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The idea for the company came when Burick was building a “white box” PC from standard, off-the-shelf components, and realized there was no comparable product for robotics. ... They sold about 200 robots in 17 countries, Burick says.
Yup. There's no volume in hobbyist robot kits.
The only one that I would point out as better is Render, as it allows for containers, all others are worse than Vercel, in tooling, and supported languages for serverless on the backend.
It's like someone should make a file... maybe in /etc ... and put short names for services in it... maybe it could be called /etc/services...
I am reminded of user-agent sniffing and the idiocy that created. One would hope that this leads to less self-identifying overall. At this point it looks less like a cat-and-mouse game but more like a cat-and-cat game, but all the cats are equally retarded. I suppose it makes for good entertainment for the rest of us who don't need to use, and now have another reason not to start using, all this AI stuff.
In general a neural net does not have any way of knowing "why" it is doing what it is doing. This completely applies to humans too. Metacognition means we can make some decent guesses, and sometimes the "reasons" are at a metacognitive level (e.g., "having examined my three options it is only rational to select B" is a reasonable "reason") but that is the exception, not the rule.
You can get something of an intuitive sense of what I mean if I ask you to pick a neuron in your brain and tell me when it fires. You can't even pick a neuron in your brain. You can't even tell whether a broad section of your brain is firing. It is only through scientific examination that we have any idea what parts of the brain are doing what; we certainly have no direct access to that information. There are entire cultures who thought the seat of cognition was the heart or the gut. That's how bad our access to our own neural processes is.
So "why" explanations always need to be taken with a grain of salt when a neural net (again, yes, fully including humans) tries to "explain" what it is doing.
Contrast this with a symbolic reasoner, which has nothing but "why" some claim is true (if it yields the full logic train as its answer and not just "yes"/"no"), no pathway for any other form of information to emerge.
And what is the insurance in the Linux case, for which the analogy was being made?
Let's all just never talk to anyone unless it's face to face, for fear that an AI will read it.
>First responders/doctors/CPS investigators see the worst but they also have days where they make a difference. Save a life or multiple lives. I'm sure it's a huge part of what makes the job bearable, and to some meaningful.
You think miners don't make a difference or save lives?
One can think of a pun for the second term too
The problem is that if the U.S. goes down so does the rest of the world. Some of this is the regional wars that we are likely to see once the U.S. withdraws from its position as peacemaker (like Russia/Ukraine), some of it is economic damage from the collapse of globalization (a la Straight of Hormuz), some of it is direct threats (like Trump threatening to annex Canada and invade Greenland). If we're really stupid some of it might even be nuclear annihilation - superpowers don't go down easily, and MAD requires that the nuclear armed powers have a future that they seek to preserve. Russia is a significant risk here too - demographically they're done in a generation, and countries that are going to fail anyway don't have much of an incentive to keep the current world intact.
Given that the current world order is likely toast, I'd rather hole up in my current spot, where I've got family, friends, a home, and knowledge of the local environment and culture. Plus it's got a relatively forgiving climate, fertile soil, natural harbors, two oceans for defense, an educated populace whose values aren't too different from mine, and a set of mountain ranges if we need to defend ourselves from the rest of the former U.S. Geographically it's hard to do better than the territory occupied by what is currently the United States.
It's right there in the developer APIs. All of those NS_ prefixes in the MacOS and iOS SDKs stand for NeXTSTEP.
As a company, this is a great problem to have. Way better than the opposite.
Given the memes I see about how GenX are perceived in US, it seems now they have gone too far into the other direction.
No, you're in more pain, but other defenders with different postures benefit from having faster and fuller disclosure.
BCM84891L. I like these modules (select 80 or 100 m in the drop down): https://www.luleey.com/product/10gbase-t-sfp-to-rj45-copper-...
Using this module, I was able to get a stable 10 gig over a 75 feet long, 20 year old run of Cat 5e.
I don't get it though. Why not just revise the billing so that if users are hitting the servers above some defined frequency, they get charged more?
I'm tired of this startup-adjacent mindset that promotes endless adversarial scamming. I absolutely think people should be able to run OpenClaw or whatever harnesses they want, but I also think they should pay in some proportion to usage rather than trying to exploit an all-you-can-eat buffet offer to stock their own catering business.
> I like the networking perspective, but the ML perspective is such a loose analogy that it's hard to even judge.
