Animats

34 ms·

691.
by Animats 5mo ago
China has this in a big way. The big energy sources are mostly in northwest China, and the big loads are in the southeast. That's why China leads in million-volt DC power transmission.
692.
by Animats 5mo ago
That's what happens when the storage tanks fill up. Nobody can buy it because they have to accept delivery and put it somewhere.
693.
by Animats 5mo ago
Yes. "Medicare Advantage" = HMO. All the usual HMO problems. The best Medigap plan is Plan F, which is no longer available to new subscribers. "Discontinuation of Medicare Plan F was a strategic decision aimed at promoting re
694.
by Animats 5mo ago
It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news. Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.
695.
by Animats 5mo ago
Yes. Apollo had a lot of WWII military people. The dud leaders in the US military were mostly identified early in the war and kicked out. Gen. George C. Marshall established a "plucking board" in 1941 to remove bad officers.[1] &q
696.
by Animats 5mo ago
There's been real progress. Wine's memory allocator had an architecture with three nested locks. "Realloc" held a futex lock on the memory allocator while recopying the buffer. Multiple threads doing allocation could go
697.
by Animats 5mo ago
Many sites are talking about this, but here's the actual video. Related announcement from CEO on X: https://x.com/adcock_brett It's a humanoid robot taking bags and boxes from an incoming chute and facing them lab
698.
Figure humanoid robot package handling live stream [video](youtube.com)
9 points by Animats 5mo ago|3 comments
699.
by Animats 5mo ago
> It was kind of a thing in 486 and P5... After those machines, at the Pentium Pro, with look-ahead instruction decoding, it became a major lose to store into code. Superscalar x86 CPUs have the hardware to detect and handle stores into
700.
by Animats 5mo ago
> What's being delivered now is, an agent running on someone else's computer, copying your data to someone else's database, with zero responsibility, or mandate to protect that data and not share with with anyone else (in
701.
by Animats 5mo ago
So they don't have to handle the really hard case. In x86 land, it's hard to find the instruction boundaries statically, because, for historical reasons going back to the 8-bit era, x86 nstructions don't have alignment restri
702.
by Animats 5mo ago
Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
703.
by Animats 5mo ago
Somewhere, an LLM trained on this and can now produce cliche future fonts. Is the Trajan fad over yet?[1] [1] https://letterboxd.com/sethpaul/list/trajan-the-typeface-tha...
704.
by Animats 5mo ago
In "Failure Is Not an Option", Gene Kranz, who ran Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s, brings up tolerance for bullshit. Someone tried to bullshit him about something. He put his arm around them and walked them out of mission con
705.
by Animats 5mo ago
> Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. Yes, they are. The Carver Silver 7 was built to demonstrate this. [1] It's a tube amplifier wit
706.
by Animats 5mo ago
It's the 3% silver that does it. That gets the melting point down. Unfortunately, the price of silver has tripled since 2023. Hobbyists won't use enough solder to notice, but it's an issue in production.
707.
by Animats 5mo ago
JLBPCB does small runs cheap as a loss leader, so they get the production runs, if any, later. Also, they get to see what people are doing, in case something interesting goes by. There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged t
708.
by Animats 5mo ago
He's soldering like it's fifty years ago. Everything is lead-free surface mount now. Solder paste, stencils, reflow ovens. Hand soldering is precision temperature controlled irons, hot air rework stations, magnifiers, cameras, an
709.
by Animats 5mo ago
Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work h
710.
by Animats 5mo ago
> rule-by-the-least-apathetic That is a great phrase. Many small organizations don't need much governance. Those are usually the ones with no real assets. At the community space level, you have assets and constraints. At that point
711.
by Animats 5mo ago
They can make it unnecessary for you to understand. Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know abou
712.
by Animats 5mo ago
Governance: basically anarchic, but with one person ultimately calling the shots. That's the classic problem with pseudo-anarchies. They're really dictatorships. The larger scale form of this is the non-profit with the self-perp
713.
by Animats 5mo ago
So Israel is switching to Google and Amazon. Hm.
714.
by Animats 6mo ago
There's an answer for that now: "Release ALL the Epstein files."
715.
by Animats 6mo ago
Here's a similar video for BART's Transbay Tube, which was built in a similar way.[1] The major differences come from building in an earthquake zone. The Transbay Tube is mostly steel, rather than concrete, for flexibility. There
716.
by Animats 6mo ago
Question: for software development, how much of an AI do you need for local development? Can it be run locally? Can someone train something that knows a lot about software but lacks comprehensive coverage of history, politics, and popular c
717.
by Animats 6mo ago
Right. An operation is idempotent only if doing it twice has the same result as doing it once. If you have to worry about whether an operation has already been done, it's not idempotent. If you have to worry about order of operations,
718.
by Animats 6mo ago
That's what metaverses are like - big spaces in which users can do things. What to do is largely up to the users.
719.
by Animats 6mo ago
The low execution quality of Meta's metaverse effort surprised me, too. But they wanted it to run on their relatively weak headgear. A good metaverse needs a decent gamer PC, a serious GPU, and a few hundred megabits per second of Inte
720.
by Animats 6mo ago
Stepping motors are not good at stationary power consumption. They use power even with no load on them. Brakes for robot joints are common in industrial robots. They're usually part of the emergency stop system. If power fails, the con

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