microtonal

Google has betas for QPRs and yet this was not caught. It makes you wonder if Google is dogfooding the devices themselves or at least the devices that are not the latest gen and have 16GB memory.

The other issue is that it often takes weeks or months to fix show-stopping issues. Compare to e.g. Apple who rolled out a fix for Apple Watch 12/Ultra reboots or the iPhone 18 Pro Face ID issues within a week.

There are seriously things wrong in their process if they don’t catch these bugs and/or fix them quickly. (Or the other possibility is that they are understaffed.)

So from that perspective there is not really a difference between AOSP and Linux, you need support from the device vendor. But AOSP is many times more secure than the traditional Linux desktop and has many times more apps available (most of which do not require Play Integrity).

Pixel 11 series received a bug fix release near the start of September 2026 with the 2026-09-01 patch level. That update wasn't Android 17 QPR1 and also doesn't include the September 2026 Pixel firmware/driver security patches. Perhaps they noticed this issue and cancelled it.

Yes, effective in speeding up decoupling of the EU banking system from the US and quickly reducing the use of the systems of Mastercard and Visa. Last year's sanctions on ICC individuals already had a large effect. For instance, the fear of further dependence on US companies has already caused blocking of the sale of the Dutch company Solvinity (who maintain the Dutch digital ID systems) to Kyndryl and has put some countries on the path of moving off Office 365, Exchange and even Windows.

It's just insane stupidity by the US administration. It's very unlikely that an US official would ever be arrested for the ICC, allies wouldn't go there. So, it's just putting Europe on a path to purchase less and less from US service/software companies to protect Benny, who could simply avoid being arrested by not going to a country that joined the ICC.

They could have immediately activated the trade bazooka when Trump was threatening Greenland, but the slower diplomatic approach also worked and led to far less damage on both sides.

There are strong calls from the EP now for the EC to prepare the blocking statute:

https://www.politico.eu/article/block-us-sanctions-on-the-ic...

https://finance.ec.europa.eu/eu-and-world/open-strategic-aut...

But in this case it’s a misnomer. The Home Assistant instance is not in the cloud, but local. The core service of Nabu Casa Cloud is making it remotely accessible. So Link is actually a better name.

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

Ukraine is taking back terrain currently:

https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-has-retaken-745-sq-km-...

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/85252

Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO

It is not. The primary reason that Russia can even keep up is that it has many more citizens that can be thrown in the meat grinder and can work in arms factories and it has a larger industrial base than Ukraine. If you would tell most experts before the invasion, that it would've ended up as it did, they would have laughed their heads off. They would have told you that the Ukraine army would not be a match for the Russian army and they would have told you that the response of the West would have been divided.

Russia has ~146M citizens, Ukraine has ~29M citizens within land that it currently controls. Russia's estimated GDP is $2.66 trillion, Ukraine's GDP is $225 billion. That's 5x as many citizens and a 10x larger economy.

A real conventional war against NATO would be a completely different story. Sure, NATO countries would have to catch up with drone production and defense, but a lot of knowledge transfer and co-development is already happening. But NATO's economy and population is several times larger than Russia's. If NATO countries switched to a war economy, it would not be a fair game.

Of course, Putin knows this and he also knows the real weaknesses: there is a change that not all countries will uphold Article 5 and coordination might end up in a mess if the US would bow out, because command & control has always largely been handled by the US. This is why he is constantly testing how strong Article 4 and 5 are on an escalating ladder. The other weakness are disinformation campaigns through social media, which are working really wel for them, both in the US and in various European countries.

(I don't think it's useful to talk about nuclear war, it will end up badly for everyone in a population center. There will be no winners, only losers.)

    softmax(QK^T/sqrt(d_k))V

    Q: N x q_dim (leaving the batch size and n heads out for simplicity, they are constants for our purposes here)
    K^T: k_dim x N

    QK^T: N x N <- this is the attention matrix

Then

    V: N x v_dim
    (QK^T)V: N x v_dim

Note that during decoding, the dimensions change. Since it is an autoregressive model, we do not need to recompute the values and keys of prior tokens, only of the token that we are currently decoding. Of course, the token that we are decoding still attends to all prior tokens and itself.

    Q: 1 x q_dim
    K^T: k_dim x (N+1)
    QK^T: 1 x (N+1)      <- Note that attention in this step is not quadratic anymore, since
                            we only need to compute how the current token attends to prior
                            tokens, the representations of prior tokens are frozen. K comes
                            from the KV-cache.
    V: (N + 1) x v_dim   <- V comes from the KV-cache
    (QK^T)V: 1 x v_dim   <- Also not quadratic, the value is only computed for the current token.

The point-wise feed-forward layer does not matter, in decoding it only needs to be computed for the representation of the token that we are currently generating. We don't need the representations of the preceding tokens for the next layer, since we have already cached their keys and values for each layer.

Disclaimer: I was one of the developers of a widely-used inference engine and implemented several of these optimizations.

Some apps like the App Store or Mastodon are a complete stutter fest, even when you let them preload all assets. But it even happens in very basic apps like the Settings app.

Meanwhile my woefully underpowered Pixel 10 Pro (on par with a flagship from a few years ago) with GrapheneOS is butter smooth in nearly every app.

I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong. Then it gets reformulated with the typical confidence of an LLM.

Very scary because at the same time I notice people taking the AI overview answers as truth.