Right. ML doesn't have to work well because it's used in situations where the cost of the errors falls on someone other than the service provider. Hallucinations require a business model where their cost is an externality, like pollution.
With an objective goal, such as tests or a spec or driving without hitting anything, to check the results, it's possible to do better, of course.
The Internet only works because fiber optic bandwidth is cheap. As someone who was working on congestion in the early days, I could see that congestion in the middle of the network had no known solution. If congestion could be pushed out to the edges, there were strategies, but there were no good solutions in the middle. And, in fact, the whole Internet would sometimes go into congestion collapse in the early 1990s, with the big peering points at MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST losing well over half of the packets. What saved the Internet was cheap long-haul bandwidth and big hardware-supported switches. This kept congestion at the fringes.
Go hunt up a Rubidinium standard on Ebay, $150 or thereabouts and you'll have a pretty good standard.
This is bad news because those are some of the most risky plants operating in Western Europe. Many, many safety issues over the years, quite a few of which were waved off from being properly fixed because they were going to be decommissioned anyway. Now whoever owns them will have to do all that back maintenance first. Or not...
Both Doel and Tihange have a long, long list of issues.
AI loses money for two reasons: (1) certain uses where owning the market is expected to be a high long-term value are currently heavily subsidized (the top-level story here is about the increasing efforts of model providers to prevent exploits where people convert subsidized services to uses outside the target of the subsidy), and (2) development costs of new models to keep up with competition.
The problem is, if you are transparent about your constraints, then users who are using your subscription in bad faith and against the terms, they know exactly how to maximize usage.
It's the same thing when people say that Gmail ought to publish the rules they use for blacklisting senders. If they did, then there would be a lot more senders abusing email.
Whenever you are defining rules internally for catching bad actors, you cannot make those rules public. It defeats the entire purpose.
So maybe Anthropic is losing good will, but it's better than the alternatives.
It’s not a choice between nuclear and PV. It’s a choice between nuclear and the other things that provide base load: gas and coal.
One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle. If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you really ought to be able to articulate some sort of stopping principle where you stop pouring the resources in. Maybe the problem is adequately solved. Maybe the further resources don't justify the tiny incremental change. Maybe the intrusion on liberty starts to overwhelm the benefits. Something. Otherwise you just end up going farther and farther down the road with no idea when to stop.
These IP blocks don't seem to come with a stopping principle. They were large and growing, and inevitably more and more entities were going to say "Hey, if that company is large enough to flip the switch to protect their assets then I'm large enough for that too!" and the obvious and inevitable stopping point was 100% blockage.
Taken to its logical conclusion, and I do mean "logical" and not "rhetorically overblown for effect", this comes perilously close to just declaring that the value of the Internet is so net negative due to piracy that it should just be shut down in Spain. If that's true during certain sports matches it's already not far from being true for lots of other things too. This was leading in an obviously-economically-untenable direction.
The article’s second sentence disproves its title: “Section 2 — a provision that broadly outlawed discrimination in voting on the basis of race.”
Exactly. The purpose of the VRA is to ban racial discrimination in voting. That’s why the Supreme Court ruled that you can’t use race to draw district lines. You can’t try to create white majority districts because you think that’ll get white candidates elected. And for the same reason you can’t do that if you replace “white” with any other group.
The article then conjures up a different purpose for the VRA: deliberately using race to increase the prospects of minorities being elected. The article concedes that was added as an interpretive gloss after the fact. But it condemns the Supreme Court for interpreting the VRA consistent with the law’s actual purpose instead of this other purpose that courts came up with after the fact. That’s what it means when it says the Court “limited” the VRA. It means that the Court limited the scope of the law with regards to this after-the-fact purpose.
The civil rights laws prohibit treating individuals differently based on race. That’s what they say and that’s what they were trying to achieve. Unless expressly stated, they were not designed to be a remedial system that allowed racial discrimination so long as the people doing it purported to have good intentions.
How much of a responsibility should the provider have to scan what they're hosting and proactively make a judgment on whether they should block it or not?
It's really hard to do that in the general case. As the aphorism goes, "Show me your budgets and I'll show you your priorities", and in a democratic society, the priorities are supposed to be decided by the voters.
