Animats

13 ms·

271.
by Animats 2mo ago
This is much like the Tata Nano, the one-lakh car.[1] Although very cheap, it did not sell. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano
272.
by Animats 2mo ago
Today: Iran drones strike a gas storage tanker in Egypt. Yemen's Houthis are attacking Saudi Arabia from Iraq.
273.
by Animats 2mo ago
That's better than the performance of the average new hire. 24 hours to push a product with a very narrow market is not much.
274.
by Animats 2mo ago
As usual, the weak point is key generation and management.
275.
by Animats 2mo ago
The next demand for those trades will be for war plants. For those who haven't noticed, the US/Israel/Iran war and the Ukraine/Russia war just merged. Countries currently shooting at each other: Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Is
276.
by Animats 2mo ago
NVidia has been talking about 800VDC 1MW racks for about a year now.[1] They're trying to get others to solve the power and cooling problems. The Schneider Electric view: [2] The view from Flex.[3] This was being talked about more in 2
277.
by Animats 2mo ago
Whether inference hardware will be a commodity remains to be seen. We had twenty years of most servers being x86-64. That's commodity compute. Inference hardware isn't a mature architecture yet. There will be progress and obsolesc
278.
by Animats 2mo ago
Next, plumbers. The future of data centers seems to be more liquid cooling and less ductwork. Take a look at this new 1 megawatt server rack.[1] It has more pipes than cables. All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded
279.
by Animats 2mo ago
Not clear yet how the economics of standardization will work out. Take a look at Unitree's robot line.[1] They have humanoids. They have quadrupeds. They have quadrupeds with legs that end in powered wheels. They have kung fu robots.
280.
by Animats 2mo ago
Coming soon, the AI powered sundial.
281.
by Animats 2mo ago
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Hoyle. There needs to be more "prediction depth", vs. explanatory depth. If you can explain something but can't predict what's going to happen, you don't have an
282.
by Animats 2mo ago
You need tacky grease for open-air applications where centrifugal force will throw oil off the gears. Like this stuff.[1] I use that on open gearing in Teletype machines. [1] https://www.lucasoil.com/product/red-n-tacky
283.
by Animats 2mo ago
I've seen the Shays at Roaring Camp, near Santa Cruz.[1] Good to know they are still running. All those huge open bevel gears! It's all-wheel drive, including the tender, using a long drive shaft with universal joints and splines,
284.
by Animats 2mo ago
That is very nice. A large version of that would be a good bookstore window display for a busy street. It's too bad the Author Clock doesn't have a video output for a larger display. The "a little after six" clock idea w
285.
by Animats 3mo ago
It's a clock. Does it really have to have remote updating, a command line interface, an Internet connection, and HomeKit integration? That's too IoT. I have three La Crosse clocks that run off the NIST time signal out of Boulder,
286.
by Animats 3mo ago
This guy hates Strunk and White’s Elements of Style , the famous "omit needless words" book. He's plugging for a baroque style that would be unreadable today. We do have baroque styles today, but they're different from
287.
by Animats 3mo ago
Right, tab+LEN. The intended error was "<=" instead of "<".
288.
by Animats 3mo ago
Right. Since the 1980s, the Mountain Pass mine has gone bankrupt and shut down twice. Not because they did anything wrong, but because the prices of rare earths temporarily dropped below their production cost. Here's a general rare ear
289.
by Animats 3mo ago
You need a coarse level of collision detection above GJK, of course. Axis-oriented bounding boxes and spheres both work. Generating good convex polygons is indeed a problem. I used QHull for that. QHull is overkill; it can generate convex h
290.
by Animats 3mo ago
The "flight pointer" looks an awful lot like a fat pointer. See the diagram at "The intuition of inviscaps" in [1]. A "flight pointer" has a pointer to the beginning of the buffer, which they call the "low
291.
by Animats 3mo ago
Exhaustively doing all the edge-edge collision tests is working far too hard. That's why he needs SIMD. I did the first ragdoll physics system about 20 years ago, when we had less compute available.[1] GJK, which the author mentions, i
292.
by Animats 3mo ago
"1 of 1 would interview with them again" is too small a sample. This site needs more data before they post recommendations.
293.
by Animats 3mo ago
The important thing from a performance standpoint is to be able to hoist bounds checks out of inner loops. This avoids a check on each iteration. Languages which have constructs such as for foo in bartab {} can usually hoist checks
294.
by Animats 3mo ago
Trying to figure out Fil-C's "inviscaps".[1] When you allocate space with Fil-C's "malloc", some additional bounds checking data precedes the space the program gets to use. Pointers are "fat pointers"
295.
by Animats 3mo ago
It's crypto. Someone will do that.
296.
by Animats 3mo ago
There are press releases which link to other press releases. Found the technical paper from 2021.[1] The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store muc
297.
by Animats 3mo ago
"It also includes built-in safeguards that allow the farmer to swap one dead cow for a live one." Is that backwards? If you own the token for a cow, and it dies, what happens?
298.
by Animats 3mo ago
There's something to be said for that. If the Slate electric car people had a picture of their factory, they'd be more credible.
299.
by Animats 3mo ago
Right. No console support. On consoles, you need few shim layers, because there's only one possible graphics device. The game code often goes directly to the hardware.
300.
by Animats 3mo ago
The capstan winding animation is beautiful. The key thing to understand about early steam engine technology is that they didn't have steel . Good steel in quantity wasn't available until the Bessemer converter around 1880. The co

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