Animats

21 ms·

541.
by Animats 4mo ago
Because Age of Empires II can do a NAND gate? Oh, please. I thought this was going to be about NPCs in video games. NPCs, by intent, have human-like attributes. It's not hard to do. I've done a bit of that, pre-LLM. It doesn'
542.
by Animats 4mo ago
That's a machine from IBM's 600 line, cost-effective business machines that did automated arithmetic. The IBM 601 (1931) read and punched punch cards, multiplying fields as set by a plugboard. It was entirely mechanical. The IBM
543.
by Animats 4mo ago
If that was true, he wouldn't keep losing negotiations.
544.
by Animats 4mo ago
I'm getting really tired of seeing dust and scratches applied to YouTube video. Especially when it's applied to zooms and pans over stills.
545.
by Animats 4mo ago
Washers now do have useful control systems. Mine starts out by spinning the tub a little, before adding water, to measure the load. Out of balance problems are a thing of the past - that's sensed and dealt with automatically. It's
546.
by Animats 4mo ago
The "agentic PC" for consumers probably would be something you talk to, and would look like Alexa or a living room TV or glasshole glasses. Something other than a keyboard and screen combo.
547.
by Animats 4mo ago
Is this for checking what Claude Code just did to your repo?
548.
by Animats 4mo ago
"The designation stems from concerns within the Pentagon that Israel is making a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration’s internal deliberations and decision-making on the confli
549.
by Animats 4mo ago
See [1]. There's not 128GB of on-chip memory. "Integrated" memory in this context means that the GPUs and CPUs all use the same memory. There are on-chip caches, of course. [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us&#x2
550.
by Animats 4mo ago
Look at a map. The Persian Gulf is a dead end, and all ocean water flow has to come through the Strait of Hormuz. There's some fresh water coming in from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but less each year as that fresh water is captur
551.
by Animats 4mo ago
How much is this supposed to cost, fully populated with 128GB of RAM? How much would this laptop cost? It's not that the NVidia chip has that much RAM built in, after all. It's that it can address that much. RAM is sold separately
552.
by Animats 4mo ago
> The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. No, it was done that way so that you could launch a program that was too big to fit in memory with the paren
553.
by Animats 4mo ago
We're going to need some mid-level representation of what software is trying to do. Formal specs? UML? Semi-formal specs in natural language? Design rules? People hate updating such representations, but AIs don't have that problem
554.
by Animats 4mo ago
I wonder what "management" will look like when many of the players are AIs. Humans may just be too slow to manage or coordinate.
555.
by Animats 4mo ago
Right. Bevy has its own run time allocation and dependency system, and it's <<not rust anymore>>. It bypasses Rust's compile time ownership system using unsafe code. The encapsulation may be safe due to run time checki
556.
by Animats 4mo ago
This is similar to a MIT press release from 2023.[1] That's another passive solar powered desalinization system that supposedly doesn't clog with salt. The author's paper list has the 2023 paper, but no followup.[2] Another M
557.
by Animats 4mo ago
Yes. The polymorphism isn't bad. It's the inheritance of data that's the problem. Rust traits can't have associated data. That's the big difference from objects. It's also hard to have a parent-child relationsh
558.
by Animats 4mo ago
Many of the people reading HN will be making a lot less money in two years. Some will be unemployed. Some will be homeless. Human intelligence becomes less valuable in quantity as AI gets better. Being big and strong was once valuable. Not
559.
by Animats 5mo ago
People who are drawn to the hardest thing for its own sake can be exploited, like game developers and postdocs.
560.
by Animats 5mo ago
Fragility is a common problem in surface treatments, sometimes called "nanotechnology". There are super hydrophobic surface treatments that are very effective. They generate a surface which is a forest of tiny sharp points. The s
561.
by Animats 5mo ago
The paper: [1] They're still at lab scale in glass. They haven't built a usable system, even a small one. The big claim here is that it doesn't clog; capillary action moves the salt out of the active area to another area, whe
562.
by Animats 5mo ago
The actual picture without zoom disabled.[1] In case you wanted to look at it. [1] https://api-www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/styles/w1059_h...
563.
by Animats 5mo ago
That's what "value funds" do.
564.
by Animats 5mo ago
The decision means companies like SpaceX would not be eligible for inclusion in the S&P 500 until at least one year after its listing and would also need to satisfy the index’s existing requirements for profitability and public float.
565.
by Animats 5mo ago
We know what works: a 1:5 staff to student ratio. At that ratio, method matters less. Beyond that, it's a productivity problem.
566.
by Animats 5mo ago
So why not turn it on? At least in China, where face recognition is at building gates, subway gates, store checkouts...
567.
by Animats 5mo ago
We've had self-improving AIs before, and they tended to get lost after a while. That's going to be a problem. LLMs are stable because they return to a ground state with no history for a new job. Systems with persistent state have
568.
by Animats 5mo ago
What is "frame" in this context? Video frame, or something else?
569.
by Animats 5mo ago
The Mauna Loa CO2 data is still up.[1] Trump tried to kill off the CO2 measuring, but that doesn't seem to have happened. The Mauna Loa data goes back to 1958, measured at the same point, far from any CO2 sources. 315ppm in 1958, 441pp
570.
by Animats 5mo ago
I really wonder if it's important to learn all that low-level stuff at this point. Most programmers today will never write a binary tree or a hash table. Modern high-performance ones are generic components you get from libraries. Even

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