rdl

EU changed a lot this year (EU EES and ETIAS, long delayed), so this is probably different now than it was for some people before. It should be passport + biometric in and out, with a passport and biometric enrolled once as well, and visa-free stay duration (and other activities, like criminal stuff) logged against that record as well. Previously if you entered in one country and exited in another there wasn't really any closure of the record, so they effectively didn't care, and you could stay in EU indefinitely (and enter/exit much more while also overstaying, especially if you had multiple passports or could enter/exit from different countries).

I still remember him being one of the best writers about tech (a bit more than "journalism" in that a lot of it was of more evergreen value...) from the dotcom boom and then the peak "interesting" web apps period (2004-~2015 or so, when AJAX/etc was still new, and things hadn't calcified so much). Didn't know about his later health issues, I assumed he had just moved on to other interests naturally. RIP.

We also used to x-ray people for shoe fitting/for lulz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.

If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.

Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.

(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)

If a fund can get into the Anthropic Series A vs. not get into the Anthropic Series A based on a flight to meet with the team, that is worth buying the supersonic plane even if you scrap it after.

Vastly more favorable today than it was when Concorde flew.

1) Rich people are WAY richer, and time is even more valuable 2) Businesses have some very important employees and "2 day trip" vs "3-4 day trip" is worth $50-100k 3) Larger population of people able to pay $20-30k for a flight than ever before.

The biggest practical impact is there's probably going to be a private jet version instead of just a commercial one, and there will likely be transpacific demand exceeding transatlantic. Also government/military use.

That would be true if everyone weren't supply constrained and buying literally everything they can find.

There are actual risks that this trend doesn't continue, but as long as the trend continues, it is pretty good for revenue. "AI shown to hit a wall/doesn't actually deliver/stops growing so fast", "massive improvement in hw efficiency or tech such that all the old stuff becomes obsolete", "bottleneck on power/regulations/etc such that no one wants anything but the most efficient cutting edge stuff" would be the ways it could end and then all these factors reverse. Right now, power is so constrained that old, inefficient power generation is actively being turned back on or set up at new sites (e.g. old aviation turbines which are very inefficient compared to combined cycle).

If "cost" is mostly capital investments, absolutely. Normally you'd use operating cost (which for capital equipment would be depreciation and interest), and here they are using the capital cost as full cost.

No one really knows how quickly AI hardware investments will become obsolete and thus how long it should be amortized, but 2-3 years would be extremely conservative, and in fact used H100 (discontinued/2 generations old) prices are higher today than they were when the equipment was new several years ago.

For a rapidly growing new line of business, this isn't bad at all.

I think RISKS (which he edited) was one of the first places I saw computer security discussed in a meaningful way outside a military context (NSA, Puzzle Palace, Rainbow Books, etc.)

Where I live (Puerto Rico) Costco is basically the only decent midrange to upper midrange store. There are a couple higher end butcher shops, but local groceries are "smart and final" or other discount-US grocery equivalent, with prices at mainstream NYC levels, while Costco is basically the same prices as most of the US, and ~70% of the selection of Bay Area Costco. Easy choice (along with Amazon and other online shopping).

If the issue are tent stakes/lag bolts which get buried under surface, clear solution would be metal detectors available to borrow/rent (or brought by each camp). Also probably could do a drone or ground robot with a metal detecting loop on the bottom.

He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.

My theory is a lot of the anti-AI sentiment is specifically US geopolitical adversaries (pick one or more: China, Russia, Iran, ...) who want a bad outcome for the US (AI as potential AGI; AI as one of the few successful economic sectors of the US; general desire to cause societal disruption or collapse and AI as convenient target). Probably >95% of the really bad stuff (the micron fab disruption, attacks on AI datacenters, ...) is probably root-cause that, possibly executed by useful idiots, people paid by organizations, etc. 5% is normal NIMBY stuff. Approximately measure 0 is Zizian death cultists.

I don't any of these will be dissuaded by cute family photos. Fortunately the frontier model companies and major infrastructure providers are able to pay for top-tier corporate security (although tech people generally have been unwilling to do this at home for lifestyle reasons), but I'd be afraid for people elsewhere in the supply chain.

(And destructive attack is all on top of the normal corporate espionage, infiltration, subversion, etc.)

It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.

It will be interesting to compare PQ rollout to HTTPS rollout historically (either the "SSL becomes widespread in 2015" thing, or the deprecation SSL 3.0). Cloudflare is in an easy position to do stuff like this because it can decouple end user/browser upgrade cycles from backend upgrade cycles.

Some browsers and some end user devices get upgraded quickly, so making it easy to make it optionally-PQ on any site, and then as that rollout extends, some specialty sites can make it mandatory, and then browser/device UX can do soft warnings to users (or other activity like downranking), and then at some point something like STS Strict can be exposed, and then largely become a default (and maybe just remove the non-PQ algorithms entirely from many sites).

I definitely was on team "the risks of a rushed upgrade might outweigh the risks of actual quantum breaks" until pretty recently -- rushing to upgrade has lots of problems always and is a great way to introduce new bugs, but based on the latest information, the balance seems to have shifted to doing an upgrade quickly.