You could however envision a system where the bottom-line (the overall budget surplus or deficit) is dictated algorithmically by economic conditions, with the government free to move funds between different priorities, raise taxes, or cut overall spending as long as they met the target budget surplus. Actually wouldn't be a bad idea; it mimics how private organizations and households have to adjust their spending to fit constraints. The whole idea of algorithmic central banking and algorithmic fiscal policy could be quite interesting, particularly now that you have cryptocurrency where you can build algorithms into the nature of money itself.
Maybe someone can explain, but I don't understand why such an order isn't applied to cloudflare themselves?
I don't think it's bad writing. These people actually get angry at the idea that other people do math that might not connect to the real world. And they specially have it out for infinity.
I say do whatever math you like. It is helpful to know what math you are doing. For instance, while I don't have a "problem" with the Axiom of Choice per se I do like clean specifications of when we are using it and when we are not, because it is another example of when we detach from reality as we know it. I don't have a problem with detaching from reality as we know it, I just like there to be awareness that we have.
But plenty of math is detached from reality. Honestly we don't observe very many "mathematical entities" at all; I've never seen a graph. I've never seen hyperbolic space. I'm aware of the many places aspects of them seem to map to reality, but I've never actually seen a literal graph in the real world.
Personally I am reminded of the way that we model our computers with Turing Complete formalisms, despite the fact they are observably not Turing Complete and are technically just finite state machines. However, the observation that they are "just" finite state machines doesn't move us closer to an understanding of how our computers work, it moves us farther away. Even though computers are completely real-world phenomena, if you want to understand the issues raised by things like Turing Incompleteness and other such things in the real world, you're going to be exponentially better off using Turing Machine formalisms and simply noting that you may run out of memory or practically-available computational resources before a calculation can complete than trying to build a new set of formalisms around finite state machines. We can be in an engineering context where we are well aware of the finite nature of everything we are doing because it all comes back to real, physical machines, but it's still easier to model with infinity than without it.
In that context, the real utility of "infinity" is less "an infinite number of things" than "you will never reach for another X [byte of RAM, byte of disk, CPU cycle, incrementing counter, etc.] and be told you're out of resources". Basically we write our proofs, formal or informal, as ignoring "what if I reach for this resource and it's not there?" for every such resource and every time we reach for a resource, which is quite often. You could go through a system and add a "what if" check for every such instance, but it's way cheaper to just buy another stick of RAM or tweak the program to take fewer resources than it is to try to deal with the exponential-with-a-large-exponent explosion of states this causes mathematically.
"I've planned ahead. We're just three miles from a primary target. A millisecond of brilliant light and we're vaporized. Much more fortunate than millions who wander sightless through the smoldering aftermath. We'll be spared the horror of survival." -- War Games
I'm glad I live only a few miles from Moffit Airfield, which is almost certainly a primary target (given that besides taking out NASA you'd also get Google HQ). Knowing that I most likely wouldn't even perceive a nuclear attack is strangely comforting.
> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?
The heat is coming, in part, from the lack of a proper support channel.
Seriously. It makes it seem like this is going to be a blog post either intended for elementary school students, or more likely for teachers on how to better explain some arithmetic concept to elementary school students.
It's absolutely bizarre. Images communicate meaning. Much better to have no image than to have an image that is completely misleading about the target audience or level of technical sophistication.
In case you don’t have time for an hour long podcast, some of the things I found interesting:
* They have never lost a customer in their 47 years of operating.
* They don’t do outbound sales, they wait for customers to call them, and then often reject them.
* They do nearly $6B in ARR, and never took outside investment.
* They’ve never done an acquisition, they’ve built everything in house
* The CEO is still the founder, who is now 82.
* They’re structured such that they can never go public or be acquired, even after the CEO leaves.
* While the CEO is worth billions, she has separated the stock such that she retains her voting power, but her foundation gets all the wealth, and that foundation helps low income children get health care and education.
* The company often sacrifices profits to help low income and rural health systems.
> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously
MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)
> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.
Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).
It seems to be trying to summarize data about various places but, for better or worse, talks about the data it wishes it had when it isn’t available.
I do a character to do street photography and that character does another character
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116484421100356111
who is a thēríon and not thoroughly tame like
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116476942582628585
The second character was very easy to do for me, like the foxographer doesn’t need a background story because he is legible and employed. Kitsunekamen does need a background story because he does have to explain himself so I have ‘writing’ to do.
So yeah I am very interested in how you would manifest a voice that speaks for wild things.
That isn't how LLM training has worked for some time. There's a reason the LLM boom didn't take off until training was separated into pretraining (training on all data) and posttraining (RLHF to make the output actually aligned).
