kimixa

And by doing so you have immediately excluded anyone who doesn't have an army of lawyers on the payroll from politics. And massively benefitted the incumbent, an icumbant who has, I should remind you, repeatedly stated they would reject any bill out of hand based on the party it was proposed by rather than any contents. The idea that everyone even considered for politics must have an entire, complete government apparatus ready to slot in with zero warning is crazy - it's why public offices come with funding and staff.

I do somewhat wonder if people's opinions about this would survive the current incumbent changing. From previous experience, I have my doubts.

> They don’t. They’re introduced all the time and then edited and revised.

Trying to claim that revising a bill based on feedback is the same as "no need to consider those specifics yet" is crazy to me.

Again, you're just dismissing it rather than engaging with any reasoning, and putting a rather arbitrary requirement on "real" signalling - one that has been repeatedly shown to be costly and difficult for the non-majority party to even get out of committee to a vote.

And I generally hope that actually bills have a much higher required level of analysis of details and interactions than more general direction statements. Requiring that for every statement would just put a massive burden on the minority party, as they would have to always do that level of due diligence just to be "allowed" to propose a direction.

But these actions are part of advertising their position to future voters, which is one of the key requirements in a representative democracy.

Yes, by the same logic manifestos and other statements of intent are also "pure puffery" as they're not yet law either.

Or even proposing new laws by floating bills when they don't already have the guaranteed votes - or even know they'll never pass. I'm sure many here would also want to dismiss that as "pure puffery".

Really why do we let anyone but the current majority party say anything at all? It's just puffery.

Bitcoin is volatile enough you can cherry-pick pretty much any %age you want based on the dates you choose. Which you seem to have done here - "happening" to choose the day with the lowest single day value in the last 3 years for your comparison point.

For another narrative, it was 83,038 a month ago on Sept 29th, so is down 5% in one month. And one year ago it was 112,562 on Oct 29th 2025 - down over 30% in one year. Well into "bear market" territory.

Using "traditional" market indicators and definitions for things like bear/bull markets doesn't feel sensible for such a volatile market.

LCG generators like lrand48 have been understood well enough you could possibly calculate "realistic looking timestamp" input seeds based on intended output characteristics.

Now, do we think that's likely? Probably no more likely than then being "easily broken" for decades without being noticed by the academic cryptography community.

And those rocket drones have a significant proportion of their mass as reaction gas for the thrusters, everything else being designed around lightness, and can still only resist gravity on the order of a few tens of seconds before a full recharge needs to be done. They're very much designed for "small" course corrections outside of atmosphere, or quickly dodging the terminal phase of an interceptor, rather than efficient velocity change.

There's no getting away from the rocket equation - reaction mass is heavy. The sheer number of design compromises that need to be made to allow a cold gas thruster system means I can't see anything but ending up with an awful car for the sake of a few seconds "air time". And the rest of the time you'll still be (at least) doubling the mass of your car from the propellant plus whatever the thrusters, tanks, linkages and everything else weights. I guess you could leave it empty, then only charge it for the "Party Trick", but it still seems a lot of compromises for the occasional "Hey, this looks cool".

And then really only usable in a nice empty, flat, controlled environment - the "real world" driving experience has things like other cars, people, buildings and street surfaces that likly wouldn't appreciate what are effectively localised hurricane-force level winds from the car next to them.

This is a car rigged for a specific stunt. And there's a reason why people don't just drive around rigged stunt cars. They suck as being "cars".

And this time next year I'll have 365 wives, and my CPU will run at 2 terrahertz.

Development and improvement is often very non-linear, assuming you can extrapolate forever is just as much guesswork as claiming it'll never change.

From what I can see they actually started pushing the steam update to stable users before the epic tweet. And has been on the beta channel for weeks.

So I wonder if it's the other way round, Epic rushed out the boast because they knew the window that it would be even remotely correct to most users was closing.

But their goal would be to ensure it only runs on their chips, and not any competitors. I can't see how they could do that if the best models truely were "Open".

I can see one of Nvidia's biggest fears is the inference hardware becoming commoditised.

