Animats

I used to have a label system called Neato, which provided round CD labels you could make on a printer, along with a tool to press them accurately onto the non-recording side of a CD-R. There were even transparent labels, so the resulting disk looked like a commercially produced disk.

As long as the S-1 is honest, the SEC is doing its job.

A real risk is the market cap, including insider holdings, being large enough to force the stock into major indices. That makes the stock a must-buy for index funds. That in turn props up the stock regardless of how crappy the financial position and how small the float. That was controversial when Space-X went public. It went into several major indices despite not really being that big in terms of revenue.

The Case club's web site hasn't been updated since August 2025. They may not be very active.

If you follow the links, the first thing it tells you is "Download the app".[1]

Vehicle Data Sharing appears to be opt-out, not opt-in. They do say "If you’d like to ensure you’re not sharing data, check Vehicle Connectivity in your Settings menu in-vehicle and toggle it off." After doing that, someone should check to see if the wireless modem is still emitting.

[1] https://www.ford.com/data-and-privacy/manage-your-settings/c...

And SF tech workers don't even have a hukou that gives them the right to go back to their village.

China has a "return to village" program for people who didn't make it in the big city. Here's the propaganda version of that.[1] Return to the land. Go back to being a peasant. Survive on 0.3 hectare? That's a back yard, not a farm.

[1] http://english.scio.gov.cn/in-depth/2024-07/30/content_11733...

That's what they did. See [1], Fig. 3. (Which, amazingly for Nature, has a free download of the PDF.) This isn't something that shows up in a plain load vs time graph.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02144-0

The effect is apparently small enough that they had to use Fourier analysis over many minutes to see it in the noise.

The four-color theorem appears to be case C. That was the first really long computer-assisted proof. No one has since found a concise way to do that proof, and it's been half a century now.

Sceptre, in southern California, has a line of dumb displays.[1] HDMI/HDCP in, and that's about it. Walmart sells them, and of course they're on Amazon.

[1] https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U650CV-UMS-65-4K-UHD-TV...

"Polish this paper. Check all proofs with Lean. Try to find shorter proofs of lemmas where possible. Write for a undergraduate math student. Add brief explanatory material as needed. Cite previous work where relevant. Check all citations. Convert to LaTeX."

Useful reference to "Colossus - the Forbin Project".[1] Watch starting at 00:30:00, and see this scenario predicted in detail, half a century ago.

[1] https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970...

For now. It once took Deep Blue hardware to beat Kasparov. Now most laptops can do it.

There's a long collection of comments by mathematicians at [1]. A large number of workers in the field are rather discouraged. The main quality complaint is that the proofs are ugly, long, and incomprehensible. One mathematician comments that the first proofs of new major results are often like that. Elegance comes later. The main social complaint is that the social foundations of mathematics just changed, in a big way. The main practical complaint is "what do I do now", especially from PhD students who just lost their thesis topic. They sound like the Uber drivers fighting Waymo.

One comment was "A common piece of wisdom is that mathematicians only have a few tricks in their bag – which they skillfully apply again and again." Feynman made that point in his autobiography. For various reasons, he had a different set of mathematical tools than others in his field, and that helped him to solve problems that stumped others.

A big AI model has access to all known tools. AIs have more breadth than any human. Some of these breakthrough proofs seem to come from applying techniques from areas different from what people in the field tend to use. I'm not qualified to comment on math at that level, but the comments by mathematicians seem to hint in that direction. That may indicate why throwing vast amounts of compute at these problems works - an AI can try everything.

[1] https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100...

> WICOP 3 generates white light from gallium nitride (GaN) alone.

Gallium might be a problem. "China accounted for 99% of worldwide primary low-purity gallium production. The remaining primary low-purity gallium producers outside of China included Japan and Russia. Germany, Hungary, and Kazakhstan ceased primary production in 2016, 2015, and 2013, respectively. Ukraine most likely ceased primary production in 2022. Several new gallium production projects were announced including those in Australia, Canada, Greece, Kazakhstan, and the Republic of Korea."[1]

The price of gallium has increased by a factor of 10 in the last 10 years. It's doubled since last year.[2] A huge new demand for gallium is going to be a problem.

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-gallium.pd...

[2] https://strategicmetalsinvest.com/gallium-prices/

The Intel claim it wasn't a problem: [1]

Today, it would be a bigger deal. In the age of AI, exploiting hard to exploit holes is so much easier. AI has patience limited only by your budget.

[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/intel-soothes-hyperthreading-...

If the missile is spinning, you can do it with one. The original Sidewinder air to air missile worked that way.

The article is just restating US copyright law for people who don't know it. The title indicates a recent change in policy, and there hasn't been one.