It's also why model collapse is not a thing despite everyone wanting it to be.
> The MMT folks think this is business as usual.
The MMT folks think that, when inflation gets high, you need to raise taxes to take money out of the economy. The fatal flaw in that is raising taxes is politically impossible.
Ballistic missiles are also kamikazi. Also, proximity detecting artillery shells. and torpedos.
Around here on your southern neighbour, everyone is supposed to be doing AI and being evaluated by this, yet in many projects if clients don't sign off on the use of AI tools, there is no AI to use anyway.
Additionally there are the AI targets set by C suites based on what everyone is saying on TV, and what we can actually deliver based on the available data sets, integration points, and naturally those sign offs for data governance, and hallucinations guardrails.
"This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it." - The Hunt for Red October
Cool, I just bought a school bus.
"The article makes some good points about model design"
But how can I tell if those are good points or not?
I don't want to invest time in reading something if the presence of those "good points" depends on a roll of the dice.
> thought they were visually helpful in this instance
If you're the author, can you comment on whether you used AI to write this? (Specifically, the text.)
Where it might be suffering is in its presentation of a list of facts unorganised around any thesis. It took me until your China Question section to see the meat of your piece.
If I had to suggest some edits, they would be making everything above that section more concise (by reducing the number of charts and/or moving them to footnotes) and adding a summarising subtitle.
There are also jargon jumps, e.g. from TFAB to TCB. (I initially assumed the FAA was a TCB, the latter being a generic international term.) This compounds the lack of conciseness presented by the accredition-body breakdown and TCBs vc. test-only labs sections. If those sections were moved after your thesis section, you could dive into whether China's labs differ from the U.S. labs in those respects.
... and add a pipe to vent the hydrogen gases outside instead of accumulating it inside the reactor building!
> There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies.
I'm not in the legal field, but can someone explain that further? I would have expected that all case law is public access. Not necessarily easy access, but when a judge writes an opinion, why on Earth would that opinion be gated behind a corporation? What am I missing?
>Arthroscopic Partial Meniscectomy for Degenerative Tear — 10-Year Outcomes
> they have a right to record something/everything and someone/everyone around them in public
Subject to local law. It's an offence to make indecent images of children, for example.
However, it is absolutely not the case that Meta has a right to that data, as a data controller under GDPR.
> feels at risk
This is a red flag phrase: it's a justification that people whip out for all sorts of unjustified things up to and including murder.
> MMT folks
Does this still have purchase? I thought following post-Covid inflation, the MMT folks took a backseat (in politics).
You may appreciate my own contribution, https://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2958/ , which includes an entire section titled "If They're So Wonderful Why Aren't They In My Favorite Language?", a section explaining why IO is not a good lens to understand monads and why "monads" don't really have anything to do with "making IO possible" (very common misconception), as well as what I believe to be one of the more practical applications of monads as a way of generating an audit log of how a particular value came to be what it is without. That example specifically arose from one of the rare instances I used the monad pattern in my own real code. Though I still didn't abstract out the monad interface, because if you only have one, that does you no good. The entire point of an interface is to have multiple implementations. It just happens to be a data type that could have implemented the monad interface, if there had been any use for such a thing in my code, which there wasn't.
> want Belgium to go all-in on renewables
I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.
> In practice almost no companies let you do this.
And, if they do, they might have legal issues brewing they are not aware of.
The main issue for open-sourcing old software is copyright. Not all companies buy the copyright of the tools and libraries they incorporate in their software, making it difficult, if not impossible, to open source them.
Also, getting the source code for external libraries was not common until open source became the norm. Making something open-source often requires rewriting parts of it.
Immigration and naturalization restrictions.
Yup. Another good option is co-locating with renewables. In Scotland, there's several BESS projects that are being built on the north/renewable side of a big grid bottleneck between Scotland and England, because the grid upgrades take a long time.
(maps https://www.spenergynetworks.co.uk/pages/cross_border_projec... - it's an odd area, mostly beautiful in that stark empty way a lot of Scotland is, but there's really not a lot of human use already there apart from marginal sheep farming because the land is too steep to till.)
In case anyone else is as baffled as I was by this comment, I did a quick web search and found this:
Pondering the orb refers to a meme that features a sagely figure looking into a crystal ball, often used humorously in various edits and templates online. It originated from a Twitter post in October 2021 and has since become popular across social media.