Updating websites is going to be so much easier than dealing with other systems (bitcoin probably the worst; data at rest storage systems; hardware).

I insure a bunch of big datacenters (crypto mining, AI); there are really two main drivers of cost of insurance per $ of equipment:

1) Internal risks and controls within the datacenter (the company involved and their operating history, fires, flood, etc,) -- for a sufficiently "good" datacenter, you can assume it gets maxed out in quality, or at least to the point where it's no longer efficient to spend more. Most of these risks also cause service disruptions, so if you're building for high availability anyway, the rest of this stuff is usually handled as part of that. Essentially, if you're too cheap to build a good enough datacenter to max this out, you're not getting insurance anyway in most cases, so it's not a variable factor so bunch as binary or maybe a few broad risk bands (ISO tier for datacenters).

2) External risks. This is mostly natural catastrophe ("nat cat" or "cat risk"); usually there's one dominant driver of that ("severe convective storms" in Texas; floods and hurricanes in places like Florida; earthquakes in California). In some places it's multiple risks (Japan has both earthquake/tsunami and typhoon). This drives the majority of insurance premium.

War risk, geopolitical, political risk, terrorism, SRCC ("strikes, riots, and civil commotion") are in a third category -- often essentially not a factor (e.g. for a $200mm facility in rural Texas), but often handled through special programs at a national level or specialty insurance. A lot of normal policies exclude or let the client buy-back that part of the risk.

As my personal interests in war zones, drones, etc. and professional interests in crypto, AI, and datacenters seem to have converged, looking forward to seeing "quality of air defense artillery/integrated air defense system" as well as "comprehensive quick reaction force capable of dealing with national-level threats" as elements of insurance underwriting for $50B AI datacenters/"AI factories" in the future. I assume in most cases this kind of stuff will be handled by national, military, defense, or civil defense parts of the government, but could easily be contracted as well. I don't think Oracle Cloud is likely to stand up their own private army though.

There are some products where I absolutely don't take a chance (I buy all my tourniquets/etc from North American Rescue, who are the manufacturer or primary distributor, directly), but for a while I wouldn't even buy razor blades from Amazon because of the risk of getting fakes or commingled inventory from shoplifting gangs. I'm willing to take that level of risk on Amazon policy now.

Very recently Amazon announced they'd stop commingling inventory from 3P sellers and themselves, so it should be safer to buy from Amazon in the future (if you look at the specific seller), but still maybe worth avoiding for safety critical items which are difficult to inspect.

I hate cancer.

What a long and unpredictable path his life took. Too bad he isn't still with us.

I really loved Dilbert (the Gen X defining comic), and especially his first couple books.

Unclear. I have a t-mobile e-sim in the phone I was using and that worked for me.

I’m in Niseko (Hokkaido) and had just driven 2.5h through a snowstorm to my hotel, opened door, and put down bags and phone. Weird alarm from my phone (new phone; forgot to disable, which I usually do because where I live abuses the system for a bunch of stupid alerts for chronic issues), looked at it, realized in Japan it is probably real, so I stood in a doorway. Pretty decent sized storm.

If a tsunami affects me on a mountain something would be seriously wrong, so I’m not going to worry.

One $4mm cabinet of GB300 can generate maybe 10-20x the power/hvac cost per hour so it doesn't make sense to ever have it idle. Vs. $100K worth of miners for the same 40KW conditioned or 100KW raw power.

No one I've seen does without at least battery backup/conditioning/etc. Some may have less than 100% redundancy on generators, but that's mainly because some of them are running with e.g. a 200MW grid feed and 20x10MW gensets and ALSO running about 10-15 of the "backup" gensets as prime power. It's possible corners are cut during commissioning (like they use modular structures during buildout of the tilt-up ISO 5 permanent structure), but substanially no one would do this as their long-term design goal.

I insure like >$3B worth actively I think (which includes some additional power equipment, hvac, etc. below the scale of main site transformers, etc.). If you count former equipment which has been removed from service over the years it is probably about $5-10B for Bitcoin in total? (Not pulling the BDX to look at specific breakdown of miners vs AI)

Hokkaido is by a wide margin my favorite place in the world. If I could easily HQ a tech company there (for global sales; Japan domestic market is stagnant), I would.

Almost all of the larger commercial miners (especially public companies) are looking at this. There are a bunch of issues (I have a conference talk last week at one of the big mining conferences on the topic, and have met with a bunch of miners on this.)

Probably long term the solution will be hybrid — mining gets done using any spare power. AI training generally requires protected power even beyond firm power and few miners have this for their mining operations, and also most of the mining facilities aren’t in the ISO 5 or 6 facilities we (I insure miners and AI) want to see for $500mm worth of mining hardware. Usually the mining companies don’t want to make the upfront capital outlay for these, so a lot of the time they do partnerships where part of their PPA is shared.

I'm definitely interested in these if they work -- both because mosquito elimination (the world's most dangerous animal...) is interesting, and because it's an obvious demo for inexpensive autonomous drones for various terminal effects.

The rigid aerofoil sails seem more maintenance-free. Some of those are inflatable as well.

Even better "please give us all the things which could be used by a foreign power to blackmail you, or apply pressure to relatives or other close contacts" and then poorly secure that database.