otherme123
otherme123 on Hacker News
Modus ponens is a valid "If A happens, B happens in consequence. A happens. Then B also happens". A "modus ponens fail", also called "affirm the consequence" is the invalid "If A happens, B happens in consequence. B is observed. Then A happened".
Valid: if someone is hit by a train, he dies. Someone was hit by a train, then he is dead.
Invalid: if someone is hit by a train, he dies. Someone is found death, thus he must have been hit by a train.
The first train going from A to B derailed, and the second train going from B to A crashed into the derailed cars 9 (20 on other sources) seconds later. Even if the second train was put in full brake in the exact same second the derailment happened, it couldn't have avoided the crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster
Post-crash investigation is much worse than with plane crashes, and also measures taken. We had an accident in 2013 (
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidente_ferroviario_de_Santi...), 80 death. "Investigation" was only to decide who goes to jail, and surprise the driver goes, with another guy from Renfe Safety department. It was also decided to change the ERTMS, with 60m € budget. AFAIK, still uninstalled.
If that was a plane crash, rarely pilots are to take all the blame and even if they are the main cause, the recommendations would be to add more training, more off time, redundant measures to help the pilot or overcome their mistakes and they usually do deep investigations that end in plane redesign / retrofit, changes in routes, adding safety equipment, etc. It never goes "human error", and close the report.
With the current news this was not a manteinance issue (that might be a problem anyway), but a failure in "control tower" that put two planes in the same runway, with one of them stopped in the middle. It is beyond logic how two trains can be in the same railway closer than X distance, even with human allowing it, instead of having a TCAS-like system.
In page F-7 they write:
Audited, revenue in 2025 is $4.6 with a computing cost of $7.3 (i.e. heavily subsidizing tokens). Unaudited, revenue in 2026 (first six months) is $16.3, computing cost $8.9 (1.83:1). But after adding personnel, sales and administrative costs, they are still spending $17.0 to get that $16.3 revenue (still subsidizing tokens, but less).
Old timer here: uv is not the first opinionated tool to manage Python packaging. It is build learning from other tools right and wrongs. I now use uv for everything because its quirks are less disruptive than quirks from previous tools that I also tried and disliked for being a bit too much for a very small gain.
What you call "dumpster fire", I call "steps towards uv", maybe even better tools in the future.
Finland has a very well managed forest. When I was there I was amazed about how carefully they cleared trees compared with what I was used to see in southern Europe. They are very proud of their wood houses, that they export everywhere, so wood management has to be excellent if they pretend to keep the business going. To see a foreign company just zeroing a forest with no intention of doing it right must hurt.
According to https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/06/google-da..., they had to halt the construction because they failed to assess the environmental impact. The same article you say it doesn't refute that the leveling was illegal says that at least four areas that must be protected are now leveled. It sounds to me that Google is playing the card "it is done already, just fine us and let's move on" thanks to their deep pockets.
IP is not scarce, in the sense that you can have your own intelectual product that does the same than others, and you having and using an idea don't limit other people ability to have and use similar ideas. But one emerald mine is just one, and only one person can extract from it at any given time. Thus property laws as a replacement of stick-and-stone laws take place.
If you feel that your idea is worth IP protection, just protect it as a trade secret, not as a patent or copyright. Very famously Disney have a copyright over drawing three close circles.
Funny that I can't barely access any of those just because I don't have an account. Plus Facebook. They show me almost nothing and push their shitty app to nausea. And I am sure the "site" owners get zero info on how many clients they are losing for being behind that fence.
Batteries are the best dispatchable energy "source". This is the obvious next step for Germany and others.
Germany still uses coal, but I wouldn't say they are heavily dependent. They consume ~100TWh per year of coal (20% of total), down from ~300TWh in 2015 (50% of total). They plan to close them all by 2038, and they are on the way to do so even before that.
But coal is a political problem because the are producers, thus a good chunk of voters work in that industry. Political parties that promise to keep coal running could still get many votes.
There is no model going rogue. There are models that are prompted "do whatever needs to be done to get X", and given a set of tools and virtually infinite computing power. Then they play surprised when the model breaks out of a flimsy containment (as it was ordered to), with barely any logging, and "do whatever to get X". OpenAI said they intentionally lowered the safety measures for the "ExploitGym" test that lead to HuggingFace attack, and they used the same postmortem to
praise their own model capabilities (
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur...), is not that they are concealing it.
If any of us did a tenth of what they did, we would be already in jail.
> Except we do know this because people built similar systems at similar scales and temperatures before.
Did we? Where are those fusion plants installed?
> Not compared to Nuclear, Fossil Fuel, or PV R&D + subsidies
You are probably referring to this document: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pd... . A huge share of the $183.3 billion are tax expenditures, which is to say they reduce taxes on activities related with energy (e.g. nuclear decommissioning is tax free). That is not the same as throwing money at those technologies R&D, but it counts as subsides because they can operate more cheaply. Only $11 billion of the $183.3 is true expending. But they mix R&D with other direct expending, like guaranteed loans. In Figure 11 we can see that R&D for all renewable energies is less than $300 million.
Fusion energy don't want tax expenditures, they want cash and lots of it.
> but building ITER 20 years ago wouldn’t have been a particularly significant investment.
We don't know this. There are a number of investments that fail and the investors need to let go or you get into the phallacy of sunken costs. E.g. wave energy was a failure, thermo-solar under delivered, algae based fuels never scaled up, and ethanol fuels from waste proved very difficult to engineer, syngas was a ecological nightmare... All of them received significant investment, and they were abandoned, pivoted or relegated to niche applications. I personally would throw fusion in that same group of failed investments.