Tyres are also a massive source of micro plastics in the environment, as another example of one of the "uncounted externalities".

This suggests it may be the source for over a quarter of all environmental micro plastics [0]

Some reports suggest it could be even higher, this article [1] references a pew report suggesting tyres could be the source for over three quarters of the micro plastics found in the ocean.

Though it's not as if they're just driving around for fun (most of the time), but not costing these sort of externalities means the market doesn't realistically consider alternatives even if they "should" be more efficient, so "cheaper" when all the /real/ costs are added up.

[0] https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/protectin...

[1] https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/02/toxic-tyre-dust-this-sou...

From their current balance sheets, well below costs.

Trying to separate out "per token" costs and possible profitibility from public information feels like a exercise in futility, it's too easy to play games with costs by trying to separate things still fundamentally required to actually have anything to /sell/ in the first place, like R&D and training. Even the current "Open Models" are somewhat loss-leaders, often reliant on significant funding and benefits from governments etc.

I think the only time we can /really/ judge the "true" break-even point is if the whole company breaks even.

I think it's still /somewhat/ close to feature size - I think the fin pitch of the "N3" tsmc process was about 5nm, which gives a "minimum feature size" of ~2.5nm to ensure the "gap" between them.

I think one of the big differences is that the "Gate Contact Area" simply isn't the smallest "feature" anymore - but the ITRS that defined those names called it "feature size", not "gate size" from the beginning intentionally.

You probably could make a transitor with a gate size of a similar order to the "feature size", it'll just perform awfully to be completely useless.

I feel part of the "Smart Access Memory" name is actually the driver features and paths to actually make use of it.

It's not like ReBar is a single toggle "Make Things Faster", but a different option in how it can map gpu memory to the cpu. The driver still needs to use it - and decide where it's use vs the "staging buffer" approach would actually be be benefitial.

Often not in the same way - even if there are multiple queues (that can be given a priority), they're often limited in what they can schedule between.

Often there's shared resources that are statically allocated to shaders (register space, local memory etc.) that means you often can't "just" add a new task if those shared resources are already in use. But not using those resources to their full would cause performance issues.

And the internal state of a GPU is often very large, much larger than a CPU, so suspending the current tasks, saving out their state and replace it with a "higher priotity" one can be very expensive - so often an afterthought of support at best.

Realistically the models will always be resident in the GPU during processing - the CPU and it's memory would probably more be used for related development tasks (as this is a workstation not a cloud server).

If it's just running the same model all day that CPU and it's RAM would be pretty wasted.

Yeah, but then there's the size of KV cache needing to be read through that HBM interface for each token, putting a hard limit on the tok/s based on the memory bandwidth.

On some models a large context can be a notable proportion of the size of the weights themselves.

For example, qwen 3.8 27b uses ~64kb/token for the kv cache - so for a 256k token context that's ~16gb of the kv cache for a ~54gb model (assuming 2 bytes-per-param/f16 for both).

So if the current non-baked-in chip is already memory bandwidth bound, as is often the case for current hardware and models, and the "only KV cache in HBM" chip has the same total memory bandwidth, it can only ever be (54/16)=~3.4x faster for the baked in-silicon model.

EDIT: I guess actually (54+16)/16=~4.3x faster, as the current implementation would need to read that KV cache too :)

Yes, the "Big Scary Numbers" listing CCTV cameras per capita include private cameras, which can outnumber "public" (government, council and police) cameras by orders of magnitude. In the UK these include those owned by businesses and individuals, even things like ring doorbells cameras. There's no real equivalent numbers including that I can find for the USA. In 2024 there were some 16 thousand council operated cameras in London total [0] - well below the ~700k often touted including private cameras.

If you restrict it to just those public cameras, London would barely be in the top 10 of USA cities in public cameras per capita.

Sure, it's not good, but implicit in many comments here is "I'm glad it's not that bad here" (presumably the USA for most commentors), but in reality it is happening "here", has been happening "here" for some time, and in many ways is already much worse "here" already.

