kpil

Step 1 - don't buy a boat.

I'm not totally sure about that.

Maybe Russians outside Russia.

Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.

There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.

Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.

Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.

I think Volkswagen ID.4 is alright. It's perhaps a bit small. Also - I kind of like the ID.Buzz though not sure if it will sell.

Not quite normal but not "future" - the Renault 5 E-tech electric is nice but I don't think it's available in the US.

I think this is a good point. We will most likely not get novel results, but a lot of connected dots.

That is very useful but not the singularity. Which is probably good...

The CMIP7 scenarios were just released. AR7 is not yet completed but it's the input for it.

The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible given policy already in place, renewable cost declines, and observed emissions.

The policy changes have changed the projections.

Warming will continue, yes. The consequences will have to be dealt with. In some regions this will be problematic. It's still political and economical factors that determines the outcome.

It's worth noting that there is a fair amount of eschatology or even apocalypticism going on. It's built into the human mind somehow.

I spent 5 minutes just playing with the folding :-D

There is a certain difference between activating all relevant memoized facts that's in the weights and stringing them together with the help of all the stored text in the world, or displaying genuinely emergent behaviour and generating novel output.

One is really impressive and useful trick, one is AGI.

Apple's research show almost zero emergent behaviour, so I'm inclined to think most of it was already in the weights.

It doesn't take away the usefulness, it just defined the boundary. We can't expect "original research" then because it actually can't reason about concepts that are too far from whats already in the discourse. The discourse is big so we don't notice.

Unless they just swiped the workbooks of the actual mathematicians that where working on the problem using AI and it's in the "next-gen" training dataset.

The tree map folding is ingenious. I have never seen it.

As a whole it's brilliant and humbling. Both the vastness and complexity of nature and biology on Earth, and also the absurd amount of work and human lifetime that has been spent on gathering the information. It's also a testament of the power of Wikipedia.

I've had a glass of wine, but isn't it 3 half-hitches inside each other?

No, yes it's backwards.

I guess there's always the risk for a rig failure.

I looked a bit on doing the same, but came to the conclusion that it will be expensive to fulfil racing rules requiring the boat to be able to maintain speed for 5 hours ie around 25-30 NM range.

As it is now, I have about 500 NM diesel range on my boat, which is basically 3-4 days continuous runtime. Cutting it down to 25nm and 5 hours requires minimally 100kWh.

For a blue water boat, 500 NM is not quite acceptable, but can be fixed with jerrycans for a couple of dollars. An all electric blue water boat would clock in at an unrealistic 2MWh of batteries with a weight at least 20 metric tonnes. 10x the load capacity of my boat.

How the f are you supposed to type? Ideally I'd like full support for my arms from the elbow to the wrist.

In my first job - i think it was in 1997, I had my own small room with an L-shaped desk with a rounded corner. That gave a few inches of space for resting my arms - both when typing on a quite reasonable Pentium laptop, and especially when using the mouse.

Since then, the desks and the chairs has become shittier and shittier. Except perhaps when a was a consultant for an HR-department.

The U-shaped desk was probably the best ergonomically designed workplace I've had. Maybe a wheat-filled pad along the desk would have made it better.

I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.

Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.

The etymology is interesting - Pebble Voting was used in the early democracies in Greece from 500 BC. Black pebbles meant 'no' and white meant 'yes'. The tradition evolved to the black and white marbles used in the Roman senate centuries later, i.e. two millennia ago. The practice has since continued – it was used in the early American republic in the 18th century, and the word 'ballot' used today for voting means just that - a 'little ball'.

The word 'blacklist' probably originated from this meaning. It was in use in England since before, but it was probably the "Black List of Regicides” that popularised the term. It was a list compiled by the administration of King Charles II England of those to be punished for the beheading of his father King Charles I in 1649, following the restoration of the monarchy of England in 1660. As this list was rather long, it was a probably a bit of a traumatic event for the gentry in London and it’s not hard to imagine that the memory of the dreaded "blacklist" stuck. A century later the word was in general use for a list of enemies, detractors, and unwanted people.

Conversely, "in the black" is the notion of having no debts or a positive cash flow. This obviously comes from the centuries old principle of using black for credit, and red ink for debit and negative balances in the double-entry accounting system codified in the 15th century.