Last time was 15 years ago, though family has been as recent as a few years ago and havent's seen a much of a change change. Also, in many ways, the last 20 years is quite a bad example to pick, since wealth of everyone under the 90th percentile was the same in ~2017-2018 as in ~2007:

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

Recent years are better though.

gotten better in the US and worse in EU, steadily

Not GDP at PPP, it's same-same: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4NLV!,f_auto,q_auto:...

Fun fact in this context: (Dutch) Philips was a major initial investor in TSMC (both in money and IP):

Only Philips was willing to sign a joint venture contract with Taiwan to put up $58 million, transfer its production technology, and license intellectual property in exchange for a 27.6 percent stake in TSMC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#History

Many Europeans are better off than a few decades ago. Heck, many European countries were still under authoritarian rule until a few decades ago (East Europe, Spain, Greece, etc.).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cabinets_of_the_Nether... <- note that 'liberal' in NL has a different meaning than 'liberal' in the US.

There is also really weird segregation, like neighborhoods where only African-American people live. We once walked into a large restaurant and people looked at us in shock. There were only black people in the restaurant and by the shock on their faces, a family of white people walking in must have been rare occurrence. They were super kind, but it also was very weird.

But yeah, we have one party that is most often in government that just loves privatisation, taxing workers more and the rich less, etc. and engages in a lot of short-term thinking. Apropos short-term thinking, one of them was a prime minister for 14 years and cut defense spending and did not even consider increasing spending when Russia invaded Crimea. And now he is the secretary general of NATO. Talking about failing upwards. Though he is probably primarily chosen for being able to communicate with Trump.

I am happy that we are increasing spending and building up our own industry now. But it was far to late and it was fair for US presidents to criticize Europe for it. Note though that this happened as early as Bush and the 2% norm was established under Obama. Mark Rutte just sold the 2% to Trump as Trump's own win (initially during Trump I) to keep the US on board.

The current 3.5% is still the same 2%. It's some weasel wording about investing 1.5% in infrastructure that benefits the military as well. But you can put pretty much under that umbrella. It was purely to appease Trump. Though a lot of countries are going above 2% anyway due to the increasing Russian threat.

Your belief in US exceptionalism is interesting. Even more so, because it is so obvious that the power that will soon overtake the US economically is very likely to fill that void. But they will also get all the benefits of that role and the US will slowly lose them.

In fact, they have already been stepping in the US' former shoes. Some EU leaders mentioned to Zelensky that the only reason that Russia hasn't used nukes against Ukraine is because China said 'no'. In better (depending on perspective) times, it would have been the US as its role of world leader/police to enforce such implicit rules.

It is true that China is currently supporting Russia, but it's mostly of their interest to drain NATO and increase their power over Eurasia. Well, thanks to Trump they proceeding very fast. Or as the Chinese like to say "Trump the nation builder".

Ehm, Russia didn't invade Danish territory. The US was threatening to invade Danish territory.

First, Europe has no ability to engage with Putin, and if Kushner and Witkoff are the people he will see then we should try for some manner of diplomacy even if the people that are sent aren't the ones you would prefer.

Putin only wants them because they are weak and can be played.

It was a dumb negotiating tactic but it's important to us that it is defended to our satisfaction.

It was not a negotiation tactic. They already had an agreement for over half a century that they could scale up US military presence as they would like. The US has reduced presence over the years.

Trump wanted to add land like every pathetic little (wannabe) dictator. But the EU showed some teeth suggesting that the trade bazooka could be employed, country moved troops to Greenland (so it wouldn't be a clean invasion without blood). So Trump TACOed out.

If it was a negotiation tactic it is bloody stupid ("art of the deal" I guess). Aside from getting a worse deal then before, as a side-effect many European countries that were planning to buy US arms are now switching to European options.

If you're in favor of nuclear proliferation then sure. But it doesn't include just the "good" countries. It also means Israel gets to ramp up its nuclear forces, Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Argentina can get nuclear weapons, and anyone else on your naughty list. So we will further double down on a more dangerous world and you're advocating for further breakdowns of international law.

Yes, and that was exactly my point earlier, the Trump and the US opened pandora's box. He disturbed the equilibrium by threatening to leave the NATO/not respecting article 5, by threatening to attack its own allies, by yelling Zelensky out of the White House. This sends ripples all over the world and Europe, Canada, and East Asian countries get the message "we cannot trust the US as an ally anymore", which leads to proliferation and probably more wars. It's very likely that Putin will try some sort of attack on NATO countries soon, just to test how firm Trump's commitments are. This would never have happened if he didn't weaken NATO. It's understandable that Poland gets nervous and wants to be able to MAD Russia.

"Art of the deal"

You seem to have missed their point. There was a detente and a worldwide "order". Russia stepped out of line and almost the entire world punished them for it. The order mattered.

Exactly this. It seems that the US has forgotten what soft power, alliances, rules-based world order means. You have the power because you have allies, because you can hold others to rules (and mostly keep up the appearance that you obey the rules yourself), etc. Initially, you can benefit from abusing that position, but it is short-term only. Your allies will form new alliances (e.g. Canada getting closer to the EU), stop buying your weapons, wean themselves of your products (this very news item), etc. The problem with incompetent people like Trump and his administration is that they only see the benefits of the short-term abuse, but not the terrible harm they do to themselves and the rest of the world long-term.