mr_toad

It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.

Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.

No graphics output. And so loud you wouldn’t be able to hear your game either. Also they use about 1kw of power, so you’d only want to run it in the winter.

> And with typical main sequence stars lasting under 10 billion years

For mid to large size stars, yes. But Red dwarf stars are expected to live for trillions of years.

The biggest costs and sources of delays to building high speed rail in the UK are legal challenges from people who don’t want any construction to take place anywhere near them.

The browser can easily handle millions of calculations and then render a million DOM elements so quickly that you won’t even notice it. The problem is when you try and do this hundreds of times very second.

The irony is that obsessing over smoothness and frames per second is what causes this in the first place.

“It goes without saying that if any of the turbine fragments had entered the passenger cabin, there would have been injuries, if not fatalities, even if the plane later landed safely.”

They got lucky.

> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions

Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are both valid in English, but in French you’re not supposed to say “ce est”, you have to say “c’est”.

Linguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.

> So we'll need neural methods which can be learned

Data is a problem. LLMs had the advantage of the whole internet to train on. Robots don’t have that corpus of information. And real time learning seems to be something that everyone in AI is studiously ignoring.

I guess they assume that nobody with a personal domain cares enough to sue them over this.

Somewhat off topic, but Oracle database connection strings seem to be a form of Lisp. It makes me wonder why they would choose that.

> It's also the idiotic thing about gold, a metal that has no more or less inherent monetary value than a fiat currency =)

I don’t know why people keep repeating that. Half of gold production is used in industry and for jewellery. And gold has never lost its value the way that some paper currencies have. It’s not like anyone can print gold bars.

Not classifying things seems like a really good way to get your fingers burnt, or get poisoned, starved, or eaten, drowned, or die in many different interesting ways.

Science doesn’t care about collective consciousness. Nor does the universe.

It’s not vague or unimportant. Clearing their orbits literally made them planets because they absorbed the mass of everything they cleared out.

In science, classification should have some predictive value. You should be able to predict the characteristics or behaviour of a class member based on its classification. For example if you classify something as a fruit you could predict that its seeds should be on the inside.

Classifying Pluto as a planet is problematic because it lacks the behaviour and characteristics of something that formed according to theories of how planets form. If you tried to describe what a planet should look like based on the nebula hypothesis, you would not be describing Pluto.

Instead it has behaviour and characteristics a lot like the many trans-Neptunian objects, so it makes more sense to classify it that way.

> But I've always distinctly recalled that he was arguing for a 4th, or possibly 5th type, yet whenever I survey the literature I've only found at most such 2 types. But I've probably been looking in the wrong places.

It’s common for surveys to encode various null values. ‘Refused to answer’, ‘Did not know’, ‘Not applicable’, ‘Illegible response’ etc, although there is no standard way to do this.

The SAS language allows you to use multiple custom missing values, but this is not widely known and I’ve never seen anyone do it.

> That wasn't that long ago was it..?

Last time I used a crossover cable I was still using dialup, probably about 20 years ago. Once I had DSL I also had a router, so the crossover cable became redundant.

“ Each PIM block only has fast access to its locally attached DRAM bank. All other input data has to be brought in through the DRAM chip’s comparatively constrained external interface. PIM blocks can’t directly exchange data with each other, so the host has to move data using regular DRAM reads and writes if one PIM block needs to use results generated by another.”

So how big are these banks? If you can’t fit the weights of a layer into one bank then presumably you lose a lot of the speed gains.

If you’re not prepared for the financial and time investment of the table top game there are a quite a few video games set in that universe.

> Someone must set the goals, after all and current LLM's have no agency

The board might have to take on a more active role in instructing the CEO, just as someone managing an LLM now has to be careful how they prompt it.

God forbid the board should make to do more than show up for a few general meetings and collect a fat cheque.

As a shareholder I’m optimistic about the possibility of using LLMs for senior management positions, and on down. C level executives are rare, expensive and often unpredictable quantities. LLMs, if proven to work, could be easily cloned, relatively cheap to run and as a bonus they’re unlikely to get involved in improprieties with their subordinates.

> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.

Sure, the models are open weight, but porting the code needed to run them on non-Nvidia hardware is not trivial.

And stop bailing out people who build in known danger areas where they can’t get insurance.

Time is change that happens in a continuous manner. It’s still possible to conceive of change happening in an unordered unpredictable way that is not like the smooth ordered time that we experience.

In a gravitational singularity spacetime breaks down. You could argue that time stops, but it’s also valid to argue that causality breaks down and we can no longer make any predictions about the future. Just because we don’t have a theory describing what could happen, doesn’t rule out that something could happen.

Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.

Apple levelled up in the middle of a fight.

And less than a day later Apple announced the M6. The timing has to be a coincidence, but it is quite amusing.

> Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang.

I would not want to be maintaining a long-term naval blockade while constantly looking over my shoulder worrying about surprise attacks. Everyone knows where you are, and it would give plenty of time for a counter offensive to be planned. The US has something like 50 attack submarines, and a surprise attack from all of them at once would be a nightmare scenario for any fleet.

In the era of drones and missiles having your navy tied down in a blockade like that makes it all the more vulnerable.