Now, this is US law. Much of the world does have "sweat of the brow" copyright. But the US does not. See "Feist vs. Rural Telephone". There must be human creativity because the US constitution reads "(Congress shall have the power) To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That limits the power of Congress to change this.

So a lot of things are uncopyrightable in the US. Feist is the big case, and it was about telephone directories. No copyright. Useful objects are not copyrightable, which is why there are third party auto parts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are databases of facts. Nor are pictures of public domain art. Nor is automotive sheet metal, despite lobbying by automakers.

That's what leads to AI-generated content not being copyrightable. Model weights don't seem to be copyrightable either.

Voyager I is leaving the solar system again! [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1189/

The ancestor is not Braitenberg. It's Grey Walter's turtles.

In 1948, W. Grey Walter built two simple robots that could sense light and touch.[1] Much complex behavior emerged. That's where this idea started.

Watch the video.[2] It's very impressive for 1948 and tube technology. If you've seen an original Roomba, you've seen a similar level of intelligence. Rod Brooks went down this road. But it didn't go very far. There are severe limits to purely reactive robotics. It doesn't work well for anything that moves fast enough that inertia matters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_and_Elsie_(robots)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLULRlmXkKo

He's still on social media. He just wants a better bullhorn for his own position.

"Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick. Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreements with both of these trends." (This is the guy behind Ethereum.)

So he built a tool that allowed him to post simultaneously on multiple services. That's not digital minimalism. That's a spamming tool.

> The Nautilus series is unwatchable.

I never saw it, but after reading the synopsis [1], that appears to be fortunate.

There is worse. Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel.[2] Vaguely Verne-inspired. Very vaguely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(TV_series)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wkH_dlcVSg

We're in trouble. Four of the top ten items on Hacker News are security breaches.

That's sort of a random heading put on reports of Q3 earnings.

The big news is "Alphabet shares record their worst day ever, shedding $500 billion in value"[1] Google ad revenue has dropped. AI results from search engines don't generate the click-through revenue that search ads did. That's scary for Google management.

Roblox reports user counts are down. Reddit traffic is down and management blames AI search not referring users to Reddit. None of this seems to be closely related to AI costs. That's losing the competition for attention.

Intel reports PC sales are down. That's likely related to RAM costs, which made price/performance of new PCs drop.

There are issues with AI costs, but they don't seem to be the cause of these reported Q3 earnings drops.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/alphabet-google-sto...

Another guy pardoned by Trump.[1]

[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...

At some point, the pick and place machines, which can handle a limited number of different components at one time, have to be loaded with something. How does that work?

> sounding identical

In AI-generated entertainment, the names "Marcus", "Chloe", "Sterling", "Meridian", and "Apex" keep appearing. Those aren't common names, but LLMs seem to prefer them.

In my aerospace days, our buildings had both ionization and temperature detectors, plus water flow on the sprinklers. Any detection would sound loud buzzers locally, but two sensors, or water flow, had to trigger before everything powered off. That's common in big installations.

We once got an alarm because the heating element in a computer room air conditioner had turned on for the first time ever. It was defective and started to smoke. Smoke detection tripped, buzzers sounded, lights on a panel showed where the problem was, and alarms went off in the security control center. But this didn't trigger building evacuation or full power down. That took confirmation from a second sensor.

Someone ran into that computer room, saw smoke coming from the A/C unit, and pulled the big red power switch, installed by the safety people, on the air conditioner. Then we had time to shut down normally, the safety people came to clear the alarm, and the HVAC people came to fix the problem. I kept the burnt heating element on my desk for a few days for people to see.

This is typical for big industrial plants. Bad stuff will happen, and you have procedures for it.

Worldwide, gasoline-only powered cars are now less than half of worldwide sales.[1]

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/10/05/gas-cars-fall-below-50-percen...

So how is the part feeder setup automated? That's the big problem for short runs. Board making, solder paste, pick and place, reflow, and inspection were all automated already. The usual short run setup bottleneck is that someone has to put the tapes of parts into the feeders, then load the feeders onto the pick and place machine.

The video doesn't show how that happens. The robotic systems seem to be moving boards around, not parts. Yet that's the big manual part.

EHang keeps demoing their flying cars, without getting much attention. [1] They're scaled-up quadcopters. Their newest model transitions to winged flight to get better range. They've been testing versions with expensive solid-state batteries to increase the range.

Archer Aviation has been flying their electric air taxi over the SF bay this week.[2] Cost is about $5 million, though.

The big event for flying cars will be the 2028 Olympics in LA. VIPs will be shuttled around in Archer craft. That's about the right demo market - trips are short, but congestion on the ground is a problem.

[1] https://www.ehang.com/

[2] https://www.archer.com/news/archer-completes-historic-electr...