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wood_spirit

2,073 karma · joined February 18, 2023

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wood_spirit··on Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling
So this is basically a one-way heat transfer film?

Can it be made multi-layer?

And can two plys be glued back to back so both are trying to transfer heat from center outwards and act as an insulator?

wood_spirit··on TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology
The US is trying to get fabrication out of Taiwan so that it doesn’t need to defend Taiwan from China.

If you were Taiwanese this would worry you?

It makes complete sense for Taiwan to invest in maintaining it’s “silicon shield” even as china tries to catch up with fabrication on the mainland.

wood_spirit··on Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
As a generalisation it seems sensible that it should be illegal to knowingly handle illegal things and the proceeds of illegal things.

It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime.

If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc.

This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.

wood_spirit··on French villages have no more drinking water. The reason? PFAS pollution
In Sweden, areas near airbases have been suffering from health complications from pfas which was used in firefighting exercises. There have been long running court cases trying to get compensation.
wood_spirit··on Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
> Conversational partner

This is the ai holy grail. When tech companies can get users to think of the ai as a friend ( -> best friend -> only friend -> lover ) and be loyal to it it will make the monetisation possibilities of the ad fuelled outrage engagement of the past 10 years look silly.

Scary that that is the endgame for “social” media.

wood_spirit··on ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure
The article says

“ Open LLMs are increasingly viewed as credible alternatives to commercial systems, most of which are developed behind closed doors in the United States or China”

It is obvious that the companies producing big LLMs today have the incentive to try to enshitify them. Trying to get subscriptions at the same time as trying to do product placement ads etc. Worse, some already have political biases they promote.

It would be wonderful if a partnership between academia and government in Europe can do a public good search and AI that endeavours to serve the user over the company.

wood_spirit··on ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure
The announcement was at the International Open-Source LLM Builders Summit held this week in Switzerland. Is it so strange that they announced what they are doing and the timeline?
wood_spirit··on At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
There has been a lot of questions just in the last few days about Fujitsu continuing to bid for government contracts even when they said they wouldn’t. A random google result https://www.politico.eu/article/post-office-scandal-hit-fuji...
wood_spirit··on Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
Cue physical books being licensed not sold in the futur with restricted agreements …
wood_spirit··on Swedish Campground (2004)
This road sign sign means castle or other point of historic interest in Sweden.

Campgrounds have a normal descriptive “tent” symbol road sign in Sweden https://korkortonline.se/en/theory/road-signs/direction-sign...

wood_spirit··on I built an app to backup Live Photos from iPhone to external hard drives
I use a usb cable and a Linux laptop to copy to a couple of external hard drives (which I store separately). It’s all manual but not too orrenous although i ought backup more often. The biggest hassle is accessing the new heic format on pretty much everything.

Could it all be made into a sd card image for a pi zero perhaps? Even with a web ui accessible over Wi-Fi? A basic cheap sync-cable-appliance that non-techies can easily use?

wood_spirit··on Telegram founder Durov says his 100 children will receive share of his estate
doesn’t this mean that 100 people and those can benefit indirectly from those 100 people all now have a big financial incentive to hurry his demise?
wood_spirit··on Telegram founder Durov says his 100 children will receive share of his estate
I guess he means he will publish his dna.

Then, all who can match that they are his children can claim.

wood_spirit··on Honda Conducts Successful Launch and Landing of Experimental Reusable Rocket
It’s not clear that they need to take so long to catch up.

It’s like a four minute mile. Now we’ve seen reusable rockets work, everybody builds them and nobody says it won’t work?

wood_spirit··on Andrew Ng says vibe coding is a bad name for a real and exhausting job
Dilletanteers? Dilletanteering perhaps?

Although it brings to my mind rich people who don’t need to work for a living and just play at dabbling in things until the shine wears off?

wood_spirit··on The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela
Academia has the full gamut of software quality. A good example what springs to mind is Wirths operating systems work at ETH.

In the same way that the early google made it great to put top minds on mundane problems, let’s imagine that an institute can make a knowledge-first search engine and AI. It’s about aligning incentives.

wood_spirit··on How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
Countries could be forward deploying these assets covertly in deniable ways in prep for future tensions?
wood_spirit··on How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
How does the ocean protect America from swarms of short range drones being launched from normal looking shipping containers on trucks being controlled from thousands of miles away?
wood_spirit··on Show HN: Kan.bn – An open-source alterative to Trello
This will sound crazy but I wish there was an open source “everything” app. If this could grow into a slack alternative (where channels can host a kanban board) with http bot api and built in charting and dashboards and python notebook snippets etc etc so we can get things in one place… that would be great!!
wood_spirit··on The Difference Between Downloading and Streaming
(For music etc, the difference is licensing. It’s not a technical distinction, it’s a business one.)
wood_spirit··on InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel
Lots of modern construction is well behind the times. Eg most new residential buildings in England are still brick instead of wood stick framing and insulation. At least they adopted cavities! But houses in England are correspondingly cold and damp and cost a fortune to heat up. If only they imported more pine!
wood_spirit··on British naval dominance during the age of sail
Also the oak used in the construction was much better.
wood_spirit··on Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting branch predictor race conditions
So this is where they got the pager and walkie talkie ideas from
wood_spirit··on ToyDB rewritten: a distributed SQL database in Rust, for education
Simple question but is this OLAP or OLTP?
wood_spirit··on Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital unwrapping
Christianity had a really transformative impact on the Roman world so it makes sense to classify texts as pre and post Christianity. The date - literally BC and AD - don’t work so scholars have for a very long time clarified by calling the pre-Christian “pagan”.
wood_spirit··on Reservoir Sampling
They wanted to see your analytical thinking skills at work. To pass you only needed to be sensible. You didn’t fail the interview if you couldn’t invent reservoir sampling!
wood_spirit··on Reservoir Sampling
Interesting idea, hadn’t that about that way to apply it.

I knew it from before my interview from a turbo pascal program I had seen that sampled dat tape backups of patient records from a hospital system. These samples were used for studies. That was a textbook example of it’s utility.

wood_spirit··on Reservoir Sampling
I remember this turning up in a google interview back in the day. The interview was really expecting me not to know the algorithm and to flounder about trying to solve the problem from first principles. Was fun to just shortcut things by knowing the answer that time.
wood_spirit··on How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025?
They create meme coins etc?
wood_spirit··on Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply
Chlorinated chicken has become a big talking point in the UK and there is overwhelming public support for continued ban.
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