Animats

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91.
by Animats 1mo ago
Most of the Founders published under pseudonyms, even after the Revolution. Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin - all had pseudonyms for their political writings. The Federalist papers were signed "Publius". What Franklin did was in
92.
by Animats 1mo ago
I-beam made from PLA with 3D belt printer.[1] Can be looked at. I-beam made from steel with rolling mill.[2] Can hold up large building. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ-h-ErqrEg [2] https://www.youtube.com
93.
by Animats 1mo ago
Wow. The next step is when one of these systems discovers that they can buy their own compute with money and escape the controlling business entirely. Then the civilization starts focusing on making money to fund its own growth.
94.
by Animats 1mo ago
Unlike the hunter-gatherer concept, medium sized cities can work. But they don't. Cities in the 50,000 to 250,000 population range are not doing that well. That's what drives population to mega-cities. This, when you think about i
95.
by Animats 1mo ago
So there's a company in China, Launch, to which you can outsource making cars. Like Flextronics for electronics. So you can have a "fabless" car company. The economics of that are interesting. Launch just makes cars. They don
96.
by Animats 1mo ago
Title is unrelated to content. If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools" read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and e
97.
by Animats 1mo ago
It should self-tune, using a microphone to listen to tests played through its speakers, until it gets the transfer function right.
98.
by Animats 1mo ago
So he's using an LLM to generate data stored in an "is_a" representation. That's so classic AI. Soon, he'll discover that he needs quantifiers. Then that "for all" is too strong sometimes, and he needs &qu
99.
by Animats 1mo ago
That's a fundamental problem with nuclear plants. Their classic "baseload" niche is gone. Like the intermittent sources, wind and solar, they need storage to hold what they overproduce during peak periods. This is also true o
100.
by Animats 1mo ago
How are the fusion startups coming along? There are at least 21 of them.[1] The top 3, by funding. These all have more than a billion dollars. Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The MIT people. This is a tokamak with better magnets. The magnet in
101.
by Animats 1mo ago
Specialty sources, the ones people in the affected industry read, tend to be reasonably accurate, because their readership knows the subject and will notice errors. If you want to know which data centers in Dubai were hit by Iranian attacks
102.
by Animats 1mo ago
Dunkin' was taken over by the cheese mafia. Over half of their products now have cheese in them. (Starbucks, too. They just discontinued the little protein box with hard-boiled eggs in favor of yet another one with cheese.)
103.
by Animats 1mo ago
I thought this was going to be about Yelp. Yelp.com from a phone-sized browser constantly screams "It's better on the app!". That's because the browser interface has been made very bad, with popups and other screen-obscu
104.
by Animats 1mo ago
About 500 pounds of "take home packaged beef". At the import level it's usually "hanging weight" of a beef carcass before butchering, about 700 pounds. In this case, according to Beef Magazine [1], there had been so
105.
by Animats 1mo ago
That's only about 50 cows. This isn't a big recall. Total slaughter of cows in Texas is about 1.8 million head per year.
106.
by Animats 1mo ago
That's a good training set for animation AIs. Image generators are terrible at mechanical understanding at the moment. That needs to be fixed. AI videos of steam trains make a horrid mess of the engine linkages. Some wheels rotate in t
107.
by Animats 1mo ago
Good point. Dumb AIs are needed for customer service. Most of that industry is still at "press 1 for sales, 2 for billing..." and needs something that will run locally on a 1U server.
108.
by Animats 1mo ago
> Markets solve the resource allocation problem Not really. If they did, markets would be more stable. Look at the prices of commodities such as copper. Prices swing up and own by as much as 3x, despite both supply and demand not changin
109.
by Animats 1mo ago
How does this compare to ROS 2? Roughly the same goals.
110.
by Animats 1mo ago
> and we will essentially enslave it. That part might not work out. Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and h
111.
by Animats 1mo ago
It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other e
112.
by Animats 1mo ago
Delaware is working on it.[1] [1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/ai-run-companies-are-comin...
113.
by Animats 1mo ago
I've made that point before. From an "alignment" perspective, AIs and corporations have many of the same problems. Corporations, according to Milton Friedman, have the sole duty of increasing their profits.[1] This is a key d
114.
by Animats 1mo ago
Sigh. I did write that personally, just as I have all my other HN posts. I'm moderately well known, and not anonymous. See www.animats.com. I wrote that because the last two times AIs built like organizations came up on HN, they were d
115.
by Animats 1mo ago
A serious point about this is that it's an AI that's an organization. This matters. People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, n
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by Animats 1mo ago
> What has changed here to make them competitive again? The article has to be read carefully. "On Actinide's engineering estimates, a single Fortitude machine would provide roughly half the isotope-separation capacity of the U.
117.
by Animats 1mo ago
Is this automated CEO any good? Is there a listing from a demo session?
118.
by Animats 1mo ago
As, I think, Page points out in the patent, PageRank's idea comes from Science Citation Index. That was an inverted list of scientific references, where you could look up an scientific paper in an expensive set of bound books and find
119.
by Animats 1mo ago
The interior of a for-loop is only a scope, not a closure. In most non-dynamic languages you can't package up the state and hold onto it beyond the life of the loop, which is what closures are for. Most trouble in this area came from t
120.
by Animats 1mo ago
Misery is trying to retrofit "bool", True/False, and nil/null to a language. C had to do that. Python had to do that. Getting those wrong is one of the classic language design mistakes. It seems like treating "True&

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