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semi-extrinsic

14,153 karma · joined November 28, 2014

aaervik [a t] gmail.com
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semi-extrinsic··on Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates
The best version is of course Dick Pick, creator of the Pick operating system (not joking).
semi-extrinsic··on LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
I think OP doesn't want techno-babble, but coherent and causal interactions of everyday objects in their story.

Mary packed the binoculars in chapter 3, therefore she may use them on the train in chapter 6.

semi-extrinsic··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
Mechanical integrity in industrial processes is often divided into two categories: static equipment (tanks, pipes, heat exchangers...) and rotating equipment.

These two have very distinct failure modes. The failure mechanisms for solid state electronics are much more similar to those for static equipment (corrosion, thermal fatigue, creep, ...)

semi-extrinsic··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
I know a guy who is very proud of the fact that he has a Flask based web app, fully exposed on the public web, running with >99.9% uptime on a cheap hosted VM with zero updates to either the OS or application code since 2016.
semi-extrinsic··on Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons
I have no argument against the case that scientists may one day send a probe to travel to other solar systems. Probably it will be unmanned.

This does not extrapolate to a dark forest scenario.

semi-extrinsic··on Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons
None of these points solve the underlying economic problem. You would not get any ROI for hundreds of years, at which point the people who made the huge investment are no longer alive, and the companies/nations may not even exist anymore.
semi-extrinsic··on Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons
Or maybe it's so boring that the math of the universe (practically achieavable time to travel to another solar system) makes the galaxy a set of distinct systems, where 1 in X has an intelligent species which has achieved orbit, but with no transit in between.

It's not a cool concept to write scifi books about, but it may still be the reality we live in.

The most likely situation (by many orders of magnitude) is that the only practical way of getting to another star system, even in the far far future, is a generation ship travelling 50+ years one way with a significant risk of people dying from organ failure or cancer along the route. This would represent a 1000x speed improvement over current tech and is only a factor of 10x slower than lightspeed.

It is entirely unfeasible for any company or even government to spend money on such a project. Even if the ground on the other planet is strewn with diamonds and gold and the elixir of eternal life, you are looking at ~200 years before any ROI can be realised.

semi-extrinsic··on Boards of Casio
I submit for consideration the Korg M1 "Organ 2"

https://youtu.be/Ps2Jc28tQrw?is=tXq9sAaeK_OurFqR

semi-extrinsic··on US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report
It's actually no different for dice than for LLMs. Explaining accurately the reason for the exact outcome of any given dice roll someone makes would be stupendously hard. It would require lots of instrumentation and math and be poorly transferrable to another surface, another player, etc.

But even so people don't say that we don't understand how dice work.

Saying that we don't understand how LLMs work is exactly like saying we don't understand how dice, or tires, or golf ball shots work. Or like the old myth that we don't understand how bumblebees fly.

semi-extrinsic··on Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026
I am entirely unsure whether to upvote or downvote.
semi-extrinsic··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
There was research some years ago in Sweden that cars with 4WD get into accidents 20% - 30% more often than cars with 2WD. And cars with 4WD averaged 10% higher speed at the moment of the crash.

The cause was found to be drivers with 2WD losing a little traction early in their drove and subsequently slowing down, while drivers with 4WD just kept driving like normal until they were suddenly off the road.

Another statistic is that intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers cause more than half of all fatalities. So making a solution with machine learning and cameras that could retrofit into any existing car and just deny starting the car for such drivers, and having insurance companies cut premiums for having such gadgets installed, would be much more effective than any form of self driving or similar.

https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011....

semi-extrinsic··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
If you think about what it actually means to have a time-varying smooth body force defined in all of 3-space, you fairly quickly come to that kind of conclusion.

Even if someone comes up with a construction that does not require any forcing, it is going to be some extremely weird initial conditions that you will never be able to even approximate in reality unless you can move all the individual molecules of a fluid around and set their initial velocities from a far distance.

semi-extrinsic··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
"Does there exist a pathological combination of smooth body forces and initial conditions for this set of PDEs, where singularities appear, which by the way is completely impossible to actually create in the real world unless you are a literal God?" is a question of math, not physics. This is a hill I will die on.
semi-extrinsic··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
> For the next several decades, we'll have engineers (presumably with AI) optimize things like rocket engines and turbines and AC compressors to work a few percent better because the numerical approximations might have caused us to be overly conservative.