I knew nothing of this. Maybe I'll put the post up under that title and set the linked page to be a re-direct.
Strictly: France will no longer decommission Belgium's nuclear power plants, as Belgium will buy them. The current owner Engie are majority-owned by the French government.
Apparently there also used to be a phaseout policy which is being rescinded: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ram...
I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
Further background: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fifth-belgian-re... (2025)
> "Belgium's federal law of 31 January 2003 required the phase-out of all seven nuclear power reactors in the country. Under that policy, Doel 1 and 2 were originally set to be taken out of service on their 40th anniversaries, in 2015. However, the law was amended in 2013 and 2015 to provide for Doel 1 and 2 to remain operational for an additional 10 years. Doel 1 was retired in February this year. Duel 3 was closed in September 2022 and Tihange 2 at the end of January 2023. Tihange 1 was disconnected from the grid on 30 September this year."
> "Belgium's last two reactors - Doel 4 and Tihange 3 - had also been scheduled to close last month. However, following the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022 the government and Electrabel began negotiating the feasibility and terms for the operation of the reactors for a further ten years, to 2035, with a final agreement reached in December, with a balanced risk allocation."
It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.
Those are covered in Common Lisp, Scheme/Raket and Clojure, which are the Lisps most folks would be using, not Lisp 1.5 from McCarthy days.
> When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their ability to tell hard truths and to call out those who hold erroneous views.
I see people being incredibly toxic on the internet every day. Including under their own names. Sometimes even on their own social network.
Whenever I head "hard truths" in that context I'm very suspicious about what is actually meant.
We start by not shipping Chrome with "native" applications instead of learning the platform APIs.
Followed by creating Web applications based on Web standards, instead of whatever Chrome does, and then complain about Firefox and Safari not being up to the game.
What Java code?
Regardless of how they might have used LLMs, I tend to have an issue with this kind of complaint, given the C++ example code on the Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software book, released in 1994, 2 years before Java was made public.
Or the examples from "Using the Booch Method: A Rational Approach", "Designing Object Oriented C++ Applications Using The Booch Method", or "Using the Booch Method: A Rational Approach".
Additional there are enough framework examples starting with Turbo Vision in 1990, MacAPP in 1989, OWL in 1991, MFC in 1992,....
Somehow a C++ style that was prevalent in the industry between 1990 and 1996, that I bet plenty of devs still have to maintain in 2026, has become "Java in C++".
IBM announcement: https://research.ibm.com/blog/granite-4-1-ai-foundation-mode...
OnlyFans lost its purported audience years ago, when they made the decision to include human adult content in addition to fan-related content only. The adult content quickly took over and now you can barely find anything relating to fans on there.
Reddit is a much better place for that now, and if you aren't particularly precious about documentary-style fact reporting, you're much better off browsing r/fanfiction.
Oh, nothing special, just a run-of-the-mill school shooting he wanted to do at some point.
"Main character energy". What they're really doing is protecting their view of themselves as smart, and they're making a contribution for the sake of trying to perform being an OSS dev rather than out of need or altruism.
AI is absolutely terrible for people like that, as it's the perfect enabler.
"The air taxi can continue flying with up to two motors out" says the article.
Probably safer than a V-22 Osprey.
You could do a whole thesis on how industrialization and the invention of bureaucracy are efforts to get reproducible results out of fallible humans.
We don't yet have the luxury of several thousand years of work trying to get LLMs to be less fallible.
Just curious - what's the point of linking to an older post which doesn't have any comments?
It's not in the top 10, but it's of the more well-known and widely recommended book in the software industry. I'd put it in the same bucket as "Clean Code" and maybe even "Domain Driven Design"; they're kinda from the same "thought school" in the software industry. So it's definitely over-represented in training data (I'd guess primarily in the form of articles and blog posts and educational material reiterating or rephrasing ideas from the book).
FWIW, I found the concept of "seams" from that book useful back when working on some legacy C++ monolithic code few years back, as TDD is a little more tricky than usual due to peculiarities of the language (and in particular its build model), and there it actually makes sense to know of different kind of "seams" and what they should vs. shouldn't be used for.
When I was at CERN during the early 2000's, the use of LaTeX was already slowing down. On my ATLAS TDAQ/HLT section, most folks were using one of the required Word templates, or FrameMaker, only a few hardliners were still going with LaTeX.
The only password manager that IT allows on their hardware, bought by your employer.
