentially. Now renewables are approaching 50% of electrical power generation in many places, and it's pretty clear that in another 20 years, wind/solar/battery will be the sole generation source for all but the most niche activities.

I expect the robot boosterism of the present day to bust pretty quickly when we see how different their capabilities are from the fantasy. But fast-forward just 20 years, and supply chains adapt much faster than expected (cf. Chinese electric car manufacturing) and the concept of ubiquitous robotics seems much more feasible. It certainly seems likely that if we can make roughly 100 million cars every year, we can make robots at a similar rate. I think it's likely to change the world in ways we can't imagine yet.

People live longer than 20 years, and the average person born today can expect to see perhaps four such technological revolutions. Think long-term.

If the humanoid robots are no better than the cars, it's unlikely. Unitree and Boston Dynamics are pretty much there in terms of solving the hardware problem, and the rest is software and the hardware manufacturing learning curve.

The Chinese are massively out-manufacturing Tesla in the electric car market - would you bet on Tesla somehow being better than the Chinese at manufacturing?

The rest as I said is software; given Tesla's consistent lack of success in "Full Self-Driving", would you bet on them outengineering the rest of the world in the software aspect of robotics?

This is a software, not a hardware problem. Suitably intelligent software could gently apply the brakes every now and then in addition to regenerative braking even when it doesn't need to, just to keep the brakes in good condition.

I think you'd be suprised how effective robots will be at manual tasks eventually. Manipulating physical objects in space is a different problem from manipulating text strings, but efforts to solve this problem are already well under way.

Boston Dynamics has shown us that the difference between a clumsy robot and an agile one is mostly software, and the differences between current Unitree-class robot and an actual practical worker robot is also likely to be mostly software (and of course access to lots of compute power - most of the 'brain' is unlikely to be situated within the robot body itself, instead residing in a data centre some milliseconds away).

Great, but PLA is somewhat flammable.

According to Statcounter, Linux's share is 3.86% and rising; but I'd imagine that quite a bit of the almost 16% 'unknown' is also Linux.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Not insignificant at all.

Archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251009081648/https://conscious...

It can detect not only large containers of liquids, but (up to a point) what liquid is in them.

Randall Munroe coined the helpful word 'citogenesis' to describe the combination of uncritical citation and feedback loops. Once the nonsense is out there, it's hard to ever claw it back.

https://xkcd.com/978/