While I think many of the UK's actions around this are massive mistake, certainly don't read me as supporting it, at least understand that the big headlines and pointing away from home towards "Orwellian UK" is a misleading distraction.

[0] https://www.get-licensed.co.uk/reports/cctv-cameras-in-the-u...

There's the simple physics of a vtol craft when landing needing to push down a lot of a air very fast just to lift an average human - plus the weight of the craft itself. There's a reason helicopters today don't land on street corners even if there's no rotor clearance issues. And these "personal" VTOLs don't seem any lighter than a helicopter of a similar size - for example the "Air One" is twice the mass of a Robinson R22 - ~400 vs ~970 kg empty.

The idea that they would be common enough to seriously disrupt "personal transport", even restricting to the "premium" market as it's known today is crazy. Imagine a fancy party where every 10 seconds everyone on the red carpet is being blown away by the backwash of someone landing - also disrupting everyone else trying to land there at the same time.

No, but to most people the only exposure they've had to the term "Effective Altruism" (if they've even heard of the it) is morality-washing personal greed that never quite seems to get past the "accumulation" or "self-serving boondoggle" stages.

As a brand it's tainted. You might argue unfairly, but that's never mattered in "public brand perception" before.

A spaced en-dash is also commonly used in British english for the parenthesis equivalent. So it's not really "anglosphere".

While there's no central authority, both Oxford and Cambridge University press style guidelines recommend that.

It mostly works because the object you're sling-shotting with is moving relative to the initial origin of the probe - if you can line it up so the object is moving in the direction you want to accelerate in you can get it to "drag" your probe along a bit.

The end result is the probe isn't moving any "faster" leaving the slingshot object than it arrived from that object's point of view, but it may well be faster from the origin reference frame.

The thing is to remember that the bodies you're launching from, and then slingshotting against, are moving very fast relative to each other already. It's like throwing a bouncy-ball against a moving car - when it bounces off it may be moving faster relative to you than when you threw it, but it's actually a lower velocity relative to the moving car's reference frame.

Yeah, many of the theoretical solar sail ideas fall down on what I consider a useful "probe" is, and what it can mass. As mentioned in my other comment, if you define the "probe" to be "a single particle" we /already/ do this all the time in particle accelerators. But it's clearly not a useful "probe" I believe the original thought experiment implied. A few hundred grams of super thin solar sail material is still very much in the "Not A Probe" definition in my mind.

Plus even the best laser dispersion quickly gets significant at the distances required to give the sail the time to accelerate at such a low thrust.

It might help a bit, as you mentioned that Voyager is currently going about ~17km/s, so nearly 0.005% c, so it's already nearly 1/200th of the way there to our target of 1% c.

But then you're at a velocity so far beyond the escape velocity of most bodies you'd need to be skirting stars, then black holes to get anything more, and that's where it dives straight into "sci-fi" rather than anything even close to theoretically possible. How far away even if a body like that? Will this "probe" even survive such an encounter?

So even with that sort of slingshot it's well within the "Estimate Rough Error" of my intial numbers. They're "order of magnitude back-of-the-envelope calculations" of spherical spaceships in an already unrealistically biased to make the numbers smaller vacuum (just reaction mass, no thought of any mass of the engine or spacecraft body itself, or containing the reaction mass itself, or anything like that).

I probably should have stated my assumptions - in that "Can we accelerate a probe" I assumed that:

- The "probe" is a significant size - if we define a "probe" as a "Single Ion" then we already do that at CERN and similar pretty regularly - 1kg was my assumption of "Useful Probe Mass"

- "We" - in that "humans" as we know them today, preferably in the realisic age of civilizations as we know them, or even better within the lifetime of a currently living human.

Also there's different levels of "theoretical". VASIMIR has only ever been shown in lab settings, so still "theoretical" as a propulsion technology. something like Project Orion is "theoretical" in that it's never been built, but likely just an engineering effort. IKAROS showed solar sails are "possible", but so many orders of magnitude away from what would be required it'll still be a significant engineering and development effort to even show the same idea at the required scale is possible. Things like lasers as remote energy sources haven't really got off the drawing board. And then at the extreme we have "theoretical" ideas like fusion rockets, which are more "Not show to be /impossible/" rather than anything we could even start at really building today.