No. Just no.

semi-extrinsic··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
> Knowing the exact mathematical breakdown mechanisms helps developers improve adaptive mesh refinement and sub-grid scale models around high-vorticity regions (like vortex stretching and turbulent shear layers).

This is 100% wrong and reads like copy paste of AI slop.

Any simulation which uses sub-grid scale models is already solving a different PDE than the actual Navier-Stokes considered in the Millenium problem, and that PDE is guaranteed to have different properties. Full stop.

And to claim this is somehow connected to AMR methods is an example of the kind of pseudoscientific statement Wolfgang Pauli would have called "not even wrong".

semi-extrinsic··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
This is a wrong interpretation. Physicists have a shit-ton of models that produce "aphysical singularities", they just work around those to get meaningful answers anyway. This is a whole trope and stereotype. Some of the most successfull and accurate predictions in all of physics come out after you discard a bunch of singularities.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization

Nobody who actually works in fluid dynamics on any sort of application gives a hoot about the N-S millenium problem. Many do not even know what it is. There is no practical effect of this proof on how we do fluid mechanics.

semi-extrinsic··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
Obtaining a finite-time blow-up for Navier-Stokes does not necessarily advance the field of mathematics by any significant measure, whether the proof is very long or very short.

As a concrete example, such a proof could be less than a page with very specific initial and boundary conditions and inserting them into the equations to get something that goes to infinity when time goes to some finite value.

This would resolve the Millenium problem but not make humanity any smarter.

semi-extrinsic··on Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage
For cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future.

If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.

Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.

semi-extrinsic··on Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage
Depends heavily on the software cost and how far from core competency it is.

If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY.

If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it.

Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.

semi-extrinsic··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
That's the opening line to Pride and Prejudice, where Jane Austen (I guess the "bot" part of the name is intentional) states something that many people of the time would superficially agree on, but which is intended to be highly ironic.

I guess the point of GP (and of Jane Austen) is that people never actually universally agree on anything. And when they superficially do, there is actually a large undercurrent of disagreement.

Another fun quote apropos here would be "I love standards, there are so many to choose from"

semi-extrinsic··on Pixel Watch 5
Yes, before I read the last sentence I was going to comment that this niche seems entirely taken by Garmin/Suunto/Polar.
semi-extrinsic··on France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027
Could you post a few links to these things? Last I remember there were a few PoC around pushing toy-scale examples, but nobody close to "quantum supremacy for application X"?

A cursory google still seems to indicate people are using these things to learn how a hypothetical QC could be used in practice, rather than actually doing stuff in production or anything close to it.

semi-extrinsic··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
Currently there seems to be very little anti-AI bias in maths, and more of a "huh, cool new toy, let's see what it can do" vibe.
semi-extrinsic··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
As long as they are not poisoning pigeons in the park.
semi-extrinsic··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
Appreciate the good answer. Out of curiosity, ofder of magnitude how much would a person need to be bowling to get good enough that choice of shoe matters?
semi-extrinsic··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
Never understood the need to wear extremely uncomfortable and ill-fitting shoes just to throw a ball. Always seemed like a way to jack the price up.

Sure, professional bowlers use specialised shoes. Professional footballers and professional runners and cyclists and golfers and tennis players and skateboarders and ... do as well. But if you do any one of these activities at a low enough frequency and/or level that you're not buying your own specialised shoes, whatever sneakers you have will do just fine.

semi-extrinsic··on TS-2026-009: Insecure argument handling in Tailscale SSH permitted root access
OTOH, if you run vanilla ssh on a publicly accessible machine where only port 22 is open, sshd only allows publickey-based authentication and the only accepted key types are FIDO2/U2F hardware-backed keys, it's probably more secure again (less attack surface).
semi-extrinsic··on FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
Anything that can explode if overheated in a refinery is covered with passive fire protection. This is designed to withstand jet fire exposure, meaning a heat load of at least 1100 °C and at least 250 kW/m2. Ordinary sunlight at peak is about 1 kW/m2, so your mirror needs to cover 250x the visual extent of the sun in the sky.
semi-extrinsic··on QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
> In a television it's an added cost and it's unclear if serving ads really can offset that extra $25-100 of hardware (and included data) you ship on a $200-1000 television.

Amazon seems to have done the math and found that it makes sense to give a $20 discount on a $180 device if it lets them display very unobtrusive ads on the lockscreen. So I don't think you are correct.

semi-extrinsic··on Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries
It's not the top triangle bits that cause the problem, it's that the whole geometry is different with parallel versus tapered flanks.
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