mandevil

13 ms·

121.
by mandevil 9mo ago
But is that Big Money Private Equity or "took a class from that Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy who said we should create a company and invest in real estate" corporation?
122.
by mandevil 9mo ago
The difference between "AI" and "linear regression" is whether you are talking to a VC or an engineer.
123.
by mandevil 9mo ago
Yeah, I guess I mentally slot road mobile missiles as more like "less effective SLBM on the cheap," at least for a country the size of Russia (not sure that is as true for someone like North Korea where I speculate there is a larg
124.
by mandevil 9mo ago
I don't think they fill the same strategic purposes, though. The value of silo based missiles to the US is as a missile-sponge, taking most of the warheads from a Russian first strike and keeping them from American cities (forcing any
125.
by mandevil 9mo ago
There are something like 20,000 airports and heliports across the US. While not all of them can handle 747s probably there are several thousand fields that can take one of them, especially if there is no need for it to fly again. And even i
126.
by mandevil 9mo ago
I think that lesson from World War Two is that civilization is all the things we do to prevent another World War Two from happening. And that what we owe to all the people in Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nanjing, the Warsaw Ghetto, Katyn, Bengal, Manz
127.
by mandevil 9mo ago
Just a note that the importance of the triad is a very American perspective on deterrence and most other countries don't seem to approach this the same way the US does. The Russians really have a quad (they also have mobile, truck moun
128.
by mandevil 9mo ago
The US built a lot of bunkers like this back in the 1950's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex https:&#
129.
by mandevil 10mo ago
As I recall, that's because it's basically impossible to have a US rewards card in Europe. European authorities tightly cap interchange fees (the fees that come out of the merchant's end of the deal). US issuers are much less
130.
by mandevil 10mo ago
Something often observed in authoritarian states is duplication of effort because of empire building. The ruler cannot trust any of his underlings- they are all sucking up to him and backstabbing each other constantly, so he pits them again
131.
by mandevil 10mo ago
That's its official name. Obama had created the US Digital Service (USDS) back in 2014- it was essentially a formalization of the "Tiger Team" that had fixed Healthcare.gov the year before. The idea was that you would take mi
132.
by mandevil 10mo ago
I mean, the basic problem at Chernobyl was the lack of a big heavy containment vessel that essentially all other reactor designs have. That containment vessel (and a couple of other design features, e.g. negative void coefficient in a PWR)
133.
by mandevil 10mo ago
Mostly, what you are seeing is that the half of the world living in the India-SEA-China circle [1] are living much better lives, which requires far more energy then living as subsistence farmers did. In the G7, CO2 emissions have declined (
134.
by mandevil 10mo ago
There are a lot of areas that could use more investment but aren't getting it. The way this works is complicated. The best explanation comes from really understanding Moore's Law. The main effect of the law was really about invest
135.
by mandevil 10mo ago
Lise Meitner is a fascinating case of how all of this works. Otto Hahn had run the radioactivity department at the Max Planck Institute (at the time the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) for most of the 1920's and 1930's, working very close
136.
by mandevil 10mo ago
Yes, she had a paper, hastily thrown together because Watson and Crick were going to publish her data without her consent, and even to the men of 1952, what they had done to her was seen as pretty scuzzy, so they tried to give her an opport
137.
by mandevil 10mo ago
Rosalind Franklin would never have gotten a Nobel Prize. She died from cancer in 1958, three years before the Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded their prize, and Nobel was very clear that his award could not be awarded posthumously. Onl
138.
by mandevil 10mo ago
Sony sold it to Netflix (after the pandemic but before it was finished) for a fixed price which locked in a small profit for Sony but got them NOTHING for it being the most watched movie of all time, and Netflix gets all of the sequels as w
139.
by mandevil 10mo ago
Best take on serendipty versus effort in the history of science is, naturally enough, from Monty Python: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1Hu0f_ti9EQ Text from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/S
140.
by mandevil 10mo ago
The cartoon 60% of the way down the article definitely feels like an "artists barely concealed fetish" thing.
141.
by mandevil 10mo ago
No, this is not true. First of all, every nation is required by space law to publish the initial orbits of every object they launch, as part of that taking responsibility I mentioned earlier. The US Government further publishes tracking on
142.
by mandevil 10mo ago
The Outer Space Treaty is very very clear: anything launched into space is the responsibility of the country that launched it. Even if a private company payts for it and operates it, it's still the responsibility of the launching natio
143.
by mandevil 11mo ago
A couple of months ago I started listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, by Craig Mazin (showrunner for Chernobyl and Last of Us, also wrote for Scary Movie and Hangover sequels) and John August (Go, Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, etc.). Th
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by mandevil 11mo ago
A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in carefu
145.
by mandevil 11mo ago
You misunderstand the Amazon story. Amazon did two pre-IPO funding rounds: <1m angel round and an 8m Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. That's it. In contrast, OAI has raised almost 60 billion in 10 funding rounds, and if you RtFA you
146.
by mandevil 11mo ago
Yes, but there are many MD-11's still flying as freighters. There are four fire-fighting DC10's out of ~8 still flying, but there are 25 Mad Dogs (MD-11) at UPS, 38 with FedEx, and Western Global has 4, so there are plenty of MD-1
147.
by mandevil 11mo ago
Damnit, I knew that! Just forgot it in the moment.
148.
by mandevil 11mo ago
I think that the Mad Dogs only exist as freighters (~or their derivative KC-10 tankers~-Edited to correct that they retired last year) these days. I think the last pax service for any of them was over a decade ago. And air freight just gets
149.
by mandevil 11mo ago
I'm currently working through the Complete Calvin and Hobbes with my 9 year old, and he had these jabs at commercialism throughout, though it might have been sharper towards the end, but he was already jaded by art in 1985 as a 27 year
150.
by mandevil 11mo ago
Yeah, ROCm focused code will always beat generic code compiled down. But this is a really difficult game to win. For example, Deepseek R-1 released optimized for running on Nvidia HW, and needed some adaption to run as well on ROCm. This wa

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