And each step along that "further out into theory" path means more risks, and more changes that method is shown to be less useful than really desired.

Space sails are super low thrust though, even lower than my VASIMIR example - so will take even longer to reach the desired speed - though they have the advantage of not having to carry the complex and heavy engine I ignored that in the rough estimates anyway.

So by the time they're theoretically close to the desired speed they'll be on the other side of the galaxy at least, even if it took millions of years to get there at the much slower average speed.

No, not even close. The issue is simply exhaust velocity and reaction mass, that leads us into the tyranny of the rocket equation - in that you have to carry that reaction mass with you and accelerate that mass too. Even if you had magic infinite energy - e.g. it's supplied externally by a laser or similar.

Using the theorized maximum of 31km/s exhaust velocity of project orion (much higher than any current high impulse propulsion technologies) you'd need to have thrown out something similar to 10^42 times the probe's mass out the back at that 31km/s velocity.

That means to accelerate a 1kg probe to 1%c you'd need to start with a spacecraft holding a reaction mass equivalent to a few trillion suns worth of mass.

Hardly seems worth it.

It's all about exhaust velocity - increase that and it scales down quickly. Using the theoretical max of 500km/s of VASIMIR for example means it's only 400x the mass of the probe of reaction mass - but that's still theory and max thrust limits means it'll take the order of millions of years to reach that sort of speed.

They're really simple - arguably the problem is people try to treat them as a single complex unit rather than just "5 junctions in a row". Trying to think of them as a whole is rather pointless and self defeating, as there's no real advantage to doing so.

Most people have no problems with the idea of a road network loop - such as around a block - but that's exactly the same thing from a driving point of view.

Even then the "reserved" section is a carve out guaranteed chunk to allow stuff that might need contiguous physical memory (display scan out buffers and page tables, for example) and similar.

The GPU can still happily use all the rest of the memory for other use cases - which tend to be the bulk of allocations anyway. Though there might be performance implications - for example "moving" buffer ownership to the GPU would need to evict CPU caches, and often 4k pages and tlb lookups can be a pretty inefficient situation for GPU-style accesses.

That's been pretty standard for any SoC for decades. And "differences" to apple's SoC are more implementation details.

Imgur were found to be in breach of the data collection laws before any "you must check IDs" laws were even discussed in parliament, let alone passed, where the guidance was pretty much "Don't get caught actively selling data you already know is from children". And even the punishment was pretty much writing a document of "we'll try not to do it quite so obviously next time", but they refused to do even that.

The "implied" link between their fines, them rejecting UK connections, and any new laws is very much a PR thing from imgur.

All the breathless online reporting seems to miss just how toothless the law was, and they still failed at following it.

Like I think the new verification laws are an unworkable mess at best, written by people with an idea similar to believing they could "ban one specific species of fish from UK territorial waters" by throwing the odd grenade in, but they're rather unrelated to what imgur actually did.

I find this amusing as Apple were the people I had direct interactions with that didn't run stuff like fuzzers or sanitizers as a matter of course - at least not in the situations I was involved with.

Though this was ~3 years ago now, and a lot of things have changed, but these tools were very much available and well known then - they aren't new. Though perhaps as they "knew" the project was coming to a close it wasn't a priority either?

It also might have fallen through the gaps due to the Apple internal/team culture - I worked for an external vendor, and we had to work against binary built framework dumps that didn't even allow us to enable things like address sanitizer completely either, and fuzzing difficult as you'd need to trace things through their opaque binary layers before it even reached our code.

Apple did have all our code though, it was very much an asymmetrical relationship, but if they were running such things as a matter of course in CI or similar you'd see that pattern in when they reported issues it caught, and the timings from time-of-bug-caused to time-of-report. It instead suggested any such runs were piecemeal and sporadic at best.

Though, it wouldn't really surprise me if they were being run and finding issues all the time, but they never actually got back to us. This certainly wouldn't be the first time we ran into "difficulties" due to the nature of the relationship and culture.