gumby

This is why there are no foundation models from Australia

Robbing shareholders? That same mentality justified Ballmer’s decision to replace free coffee with paid coffee machines. Which marked the beginning of a long decline for MS: an increased stock price but long term internal atrophy.

The shareholders benefit when the employees have an incentive to do good work.

The shift that seems the weirdest to me is "Anne" shifting from a male name to a female name. This happened long before the US was formed, but it always surprises me when I read about a renaissance soldier named Anne.

The post office was swithcing to electric but T's postmaster stopped that.

Sorry, I was speaking about the US POTS. My apologies for not being clear, especially when commenting on a post from a UK site.

CO buildings in the US still maintain that infrastructure even though the buildings themselves are full of broadband hardware and an actual CO is now just a block of RAM

The system is so robust that for a long time in remote locations there was only one wire, with the return line simply being the top wire of a barbed-wire fence. Couple that with a party line and you could service a lot of remote customers for a very low cap ex.

In the US the POTS telcos have a strict availability requirement that constrains the oversubscriber ratio. It was these requirements that lead to the development of the erlang unit in queueing theory.

So don’t worry about that particular issue on the POTS side. On wireless, it feels like anything goes (not really true, but by comparison it’s the Wild West)

It my not be a big deal for a completely solid state device but definitely pay attention to those notices for anything electromechanical, the issue isn’t the voltage but the current draw. And given that your broadband device is a transmitter, it could possibly matter at the margin…which for the topic under discussions could be precisely were you need it.

If the collected data are worth it, sure. But the BOM of these things is stripped down as low as they can get it. A buck would be a big deal.

Xfinity runs an open WiFi for its customers. If you instead their gateway and don’t change anything (which is 99% of users) any Xfinity customer can get online. Several of my neighbors have them, and you can’t walk around in my commercial district without seeing the “Xfinity WiFi” SSID. It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.

You put the battery in the RC and have a battery maintenance schedule. They do that today: the CO battery is just for phones within a few miles of the CO, so rural setups use distributed batteries. Ppl forget how much of California is quite remote and (to my pleasure) without mobile coverage.

I have copper service (buried) for the alarm system in my house in Palo Alto, powered by the CO. I will be sorry to lose it.

The cell ppl so have batteries in the bis and ter nodes but not long term power like the phone company has to do.

Satellite bandwidth is quite limited and uses a lot of power. It’s not really a solution, especially with consumer terminals. It’s just a handwave to get away with not dealing with the problems.

Overall this is a step backwards on safety. Telecoms MAHA

The biggest problems is power. The phone company power the POTS line — you can even make an emergency call from an abandoned building with no electrical service (and no phone subscription) if you find a jack and plug in. Under those huge central office buildings are huge banks of -48 V batteries which are required to provide a week of power (or was it two in the US? I can’t remember).

Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service, so that within a year or so it won’t work. In an emergency: no phone service.

It’s hard to get too upset. Science is a global effort, and some scientists working in the US are moving elsewhere.

Just like Katalin Karikó had to leave Hungary for the US to develop mRNA therapies (which are now available in Hungary), new therapies and discoveries will continue to be developed worldwide. They will eventually make their way to the US when (if?) it’s ready to acknowledge the importance of science again. But for humanity it’s not a big deal.

Just burn some tokens in a browser & IMAP proxy, scanning for what you don’t want to see and substituting images of clowns or puppies for every undesirable image and rewriting the text to something more anodyne.

Who needs a firewall like the Great Firewall of China when you can now do a MITM rewrite to a more acceptable tone. You could call it The Phantom Edit.

At the time people didn’t understand that — they thought photography would kill painting. Then for a long time photography wasn’t considered an art form. Your comment reflects an understanding/ viewpoint that is much less than a century old.

We are currently at the point equivalent to when photography was just appearing (so to speak)

True, but a transformer system regresses to the mean. I don’t mind that with my bank’s app (in fact thats probably a good thing) but there are other kinds of applications where creativity will be required.

I really doubt we’ll have systems that come up with the Apple folding phone’s “blurry image of the outside screen as you open that snaps into focus as you finish opening it” feature, at least for a very long time. The very training system of these foundation models works against it.

Photography didn’t kill painting, as some people feared. A painting can be more accurate than a photo, in some ways.

I think the same will be true of programming and other skills.

A lot of Bay Area folks thought they were immune

Fortunately I only realised that after we’d already registered Cygnus.

The paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-74214-y

We know so little about biology that the only way to do it is test on humans.

In another comment I said that if the area of biology/microbiology etc were the size of the surface of our sun, the area of our knowledge in those subjects would be perhaps a square millimeter.

And if you think that’s bad, don’t get me started on higher level areas like neurology.

Almost a perfect superset.

Someone else asked this earlier and I wrote this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273543

Unfortunately the HN UX doesn’t make it easy to surface these situations, not that I have any idea how one could make it easier.