Animats

16 ms·

361.
by Animats 3mo ago
(2025) Doctorow has a book-length version of this, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which I just read. It's not one of his better works. It's all conventional anti-AI wisdom. Too much of it is about t
362.
by Animats 3mo ago
A hockey stick graph on a log scale is a bit much.
363.
by Animats 3mo ago
Two words: Visual Basic.
364.
by Animats 3mo ago
This criticism, like most criticisms of AI, addresses the wrong part of the problem. The problem is harm to other parties. Typically customers and employees of corporations. A solution is strict legal liability. Corporations must be strictl
365.
by Animats 3mo ago
This is from the "AI 2027"[1] people. [1] https://ai-2027.com/
366.
by Animats 3mo ago
The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership. The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military
367.
by Animats 3mo ago
That's pretty much standard in the EU. Nice to see the biggest city in the US catching up.
368.
by Animats 3mo ago
Right. Sorry.
369.
by Animats 3mo ago
Well, at least not via major airports.[1] [1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/07/23/russia-tightens-bo...
370.
by Animats 3mo ago
Poland and the Baltics know they're next on Putin's list. So they're glad to help Ukraine. Better than fighting the Russians on home territory. Taiwan and Japan, though, aren't in Russia's line of fire. The cooperat
371.
by Animats 3mo ago
"The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea" - Mao Guerrilla forces have to be popular, or at minimum, have the local population cowed. They're useful for kicking an oppressor out of your own coun
372.
by Animats 3mo ago
- Why don't they carpet bomb all of the Ukraine? Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one
373.
by Animats 3mo ago
The main point of this paper is that rear area bases are too vulnerable now. This paper is from West Point, and is the view from the Army side. It's a big problem for air forces, too. The US has a tradition of large, supposedly secur
374.
by Animats 3mo ago
Look at 1950s aircraft. That was the decade of really weird aircraft, as people figured out how jets were supposed to work. Supersonics. VTOL aircraft. The X-planes. Rocket-assisted takeoff. After that, more was known about what worked, and
375.
by Animats 3mo ago
Ukraine and Taiwan quietly cooperate in weapons development and production, especially drones.[1] They both have big, aggressive neighbors. Ukraine knows how to fight them, and Taiwan can make electronics in quantity. Ukraine is starting to
376.
by Animats 3mo ago
Mercury used in some kind of electrolysis process for extracting lithium from something, apparently. Has to do with tritium production.
377.
by Animats 3mo ago
Questions: - How much infrastructure has to be fixed before this works, and in what order? - Can you send mail from something that doesn't have a DNS entry? How does this affect the first hop from a desktop or mobile SMTP client? - If
378.
by Animats 3mo ago
Right. Databases can be modeled as linear search over huge arrays, for example.
379.
by Animats 3mo ago
This isn't about radioactivity at all. It's about the millions of pounds of mercury used at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge,[1] resulting in a lot of low-level mercury contamination. [1] https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre&#
380.
by Animats 3mo ago
The Fed is tasked with keeping inflation down and employment up. But they only have one knob.
381.
by Animats 3mo ago
Yes. I should have cited that. He has this right.
382.
by Animats 3mo ago
For some problems, yes. Formal specification is particularly useful in two cases. 1) The problem is simple but an efficient implementation is hard or bug-prone. Examples are garbage collection, file systems, sorts, databases, and tree updat
383.
by Animats 3mo ago
Dumbing down of science museums happened decades ago. The Smithsonian, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Science Museum in London were made more "accessible". They used to focus on historically significant artifacts, without much exp
384.
by Animats 3mo ago
This makes sense, although it's not well described here. Formal methods, as in proof of correctness, have been around for decades (I was doing that stuff in the 1980s) but pushing the proofs through was too laborious. The seL4 verifica
385.
by Animats 3mo ago
> If token costs converge toward zero for most AI use cases... In the real world, token costs seem to be going up, as early stage pricing at a loss gives way to pricing that generates revenue. Compute costs might go down a little over th
386.
by Animats 3mo ago
> As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some p
387.
by Animats 3mo ago
The push for replaceable batteries is coming just as battery life is increasing.[1] We're already seeing that with electric cars. When solid-state batteries finally come out in volume, they should outlast the devices they go into. The
388.
by Animats 3mo ago
> Here's the catch. To put a decent interface on a seven-dollar board today, you still need C++, a board SDK... None of that looks anything like building for the web, so the way most people build interfaces stops at the edge of the
389.
by Animats 3mo ago
Similarly, this capacitance multiplier is more likely to be seen on a chip than outside one. Capacitance inside an IC takes up a lot of chip area, while transistors are small.
390.
by Animats 3mo ago
Yes, the web site is all effects, no content. It's like an old Flash site. E-beam machines work fine for prototyping. People have been doing that since the 1970s. But they're slow. It's a prototyping technology. The sort of t

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