Animats

27 ms·

481.
by Animats 4mo ago
How far are we from reliable AI? One that could, for example, handle 80% of office jobs without screwing up more than humans?
482.
by Animats 4mo ago
> Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them. Yes. The bottleneck has been getting the cars manufactured. It takes a ce
483.
by Animats 4mo ago
Do you have to be a US citizen, so you can use Fable?
484.
by Animats 4mo ago
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence. That w
485.
by Animats 4mo ago
Those numbers include primary batteries, even though it says "durable goods". Energizer, which owns most of the US primary battery industry (Ray-O-Vac, Eveready, etc.) may account for much of that. All those AA cells add up.
486.
by Animats 4mo ago
What, again? Neither of the "Bitcoin island" schemes ever happened. The seasteading people failed to convince anybody that living on an old anchored cruise ship just for a tax break was worth it. The Sea Pod didn't look survi
487.
by Animats 4mo ago
> "good enough" Probably not. The classic fix is a "getter".[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getter
488.
by Animats 4mo ago
Haaretz reports that Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon is not part of the deal.[1] Hezbollah reports they're currently fighting an Israeli attack.[2] So, for now, Israel vs. Lebanon is still on. Israel's internal politics are confus
489.
by Animats 4mo ago
What happened is that the computing industry was acquired by the advertising industry. What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. Tha
490.
by Animats 4mo ago
> > It's kinda like people complaining about Space Launch System, why aren't we using Saturn V or an improved version of it. Because the SLS uses left over Space Shuttle engines. Once. The Space-X approach is to use 33 Rapto
491.
by Animats 4mo ago
There used to be a thing for addressing user interfaces to fake users with a profile. One talk on this for airline seat back entertainment systems had target users "Cletus", some old guy who just wants to watch movies, "Tim&q
492.
by Animats 4mo ago
I've generally liked classic approaches which had entry and exit conditions, and loop invariants, all written using the same syntax and operators as the program. The compiler has to know what to ignore, of course. The compiler should s
493.
by Animats 4mo ago
This may be changing in Europe. Entire governments are fed up with Microsoft.
494.
by Animats 4mo ago
Confirmation from Iran's Security Council.[1] It's just a 60-day cease fire extension, according to the New York Times. Trump posted something on Truth Social. There's no announcement on the U.S. Department of State site. Tha
495.
by Animats 4mo ago
I kept at it until firewood filled 3/4 of the surrounding circle. After that, new firewood just seemed to disappear. You can't win.
496.
by Animats 4mo ago
Again, volume. The Atari cabinet shown was a low-volume product. Pole Position was a high-volume product.
497.
by Animats 4mo ago
Right. That's a medium-volume production process. Some years ago, I had a boxed software product made. I went to the box factory with a disk with the imagery, and sat down with the woman who made up the printing plates. She aligned the
498.
by Animats 4mo ago
USB-C is limited to 48 VDC. Above about 50V, electrical safety codes apply.
499.
by Animats 4mo ago
240 watts over a USB-C connector? What next, USB toasters and coffee pots?
500.
by Animats 4mo ago
The biblical idea is that you're supposed to stay home. The first level of cheat was that multiple buildings surrounded by a wall could be defined as "home". The next cheat level was that the concept of "wall" was d
501.
by Animats 4mo ago
The proof checker. You verify a proof system by having it produce a proof trace: - Step 3185: Apply rule that a * b = b * a to "length * width" in the current formula. Then you run a proof trace checker which applies each transfor
502.
by Animats 4mo ago
I used to do proof of correctness work, decades ago.[1] We had more proof automation than many of the later systems. The easy stuff was solved by the first SAT solver, the Oppen-Nelson simplifier. The harder stuff used the Boyer-Moore prove
503.
by Animats 4mo ago
> Radio communications between tween solar systems require more energy than we have. Supposedly, the Arecibo radio telescope, before it collapsed, could in theory communicate with a similar setup across most of the galaxy. The dishes wou
504.
by Animats 4mo ago
Good comment. Life needs some kind of chemistry that doesn't lock up into compounds so stable they're hard to crack apart, but allows compounds stable enough to build structures. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are suck a
505.
by Animats 4mo ago
It was never intended to be a volume product. It was a demo of a system which fetched background info about companies. I'd hoped to license it to a search company. Then Google turned to the dark side and Yahoo gave up.
506.
by Animats 4mo ago
> Anyone can imagine a programing language that is as fast as C and as dynamic as Lisp, but when you sit down and think through what those goals entail, you realize the design becomes contradictory. Ignoring the usual LLM rant, that&#x27
507.
by Animats 4mo ago
Now I have to get Ubuntu/Wayland/winit/wgpu/rend3/egui/wine to work.
508.
by Animats 4mo ago
The wgpu/winit/egui churn is a headache. It's worse if you're doing 3D work. Too many crates want to own the event loop. "We're a framework now!" I'm dreading the "upgrade" from wgpu 24 to w
509.
by Animats 4mo ago
I'm trying to think of any useful crate that really uses this. "Tracy", the profiling crate, used to self-start on loading, but that was changed to require a call to get it going.
510.
by Animats 4mo ago
It's something of an issue if you have some crate that needs to set itself up at load time without a call from main. But those are very rare. Even "simplelog" needs a call at startup to do anything.

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