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londons_explore

40,189 karma · joined September 5, 2016

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londons_explore··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
These guys had already signed a deal to build - giving them permission and probably an agreed price - the money was to persuade them to give that up.
londons_explore··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted because a court would not simply unwind the deal - a court would demand compensation of the market price of the goods not delivered on delivery day - which will probably be very high.
londons_explore··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted...

Do deliver and they don't get paid because the buyer purchased with money that doesn't exist.

Lose-lose situation!

londons_explore··on Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index
I just don't think you can combine speed, latency, price and intelligence into a single useful metric.

Clearly the weighting of those things depends on the usecase

londons_explore··on Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself
I put a load of washing on, then ended up in hospital for a year.

On return, the contents of the washing machine were pretty much this.

londons_explore··on Federal Communications Commission scraps limit on broadcast TV ownership
> In a 2-1 vote, the FCC repealed a 22-year-old rule holding that a company cannot own stations that reach more than a combined 39% of the U.S. television audience.

This seems like a very odd rule. What about things like CNN? Aren't they available to 100% of households?

londons_explore··on Japanese Govt Asks US Govt to Stop Using Mario, Pokemono, Naruto Meme Postings
Couldn't the real copyright owner just sue the US government and get a payout?

The fact this doesn't seem to be happening suggests that perhaps the copyright owner doesn't care?

londons_explore··on Discovery Loop
If a future version of Claude ever gets less error prone than a human, I might prefer the smaller chance of a building collapse from Claude than the larger but insured chance from a human engineer.
londons_explore··on Discovery Loop
Either these guys are going to try and build LLM swarms and agent loops....

Or they're going to try to build much bigger LLM's which are smarter.

The former isn't very defensible, won't work super well due to current models not discovering very many things per billion tokens.

The latter turns them into any-old AI company.

I don't normally bet against Jeff Dean, but in this case I'm not so sure.

londons_explore··on Discovery Loop
> Similarily, everyone becoming their own accountant / lawyer / other professional services.

These professional services will defend themselves with gatekeeping. Suddenly it doesn't depend anymore on the quality of your legal advice, but whether it has been stamped by a qualified Lawyer. It doesn't matter that your taxes are correct, but whether they are submitted by an approved accountant. Etc.

londons_explore··on Investors are having doubts about Elon Musk's grandiose ambitions
Tom Mueller, Chris Thompson, Hans Koenigsmann, Tim Buzza etc have all left.

Makes sense - they had been there ~20 years and must have a huge pile of stock.

But due to musks political aura (mostly right leaning), the smart minds from universities(which are mostly left leaning) are no longer joining spacex en-mass.

In turn, that means the companies are merely ticking along, not racing ahead.

londons_explore··on Investors are having doubts about Elon Musk's grandiose ambitions
Crew dragon was designed by smart minds.

Those smart minds have mostly left spacex now, since musk changed political sides and became much less 'cool' for the brightest to work at.

That's why the company is struggling now - few smart minds means little progress.

londons_explore··on Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap
Another approach is to simply accept low quality data into the database, yet have some kind of filtering during the viewing stage.

Eg. Draw me a map, but include only data points tagged with 'osm-license-verified-and-spam-filtered'.

That way users of the data get to decide their own tradeoff between legal risks, data freshness, spam, etc.

londons_explore··on When random.bytes() runs but doesn't work
Need not be the NSA. Might just be some regular thief.

The longer they wait, the more they get to steal after all.

londons_explore··on When random.bytes() runs but doesn't work
I am getting suspicious of "random number generator not actually returning random numbers" bugs....

They are the perfect bug for someone trying to "accidentally" make a secure system insecure.

I wonder if bribe money was involved or three letter agencies...

londons_explore··on Scope of Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Widens as Evidence Points to Iran
People use 1000x more water than they need to drink.

If a water supply chain attack happened, we would just distribute bottled water for drinking, and people would go without washing for a few days whilst the issue was sorted.

Bottled water production is already big enough that delivering a bottle a day per person in new York is within the scale of the current production and retail networks scope.

It wouldn't cause the mass casualties an enemy might assume.

londons_explore··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
I assume the politicians are kept in a very carefully managed microcosm so that they actually think they're making the best choices for their nation, because all other options have been hidden from them or misrepresented.
londons_explore··on Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6
I get frustrated with a poor quality model leaving my codebase littered with wrong comments, which then later trip up smarter models.
londons_explore··on Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?
This isn't true for most lithium ion chemistries.

The liquid electrolyte is the thing that releases most energy when the battery burns, more than the anode and cathode. Some also have a very low self ignition temperature.

londons_explore··on AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
For the individual employees, having your name on a peer reviewed paper in a prestigious journal makes you far more employable elsewhere.

Moreso if your current employer is a stealth AI startup which hasn't yet produced much notable.

It also can encourage employees to work for fewer wages... 'If you do great work you can publish and then get a $$$$$$ job offer at OpenAI, or you can stay here and get equity in a fast growing startup. If however your work doesn't do well, you walk away from a bankrupt startup with worthless shares and minimum wage'

londons_explore··on Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History
Some urban subways have 30 second headways.
londons_explore··on 24,650 internet-accessible BMCs leak password-derived hashes before login
If that were true, it wouldn't have a password at all.
londons_explore··on 24,650 internet-accessible BMCs leak password-derived hashes before login
Who exactly wrote this spec?

How sure are we that it was an accident to share password hashes with the world?

londons_explore··on Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History
Trains are expensive because the track is 99.9% empty.

If you could fill a train track as much as a road is filled, it would be very cheap

londons_explore··on A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants
The notation looks complex, but underneath it's all just adding and multiplying.

Nothing complex

londons_explore··on Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%
It doesn't matter. However much intelligence you can squeeze into 1 GB, people will always want more.

Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.

londons_explore··on The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border
If you root it, you can put all writable storage on the SD card, and the phones internal memory becomes readonly
londons_explore··on Bitchat is now on Radicle
It does nest geohashes...

It could do with a UI tweak though so that by default it shows you the most 'zoomed in' geohash with any activity.

londons_explore··on Bitchat is now on Radicle
They should add long range WiFi. For example the Espressif long range WiFi protocol (esp-now lr) should get around 2km of range.

With effort, various exploitable WiFi chipsets could probably have support added too. 2km of range makes mesh networking possible even with very low user densities, especially if combined with store-and-forward.

And then there is always the possibility of a hardware dongle with LoRA with 10km range.

londons_explore··on The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border
Replace micro SIM with micro SD, and it can be done on android.
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