A tangential but equally fascinating concept is the practice of forbidding - or blacklisting - words in totalitarian regimes like Maoist China. Controlling language was a key strategy to influence thought, define in-groups, and ostracize out-groups. It's a hallmark of a totalitarian systems aiming to shape thought through language. Very much not at all in line with the principles of ballot voting in a democratic system one should think.

(The last argument can be used with any word. I could find your Gallicism offensive and demand that all words with a French etymology should be removed from English to restore it to it's Old-English form before the oppressive Normand rule, since after all, the old words would just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it, and my feelings are important.)

We don't "need a global reset"

It's an apocalyptical mind-bug. All times have an eschatology - ours seems to be climate collapse. It used to be nuclear war.

The media is selling a story. In reality everything is still getting better. People are healthier, richer, and better off in almost every measurable way, all over the world, including Africa and Asia.

Yes, there are some dark clouds. A long list. But the problems - even a long war in the middle east, are bumps in the road, not a cliff. If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.

The 150€ is a reservation on your debit card before filling up, since the banks or the station doesn't want the credit risk. It's released when the actual sum is booked.

I think it's just what a reasonable "full tank" was a while back.

You can just restart if you need more.

My internet provider didn't even maintain the ip-address. They have a pool of egress routes and seems to route round-robin. Basically every new connection can be from any address in the pool.

I had to call them to make it stop since it tripped the VPN solution at work, that interpreted it as a MIM attack. They disabled it no questions asked as soon as I called, so I guess it mostly works for most people, but not all.

But on that note, isn't it basically time now for IPv6 so we can stop shit like this and go to directly addressable devices like everyone did in the early 90s.

What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.

The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.

It takes some of the fun out of imagining eternal digital life, doesn't it :-)

Will put it in my list :-)

In Sweden and I think Europe, there seems to be quite much product development in apples. I think one of the reasons is that storage seems to have been more or less perfected so that the produce can be sold over almost a whole year.

Using only traditional methods there are several "new" Swedish varieties, Aroma, Frida and Saga that are very nice - and especially Saga is absolutely fantastic - On par or better that international varieties Jazz, Pink Lady and Honeycrisp.

Some of the more traditional varieties are also sold more and for a longer period because of the improved storage, even though that I think they have a shorter storage window.

I think "MMAcevedo" basically nails it: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.

We build models of the world in order to predict it.

But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.

I'm thinking that the slopocalypse is almost inevitable outside pure tech companies and can't be ruled out there either.

LLMs are a force multiplier. Clueless people will be able to produce tons of code that looks convincing but is totally misguided and misinformed. Exactly what large companies with complex in-house systems doesn't really need any more of.

The truth is that there is a lot of hype.

You need to be reasonably experienced and guide it.

First, you need to know that Claude will create nonsensical code. On a macro level it's not exactly smart it just has a lot of contextual static knowledge.

Debugging is not it's strongest skill. Most models don't do good at all. Opus is able to one-shot "troubleshooting" prompts occasionally, but it's a high probability that it veer of on a tangent if you just tell it to "fix things" based on errors or descriptions. You need to have an idea what you want fixed.

Another problem is that it can create very convincing looking - but stupid - code. If you can't guide it, that's almost guaranteed. It can create code that's totally backwards and overly complicated.

If it IS going on a wrong tangent, it's often hopeless to get it back on track. The conversation and context might be polluted. Restart and reframe the prompt and the problems at hand and try again.

I'm not totally sure about the language you are using, but syntax errors typically happens if it "forgets" to update some of the code, and very seldom just in a single file or edit.

I like to create a design.md and think a bit on my own, or maybe prompt to create it with a high level problem to get going, and make sure it's in the context (and mentioned in the prompts)

"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance.

I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market.

* We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive)

The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

Good question.

There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it

The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.

So I guess, successful lobbying?

I'm assuming they mean the old way of signing each others signatures.

As a practical implementation of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", you could get an organic trust chain to random people.

Or at least, more realistically, to few nerds. I think I signed 3-4 peoples signatures.

The process had - as they say - a low WAF.

Sometimes EU regulations isn't that bad.

Poultry litter has been banned as cattle feed since 2001, partially due to mouth and foot disease and BSE and to some extent animal welfare.