Animats

40 ms·

901.
by Animats 7mo ago
There's a raw milk lobby. [1][2] But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his ha
902.
by Animats 7mo ago
As of late 2024, Thunderbird was doing well financially.[1] About $8 million a year in donations, most spent on developers. What went wrong? It's basically in maintenance mode. Are they trying to add features nobody really wants to jus
903.
by Animats 7mo ago
Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem. There are now more things to do alone in a room than ever before. It didn't help.
904.
by Animats 7mo ago
Yes. I once wanted C unions limited to fully mapped type conversions, where any bit pattern in either type is a valid bit pattern in the other. Then you can map two "char" to "int". Even "float". But pointer ty
905.
by Animats 7mo ago
Changing the title was a good call. The article has a good take on the "lie" problem. We know about the hallucination problem, which remains serious. The "lie" problem mentioned is that if you ask an LLM why it said or d
906.
by Animats 7mo ago
> You could actually make something that kind of sorta worked for an aircraft carrier by joining tens of thousands of small pontoons and support ships. In fiction: "Tom Swift and his Ocean Airport" (1934) [1] In reality, a flo
907.
by Animats 7mo ago
Right. From the article: Through acoustic testing, the research team identified a narrow frequency band – a “safety gap” – capable of penetrating ANC headphone filters. This range lies between 750 and 780 Hz. Is there a standard specifyin
908.
by Animats 7mo ago
Building a nuclear weapon that can be carried by Iraq's missiles is relatively difficult, because miniaturizing nuclear weapons requires much more complex designs. It took the US and the USSR quite a few test explosions to achieve such
909.
by Animats 7mo ago
Response from Iran: "Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it will respond outside the region and deprive the United States and its allies of oil and gas “for many years” if the US crosses “red lines” and attacks civilia
910.
by Animats 7mo ago
We're getting close. The first big AI bankruptcy can't be far off.
911.
by Animats 7mo ago
Somehow we must be doing this wrong. "Do you realize that the human brain has been liken to an electronic brain? Someone said and I don't know whether he is right or not, but he said, if the human brain were put together on the ba
912.
by Animats 7mo ago
Fnord!
913.
by Animats 7mo ago
We'll know it's been cracked when all the lost Bitcoins start to move.
914.
by Animats 7mo ago
The article (with its doom-scrolling) suggests some stats phones should have: Dismissing a notification ...... 22% Intentional use ................ 20% Checking something that pinged . 18% Replying to a person ...........
915.
by Animats 7mo ago
Unless you use it several times a day, downloading an "app" just gets in the way. You should never have to download an "app" for a one-time use. We never went back to the restaurant in Cupertino where the table QR code t
916.
by Animats 7mo ago
It's liquid cooling. Even ordinary pole transformers are immersed in oil.[1] As transformers get larger, cooling fins appear, then active pumped cooling. It's the usual cube-square scaling problem. Heat generation increases with
917.
by Animats 7mo ago
Amusingly, the points on this posting have been going up and down quite a bit. Range is -1 to 2 so far. The point here is that Waymo requires either an Android account or an Apple account to log into their phone app. Lose that and you canno
918.
by Animats 7mo ago
That's a good point. The AI slop video is inaccurate, but entertaining. For comparison, here's the real deal - transformer winding at Virginia Transformer in the US.[1] That video provides a good sense of why these things take so
919.
by Animats 7mo ago
Then you can't take a Waymo any more.
920.
by Animats 7mo ago
The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, which builds the US aircraft carriers, once ran a full page ad announcing that if Congress would order two carriers at once, instead of one at a time, they'd throw in a third carrier
921.
by Animats 7mo ago
Next step in Germany - from mid-2027, a fitness test for 18 year olds.
922.
by Animats 7mo ago
"The second, more fundamental reason is that the relevant features are not given in advance. A large part of what the expert learns through experience is which features of the environment matter." Yes. "This is the deepest
923.
by Animats 7mo ago
It's a generic problem with flat demand in heavy industry. Shipbuilding, bridges, nuclear reactors - when the production backlog runs down and the factory goes idle, the factory dies. So do the companies that feed specialized parts int
924.
by Animats 7mo ago
The large transformer shortage has been a problem for years. Large transformer making is a craft, where the winding supports are made of hardwood, like furniture, and wound by hand. Then the windings go into a case that's an oil tank.
925.
by Animats 7mo ago
Wright designed a gas station, with a control tower office from which the manager can look down on the gas jockeys.[1] It looks like it belongs in Southern California, but it's in Minnesota. His Marin Civic Center is nicely integrated
926.
by Animats 7mo ago
Wow. This reflects the price of gold going up. A lot.
927.
by Animats 7mo ago
Oh, it's a billing thing. Not fear that Claude coupled to something that can actually do things is dangerous.
928.
by Animats 7mo ago
It's like intelligence analysis. You get various bits of intel. Some are true, some are false, some are biased, some are fake. Intel is evaluated in terms of source reliability and information credibility, which are separate. Bracketin
929.
by Animats 7mo ago
Space-X's success is due to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Musk didn't originate Tesla's car concept. He did, however, promote into a large scale business. That's the real achievement. Promotion isn&#
930.
by Animats 7mo ago
> I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. When I first saw it, my thoughts were 1) it can't possibly be that cheap, and 2) the turning radius! It&#

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