A side effect of Electron crap, before Zed many editors and IDEs on Atari, Amiga, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS, NeXTSTEP, were written in fully native code.
Ehang had a scaled-up multi-rotor drone that could carry one person. They're a drone company. Worked, but max flight time was something like 17 minutes. Their new model has both lift props and wings, plus a pusher prop for horizontal thrust. Range about 200km.
Joby is more like an Osprey. It takes off and lands hanging from its props, then tilts the props horizontally to operate in airplane mode. This potentially offers more range with less power consumption. They've tried running on hydrogen, and claimed 524 miles of range.
There's also Archer Aviation (https://www.archer.com/) which has a roughly similar vehicle. Test flights since 2021. Was supposed to be in service in 2025. Didn't happen. They supposedly have an air taxi contract for the 2028 Olympics in LA. Owned, or at least heavily financed, by Stellantis.
There seems to be convergence on something that transitions to airplane mode, as opposed to the previous round of giant quadrotor-type drones.
It's now clear that this can be done, but not clear that there's a business in it.
Unless they still have an unexpired patent on the design, it's completely legal to clone. Physical objects simply do not have the same type of copyright protection, and there is considerable precedent in making compatible components --- the most notable example being the automotive aftermarket.
> Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own?
I've been thinking about this a bunch recently, and I've realized that the thing I value most in software now isn't robust tests or thorough documentation - an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes. It's usage. I want to use software which other people have used before me. I want them to have encountered the bugs and sharp edges and sanded them down.
Full book content and model generations are not included because the books are copyrighted and the generations contain large portions of verbatim text.
There are plenty of old books in the public domain already... but I'm not sure what exactly this exercise is supposed to show, since the Kolmogorov limit still stands in the way of "infinite compression".
Capex becomes opex if the enemy is shooting your drones down or if you're using disposable drones to deliver fatal payloads.
Volcanic eruption, most likely.
This is a site for intellectual curiosity, not pedantic dissmisal.
The same logic applies to comments. No comments are better than wrong comments.
> The article doesn’t really tell us what is gained by rejecting infinity.
Decidability. The issues around undecidability all involve the lack of an upper bound. In a finite deterministic space, everything is decidable, although some things may be too costly computationally to decide.
There are several ways to go for decidability. The brute force way is computer arithmetic - there is no number larger than 2^64-1. That's how we get things done on computers, but proofs about numbers with finite upper bounds need lots of special cases. Mathematicians hate that.
I used to work on this sort of thing, using Boyer-Moore theory. That's a lot like the Peano axioms. There is (ZERO), and (ADD1 (ZERO)), and (ADD1 (ADD1 (ZERO))), etc. Everything is constructive and has an unambiguous representation in a LISP-like form. You can have recursive functions. But they must be proven to terminate, by having a nonnegative value which decreases on each recursive call. There is a distinction between "infinite" and "arbitrarily large". You can talk about arbitrarily large numbers, but you cannot get to 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... = 1. You can have integers and rational numbers of arbitrary size, but not reals.
Set theory was interesting. Rather than axiomatic set theory, I was using lists as sets, with the constraints that no value could be duplicated and the list must be ordered. Equality is strict - two things are equal only if the elements are all equal, compared element by element. It's possible to prove the usual axioms of set theory via this route. The ordered criterion requires proving things about ordered list insertion to get there. It's ugly and needs machine proofs.
I was doing this back in the early 1980s, when machine proofs were frowned upon. Mathematicians were still upset about the four-color theorem proof. It's all case analysis, with thousands of cases. That's more acceptable today.
Looked at in this light, infinity is a labor-saving device to eliminate special cases, at a potential cost in soundness.
I made an appointment at the DMV, walked in, waited about 10 minutes, answered a few questions, and walked out with a piece of paper saying I'd get the real ID mailed to me, which happened.
As for getting a birth certificate, I googled how to get a birth certificate from XX state, followed the directions, and got a birth certificate in the mail.
Odd time for Claude to go down since it's not peak work hours.
If the models get to a point of total consistency there's still a LOT that we need to figure out and learn about how to use them.
Let's say models can exactly and correctly write any code you ask of them.
- How do you break down a project into a sequence of requests to models?
- How can you most effectively parallelize the work - models will never be instant, so there will always be benefits in working out how best to use several agents at once
- Now that the models can handle the details of Lean, and Swift-UI, and Oracle stored procedures, and thousands of other technologies that you never got around to learning in the past... what can you do with those and how do you pick which projects to go after?
