Animats

10 ms·

181.
by Animats 2mo ago
If any legit museum, or attorney involved with Fourth Amendment issues, would like it, please contact me at nagle@animats.com. It's just sitting around. I bought it on eBay years ago, out of curiosity, and fixed it. I built a little co
182.
by Animats 2mo ago
It's worth realizing that, before computerized central offices, telephone wiretapping required running physical wires. Back when Rudi Giuliani was prosecuting organized time, not only did physical wires have to be run, the cops were bi
183.
by Animats 2mo ago
Manifest 3 is why I finally shut down Sitetruth and Ad Limiter. Removing ads from Google Search is now possible only in Firefox.
184.
by Animats 2mo ago
This works best in areas where cloud cover is consistently low, so solar power doesn't vary much from day to day. That's most of Australia. Two days of dark overcast and the load on non-solar sources goes way up. How much battery
185.
by Animats 2mo ago
> there has been very little progress outside the field of AI during the past decade. Rechargable batteries are much better. mRNA vaccines work. The Rust programming language works. Stacked ICs are working. Even mid-sized cities in Asia
186.
by Animats 2mo ago
> When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. Depends on what essentials need power. Furnace? Sewerage lift pump? Water pump?
187.
by Animats 2mo ago
It took only about a decade. Printing was a good trade in 1975. The International Typographical Union folded in 1986, with the remaining employees (mostly mailers, not printers) moving to the Teamsters.
188.
by Animats 2mo ago
I saw that go by on YC two days ago, and it scrolled off fast enough I can't find it. They were talking specifically about AI tools, as in avoiding harnesses and letting the LLM do more of the job.
189.
by Animats 2mo ago
Trader Joe's is out of stock, too.
190.
by Animats 2mo ago
That's a different tarpit. That's the problem with object-relation mapping, which is trying to deal with the mismatch between structs in languages and rows in SQL. There are a huge number of such schemes, and they range from somew
191.
by Animats 2mo ago
Please, no. Don't blog about things you don't understand yet. We have far too many people and LLMs doing that. After you really understand it, then consider blogging.
192.
by Animats 2mo ago
> Now it's a sure fire sign that the project was probably vibe coded. Groan. That's sad.
193.
by Animats 2mo ago
Some of this may have been a reaction to the era of Javascript framework churn. There were way too many different technologies for doing roughly the same job. They all more or less worked. On the other hand, IBM was late getting into integr
194.
by Animats 2mo ago
This is not yet about making the renminbi a full reserve currency. China still imposes exchange controls. There's historical reluctance in China to expose the internal economy to external market forces. And a lot of rich people in Chin
195.
by Animats 2mo ago
Google had never heard of Skeduflo. I hadn't either, and I once did work on critical path programs using UNIVAC computers. It was apparently an analog computer for computing PERT charts. It probably never got beyond the prototype, or t
196.
by Animats 2mo ago
"little boxes all made of ticky-tack" That song is about Daly City,[1] where some of the original houses still are pink, green, blue, and yellow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes
197.
by Animats 2mo ago
Locally in Silicon Valley, Costco and Safeway are both out of stock on sardines. Kippered herring is in stock, though.
198.
by Animats 2mo ago
What I'm getting at was covered in an article yesterday about the end of abstraction. There's an argument being made for layer-free software, where everything is one big blob of code, created and understood only by an LLM. The sof
199.
by Animats 2mo ago
Yes. Many of the bulldog breeds have breathing problems. AKC breed notes: "Because of their front-heavy structure, Frenchies cannot swim and should never be left unattended near a tub, pool, or body of water. Like all flat-faced breeds
200.
by Animats 2mo ago
There's a more general problem. We need to figure out how to use LLMs and still have decent code quality. One possibility is to have firmer APIs for known components. APIs that come with the entry and exit conditions for proof of corre
201.
by Animats 2mo ago
> Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." - Submarines.[1] - Homeland Security [2] [1] https://www.bu
202.
by Animats 2mo ago
Why is there no transcript for that video?
203.
by Animats 2mo ago
There have been a few badly optimized horse breeding trends. There was a fad in the 1980s for decorative Arabian horses with thin legs. They were not even rideable, but were used as a tax shelter. That, fortunately, is over. The much toughe
204.
by Animats 2mo ago
That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system. The woman probably has a good case for damages from the police department for doing it twice. That's sl
205.
by Animats 2mo ago
Actually, no. Replicating the manual process was quite feasible. There were keyboard-driven typesetters that worked well. Here's the Unitype.[1] This sets type by assembling type slugs into a line. It doesn't cast hot metal. It ev
206.
by Animats 2mo ago
Ah, that's why the ground is just a grey-green surface.
207.
by Animats 2mo ago
Progress bars still work. Gratuitous animations don't.
208.
by Animats 2mo ago
Well, what do you expect? LLMs are trained on blithering, mostly from web sites. So you get blithering out. There's an important point in the article, that forcing a style onto an LLM is lossy. Although he doesn't seem to mention
209.
by Animats 2mo ago
The pseudo-academic style of the article is awful. All abstractions and buzzwords, no examples. Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone cou
210.
by Animats 2mo ago
Right. So many things were tried in the 1950s. There was a lot of interest in nonlinear magnetic devices. UNIVAC had magnetic amplifiers in their "Solid State" computer (1958). Magnetic devices have the nice property that there&#x

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