oersted

I initially quite liked it, particularly when the references are a bit more obscure, generally from classic scifi/fantasy. You can end with a nice sounding name and a small wink to fellow nerds.

But it is such a shame that it has started to become the brand of dark-side (militaristic/authoritarian) Silicon Valley: Palantir, Anduril, this… Tolkien would be so very sad.

PS: Palantir is at least rather fitting and honest, it’s literally an evil crystal ball (at least the one shown in the movies).

As a founder who has gone through scaling processes, I am quite impressed at Zuckerberg's ability to remain relatively competent and relevant at the top role throughout the whole journey. The skillset required changes quite a lot in each phase.

There are very few cases where the archetypical young garage-founder has stayed on top in the long-run.

Yes I think it’s a linguistic confusion more than anything else.

To me, consciousness is not generally that you can be aware (conscious) of things around you and can react to them, lots of things can do that.

Consciousness is a shorthand for saying that something is conscious of itself, or conscious of its own consciousness. It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts. And a sense of self, a sense that the observer is the same over time.

But frankly, it’s a terrible concept and my definition is plenty flawed too. In practice it is more of a moving goalpost to denote the specialness and superiority of humans over all. That thing we can’t quite put a finger on that makes us different. It is a secular euphemism for the soul. It is not very scientific.

And that is quite problematic because the privileges we ascribe to those on the wrong side of the line fall off a cliff. We rely on that line as a foundation for so much of our morals. We have seen the catastrophes that happen when a group has a different idea about the line.

I don’t have a solution to propose, it’s hard.

I’m sure there will be a ton of unexpected complexities that arise only when you are trying to push the limits, like in all engineering domains. And it’s all a highly interconnected system, you cannot expect to dramatically change the water flow without impacting others aspects.

I know it is quite distant, but from my experience in large-scale data engineering, 90% of the time goes in addressing subtle issues that can only be observed hours into a job, the rest of the issues are quickly resolved earlier. I am assuming that such complexities will be so much harder in physical systems, and even more so in biological systems.

Sounds cool but for such experimentation you would want relatively fast experimental iterations to get anywhere, and this would take literal ages. You can play around with growth speed of course but that’s a different question and might be in some ways opposed to achieving height.

Well the point of the article is that water usage is much worse in the power plant capacity necessary to feed datacenters.

I feel like it’s never made clear in what way the water is used up in these cases.

It’s not like it’s consumed like fuel. And it is not absorbed like in agriculture. But I understand it is not trivially recyclable either, the heat of the water alone can be harmful if released as-is. Does cooling happen via evaporation and is that how the water is “lost”? And I am not sure if it is contaminated in other ways.

What is the actual impact or opportunity cost of using the water in datacenter (or energy plant) cooling versus other uses?

What do you mean? Did you read the article? There’s so much evidence showing that it was the opposite.

Their profits shot up 3x in 2023 and 5x in 2024. They had 70%-140% profit margins. They publicly said that the end of the flu was a risk for their profits. There’s plenty of messaging recording explicit price collusion.

How is that a natural supply shortage?

The underlying economic factor is simply that monopolies or cartels will always try to manipulate prices in their favor if they can.

The chart is meant to show how absurd the conspiracy theory is, but it turns out it’s literally what happened this time around at least. Well they didn’t forget their greed of course, they just temporarily lost the ability to exercise it.

I assume that the PowerPoints can be absolute slop because they do not matter at all, the power is elsewhere.

It all comes to names here. The world puts waaay too much faith in successful people being successful again, and too much of the success is attributed to their inherent talent. It’s a classic fallacy of authority.

Ironically, because everyone thinks that everyone thinks that they will succeed, investing on them does yield good returns, because others are likely to invest after. And they do indeed continue to succeed!

It’s as arbitrary as tulips. Bubbles of names. That’s why it’s weirdos, because it’s quite random who is chosen, and I suppose weirdos have a more pronounced brand.

Of course it’s not completely arbitrary, there’s real merit in cracking the initial chicken-and-egg, depending on where you start in life. And there are plenty of ways of squandering the opportunities that come after. But still.

I would be glad to learn if you are willing to explain, this what I found from trusted sources, but it would be great to know if there’s additional nuance.

To save others a search:

> The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia)

Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border".

EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot just copy-paste contemporary disputes and prejudices a thousand years ago. In the historical context it’s just like most borders between different civilizations. The point is that they were a collective organization getting together to defend their land.

That sounds incredibly harsh. What kind of university was it? Is there more to the story?

Kicking someone out and effectively voiding all progress just for failing one challenging final year class twice is completely mad.

Was it rather that you lost a scholarship and couldn’t afford to finish or something like that?

Sorry to dwell, I’m sure it must be painful, I wish you the best luck.

If it is forced it is not what you would rather do.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Such a cool article chock-full of cool facts!

> Nearly every species of scorpion intensely fluoresces under UV light. […] Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails, separate from their eyes. […] It is hypothesized that a scorpion uses this fluorescence to tell whether any bit of its body is left exposed from its hiding place. Its tail “looks” down at its body, and if it sees its own fluorescence, it knows it is exposed to light, and in danger.

And a special call-out to the “Andean Cock-on-a-Rock” :), see a photo in the article.

As far as I remember, from when I was closer to academia, in NL postdocs had to be offered a permanent contract after 3 temporary contracts, with a maximum of 1 year per temporary contract, or something like that. I believe this wasn’t exclusive to postdocs and it is a general law for most professions.

In recent years in Spain they aggressively decreased that threshold to the point where most employees need to have permanent contracts. Interestingly it has led to significant growth because, among others factors, it has increased consumer confidence, and it has been a much smaller burden on companies than expected.

Perhaps the term “permanent” contract is confusing to some. It’s not in the sense of a functionary or tenure, where you virtually have a job for life unless there are extreme circumstances. A permanent contract is an indefinite contract, one without a specific end, where firing you needs to be properly justified, but you can be fired, certainly.

It must be more general than that, otherwise the cells wouldn’t be able to repair their area if the damage came from the wrong direction (repair is not center-out).

The model generally learns to generate each pixel from its surroundings, even if the surroundings are partially missing.

In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years.

Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.

To me, it is intriguing as a toy model for how cells are able to grow into complex tissue and organisms based only on local information, and how they are able to repair and recover harmed tissue.

Of course, this is as close to cells, as neurons from neural networks are to real neurons. And I have no idea what it could be applied to (inpainting/outpainting?), but it’s interesting as exploratory research.

Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad.

This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.

It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.

And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.

Never heard of that role, good to learn. I suppose the closest analogue I am aware of is substitute teachers.

Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis.

I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.

I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.

An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.

It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.

Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.

This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.

I'm not sure how it might be with Fable in practice, but we are already not that far away from AI costing as much as a full-time professional, faster in some ways but considerably less independent.

Perhaps not that close to US salaries, but those are inflated to hell. Worldwide senior engineers and scientists have salaries just about an order of magnitude away from AI subscriptions that you can use most of the day every day.

> Pricing for both models is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

The step-up in intelligence looks massive (we'll see in practice), but the price is getting to a point where it's making me question if it's even worth giving it a try.

Good competitors will probably be out soon, which should level the playing field. I am more excited about that, just the fact that they showed that such an improvement is possible. I'm okay waiting a bit longer for this to become attainable for plebs like me.

Prices have fallen dramatically over the last few years. It’s just that our standards have increased because we are using AI in ways that were not possible with worse models. But for the same level of “intelligence” as we had a couple years ago, the prices are so much lower.

There have been quite a few instances over the years of Zvezda requiring repairs that would have been impossible without resupply from Earth.

I suppose that they were counting on the capability to resupply, otherwise they might have carried more contingencies from launch, but still.

This kind of immediate-mode rendering is quite standard for TUIs. Although immediate-mode rendering tends to be significantly simpler and use less memory than retained-mode rendering, at the cost of some redundant computation. So I am not sure if this is the reason for the bloat.

It’s possible that it doesn’t play well with JS garbage collection, since it recreates the whole UI structure for every frame (which tends to not to be an issue in the languages immediate-mode is usually employed).

But yes it’s a bit more akin to game renderings than web rendering. Which can be totally fine if done well.

This must have been inspired by Mass Effect :)

(probably the other way around, but what's the fun in that)

The Krogans got punitively infected with the genophage to drastically reduce successful births after their rebellion.