- How do you collaborate with other engineers and designers and product people in a world where you can churn out the right code reliably in a few minutes?
The models we have today are already effective enough to change the shape of our work as software engineers. As the models continue to improve figuring out and adapting to whatever that new shape is becomes even more complicated.
Unfortunately another comment thread here says that it doesn't.
That's fair, I was thinking of hole-through components and I should probably stop doing that in 2026... But: if we're being pedantic: it isn't the physical size as much as it is the loop area that the current travels through, and that doesn't depend so much on the size of the package as on how the package is constructed. Low ESR caps such as IDC or LGA type caps will do better than other types even if the physical size is identical. Lead length also still matters, whether physical leads or length of the traces connecting the cap to the device and these should be kept as short as possible.
Its a much bigger problem on things like Amazon. My expectation is that Amazon would come under the provisions of this law if the buyer was in Maryland. One the most annoying things about Amazon is looking at different prices using a browser with no history and a VPN putting you in a different zip code, than the same product on your browser where they can see where you are coming from and know who you are.
>Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws
None of the above I like, and (a) is so vague as to be useless, including if you read the obligations.
>Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."
Companies still do it all the time despite "applicable laws". And when the company is sold, all bets are off.
I'd rather they don't get, or keep, any to begin with.
Because they're elegant. Haskell is a conceptual and syntax mess.
From less than a day ago -
Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity
141 points, 163 comments
I've seen this before in London too in some venues. They have full-on computers that scan your passport and take your photo, for the express purpose of storing this info.
Yes, exactly. A refund is giving back the money they took from him, compensation is something to make up for the aggravation.
Right. There are plenty of cheap plastic stethoscopes on Alibaba. There are even metal ones in the $2 range. If you want to bang out simple parts in quantity, 3D printing is not the way to go.
I would love to have a Japan-style universal lunch program. But this point is an empty appeal to emotion. Kids are being fed. The U.S. spends $100 billion a year on SNAP and $18 billion a year on the National School Lunch Program. We just focus most of the money on cash benefits to parents of children rather than feeding kids at school.
If the business has a physical presence somewhere, it's not hard. In California, you can get an order to the Sheriff for a "till tap" or an "8 hour keeper". A till tap means a sheriff's deputy or two show up and take the money out of the cash register. A "keeper" means they stand next to the cashier all day and take in money as customers pay. There are fees for this, a few hundred dollars, and they're added to the judgement, so the creditor doesn't end up paying.
The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1] So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments. This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.
I've done this once. I got paid in full.
[1] https://sfsheriff.com/services/civil-processes/levies/carry-...
[2] https://www.grundonlaw.com/the-power-of-till-taps-debt-colle...
Have you looked at the results for any commercial query, something like [sofa beds] or [hard drives]? It is basically 100% ads. Anything where the user is intending to spend money, they show only ads, and have all the top producers in the world bid against each other for who gets featured, and Google captures essentially all surplus value in the transaction.
My wife is an investor, and one of her portfolio areas is pharmaceuticals. A couple of portfolio companies have reported that it's becoming basically impossible to make any money off of a new product, because you need to advertise it to reach the customer, and Google will skim all the excess producer surplus off as you compete with other startups serving the same market.
It's basically the perfect business model. They own the path to the consumer, which means they own the economy.
I'd also recently hired someone out of Google Search, and they said that the only queries that "legacy" (non-AI-mode) search cares about are commercial-seeking queries, and the only metric they optimize for is ad conversions on those. It literally is thousands of people whose only job is to get you to click more ads.
FCGI is also an orchestration system. It launches more server tasks when the load goes up, shuts them down when the load decreases, and launches new copies of tasks if they crash. It's like single-system Kubernetes.
I asked how to get a partial refund (it blew through my quota in a single question) and Claude sent me to Github.
Huh. I disabled search in a Claude incognito window and pasted in just the text (not the markdown links) from https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/zig-anti-ai/ and said "Guess the author".
> Simon Willison. The tells are pretty unmistakable: the "(via Lobsters)" attribution style, the inline "(Update:...)" parenthetical correction, the heavy linking and blockquoting of sources, the focus on LLMs and AI tooling, and the overall structure of an annotated link post commenting on someone else's writing. This reads exactly like a post from his blog at simonwillison.net.