Incidentally, here's a recent article about how the economics of ambulances are broken in the US: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-american-ambulance-rides-are If municipal emergency services in yout area don't cover…
Agriculture uses orders of magnitudes more water than data centers. A 50% cut in water use by data centers will have nowhere near the impact of a 5% cut in water use by agriculture. But data centers can generate orders…
This is very exciting. Congrats to Tom on the accomplishment. To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have…
Musk has more money than most of us would dream of, but the game isn't over until it's over. Speaking just for myself, I've lost respect from Elon Musk. I admire Musk's accomplishments, especially Starship and the…
For me it was torrenting a 7G ball of weights leaked from Meta and running alpaca.cpp (an early variant of llama.cpp) on my desktop computer in early 2023. I started asking it questions about the Roman empire and it…
The AI-driven data center roll out raises some legitimate concerns that really ought to be considered and discussed at the political level. I doubt that a blanket ban on data centers is the right approach. These are the…
I'm very open to the idea that consciousness is substrate independent. I have a hard time seeing why molecules could produce consciousness from an electro-chemical path, but not from a purely electrical path. Having…
My personal preference is Interstella 5555 is Daft Punk's best music video. Edit: Jinx! Gracana beat my reply to an 11 hour old comment by four minutes.
Being isolationist or global imperialist implies articulating different strategies and values. This is an administration that has neither of those.
Ideally, robot drivers will some day be better drivers than humans in all road conditions. They'll be able to coordinate fast lane merges and busy intersections by subtly adjusting speed without vehicles having to stop.…
[flagged]
While it's theoretically possible that this technology could work effectively, given the people involved, this project is probably a complete bamboozle that will divert funds away from enforcing the deportation of…
The Chinese knock-off TwinScan is almost as good as the original and far less expensive. Because of course it is.
That is a very reasonable definition, but having grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons, making good decisions strikes me as Wisdom, not Intelligence. Very "intelligent" people can use those smarts to justify or…
If you're paying for a subscription, the company might sell your data. If you're using a commercial service for free, they are certainly selling your data. Having said that, you're right to be suspicious of commercial…
I was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light…
For normal, day to day use, examples in documentation is absolute gold. As a practical matter, that's how we human learn to do things. Perhaps surprisingly, even AI benefits from examples. Children don't learn to speak…
If you mean that they're benchmaxing these models, then that's disappointing. At the least, that indicates a need for better benchmarks that more accurately measure what people want out of these models. Designing…
This M1E3 Abrams tank prototype is a hybrid: https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi... It turns out that if you aren't deluded by culture war superficialities, energy efficiency is an advantage on…
Under the current administration, the US is in the process of throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's Communist Party has the…
As a US citizen, I'm proud of Minnesotans for standing up for American values.
The GenAI providers will certainly explore advertisement revenue. They're not doing much of it yet because they're trying to gain market share while they figure out what what pain threshold of advertising their users…
AI may never be able to replace the best tech writers, or even pretty good tech writers. But today's AI might do better than the average tech writer. AI might be able to generate reasonably usable, if mediocre,…
Today, we take the term "open source" for granted, but this wasn't always the case. There wasn't a single, universally accepted term to describe software that was freely shareable. "Free software" was one of the terms…
I tend to agree with your take on these movies, but I find I can enjoy some of them to a greater extent by rejecting the notion of what's "cannon". For instance, I like the bleakness of Alien 3 opening with Newt and…
Incidentally, here's a recent article about how the economics of ambulances are broken in the US: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-american-ambulance-rides-are If municipal emergency services in yout area don't cover…
Agriculture uses orders of magnitudes more water than data centers. A 50% cut in water use by data centers will have nowhere near the impact of a 5% cut in water use by agriculture. But data centers can generate orders…
This is very exciting. Congrats to Tom on the accomplishment. To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have…
Musk has more money than most of us would dream of, but the game isn't over until it's over. Speaking just for myself, I've lost respect from Elon Musk. I admire Musk's accomplishments, especially Starship and the…
For me it was torrenting a 7G ball of weights leaked from Meta and running alpaca.cpp (an early variant of llama.cpp) on my desktop computer in early 2023. I started asking it questions about the Roman empire and it…
The AI-driven data center roll out raises some legitimate concerns that really ought to be considered and discussed at the political level. I doubt that a blanket ban on data centers is the right approach. These are the…
I'm very open to the idea that consciousness is substrate independent. I have a hard time seeing why molecules could produce consciousness from an electro-chemical path, but not from a purely electrical path. Having…
My personal preference is Interstella 5555 is Daft Punk's best music video. Edit: Jinx! Gracana beat my reply to an 11 hour old comment by four minutes.
Being isolationist or global imperialist implies articulating different strategies and values. This is an administration that has neither of those.
Ideally, robot drivers will some day be better drivers than humans in all road conditions. They'll be able to coordinate fast lane merges and busy intersections by subtly adjusting speed without vehicles having to stop.…
[flagged]
While it's theoretically possible that this technology could work effectively, given the people involved, this project is probably a complete bamboozle that will divert funds away from enforcing the deportation of…
The Chinese knock-off TwinScan is almost as good as the original and far less expensive. Because of course it is.
That is a very reasonable definition, but having grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons, making good decisions strikes me as Wisdom, not Intelligence. Very "intelligent" people can use those smarts to justify or…
If you're paying for a subscription, the company might sell your data. If you're using a commercial service for free, they are certainly selling your data. Having said that, you're right to be suspicious of commercial…
I was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light…
For normal, day to day use, examples in documentation is absolute gold. As a practical matter, that's how we human learn to do things. Perhaps surprisingly, even AI benefits from examples. Children don't learn to speak…
If you mean that they're benchmaxing these models, then that's disappointing. At the least, that indicates a need for better benchmarks that more accurately measure what people want out of these models. Designing…
This M1E3 Abrams tank prototype is a hybrid: https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi... It turns out that if you aren't deluded by culture war superficialities, energy efficiency is an advantage on…
Under the current administration, the US is in the process of throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's Communist Party has the…
As a US citizen, I'm proud of Minnesotans for standing up for American values.
The GenAI providers will certainly explore advertisement revenue. They're not doing much of it yet because they're trying to gain market share while they figure out what what pain threshold of advertising their users…
AI may never be able to replace the best tech writers, or even pretty good tech writers. But today's AI might do better than the average tech writer. AI might be able to generate reasonably usable, if mediocre,…
Today, we take the term "open source" for granted, but this wasn't always the case. There wasn't a single, universally accepted term to describe software that was freely shareable. "Free software" was one of the terms…
I tend to agree with your take on these movies, but I find I can enjoy some of them to a greater extent by rejecting the notion of what's "cannon". For instance, I like the bleakness of Alien 3 opening with Newt and…