Luckily for us, solar PV (paired with batteries) is a huge win that justifies all the above failures: for decades it was a dream for the 25th century, but some people make it true in the 21st.
Not every spending/investment ends up in success! Fusion is one hurdle after another, yet it advocates still believe that is just a throw-more-money-at-it problem. I am not so convinced. Of all the failed (for now) energy sources, fusion is the biggest money sink. France spent 25 billion, plus 7 billion in private funds. It is not like they are working with peanuts, at those quantities you have to show some serious results, maybe facing scaling problems rather than basic development problems (e.g. ethanol failed at scaling, when it already proved viable on smaller scale. Fusion is not even in "we have this toy reactor that works we are fighting to scale" phase).
Any industrial fridge, even many home fridges, have a sound alarm if some temperature threshold is reached. It is trivial to _send_ alerts if the threshold is crossed. What is less common is remote control.
E.g. the -80°C's in our lab are all naturally air gapped: the monitoring system is send-only.
> It could have easily been built 20+ years ago if it was an actual priority.
That is a bad thing to do. We diversified bets, and we end up finding a couple of pretty good energy sources, plus making some of the existing ones cleaner and safer.
Had we put all our money in fusion, today we might be drowning in cheap clean energy... or still living in a dirty coal-fuel environment, with a few old and dangerous fision reactors for lack of investment in development. A very risky bet.
> But really, how much does it matter? It seems like the four of them each contributed a lot.
In today's standards, or at least what I am used to, Franklin and Wilkins should be co-authors of the "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" Watson & Crick paper. But they only got this note at the end: "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin", not even talking about the image but giving the impression that they had an unimportant talk while having an informal tea.
But they (W & C) include this text: "The previously published X-ray data on deoxyribose nucleic acid are insufficient for a rigorous test of our structure. So far as we can tell, it is roughly compatible with the experimental data, but it must be regarded as unproved until it has been checked against more exact result". They suck for this: they could ask Wilkins & Franklin to include the X-ray that is sufficient to base their claims, add them as authors, and make a better article. But they choose to "be stimulated" by the perfect picture 51 and claim ignorance afterwards.
And we europeans consider them young. What we are pointing is that people in US (and America in general) talks about pre-1776 stuff as they were prehistoric, and pre-1900 stuff as they were comparable to Roman ruins. Add to that that we love to bomb each other to a ruble, and buildings and countries younger than 200 years are viewed as temporary stuff. Nothing pedantic or snobby here, just pointing that we live in different scenarios that affected our views.
I liked my Kobo Clara HD for years. A few months ago my wife wanted an ereader, but she reads a lot less books than me. So she offered to inherit my Kobo, and I bougth a Pocketbook Verse Pro. I like it a lot for the physical buttons, the smart ligth is programable with hourly granularity (both intensity and tone), and you get an email address that forwards ebooks attached straight to the device. It is a bit faster turning pages.
Kobo had its store on the home page, and while it was unobstrusive, the Pocketbook has nothing at all. Worth a look, if you are interested.
But also custom date pickers are the most broken thing you can find everywhere. Browse with a combination of browser/phone the developer didn't test, and you can't pick even the most basic single date. The most blatant are the fancy range pickers, instead of two date picker boxes: I have been pushed to a desktop browser because the mobile renders half of it off-screen, or don't hold open after tapping the start date, or works by dragging but breaks on single taps...
> So Amazon bought a bunch of nVidia hardware, and has been installing it in their datacenters. These are supposedly in-service for Amazon customers, a lot of it available and in-use today.
Bought, yes. Installed and in use? We don't know, but probably on a warehouse waiting for a place to be installed, for an energy source to be build.
Put the GPUs in another business, sell it to investors, and watch it unfold.
Google used to be the "good company" not that long ago. They changed the whole industry. But today, and very deserved, a lot of people that liked or even loved them, turned against. And that can happen when a company changes, but also when the user changes its point of view: you could be a voter for Trump a couple years ago, but today and after watching the results of his politics (that are not that surprising, is not like the president made an U-turn) you might have a different opinion.
If you hold the same opinion forever, even when things obviously changed, you are just a fanatic.
I think you are mixin wealth with money. In the short run it is a near zero sum game: money should go from A (now obsolete) to B. For example, brick and mortar shops replaced by online shops. For example horse business going bankrupt while car business is booming. Wealth is created in the form of more convenient shopping or travelling, not as $$$. AI might help some businesses with their productivity (creating new wealth), but those business are expected to divert $6T from current expenses (wages, or non AI tooling) towards AI pockets, or steal $6T market share from non-AI business.
I guess the real problem is pricing: right now it is buy used, then swap batteries for 8-10K? No wonder the car deprecates.
I vaguely remember a guy swapping modules of the battery of a Prius at home for peanuts, because the dealership asked 4K for the same service. There are a few places that do a battery refresh for 1 or 2K (eg. texashybridbatteries.com). In the future this might be a good business, today it seems to be a Prius thing... because it was the most successful car a while ago.
Key eink patents are expired since c. 2017. But they bought potential competitors and keep innovating (and patenting), so the monopoly stays strong. If someone entered the market right now, with 2000 eink tech, and pricing at very low margin prices, they will go bankrupt: would you buy a 20" screen, no touch, ~70 ppp, refresh around 2 seconds for maybe $300? Also, patents might have expired, but key tech, such as precise micro-sphere manufacturing, is not under patent protection, but under trade secrecy: on top of old tech, it would be unreliable. Some like Zhiwei specialize in epaper for tags using old tech, but only for b2b and barely below Eink prices.
Competition explores completely different technologies: Daylight DC-1, Reinkstone, ChLCD e.g. from Iris... but either the tech isn't good enough to generalize or be cheap (the later), or the niche economics don't allow the inventors to keep investing (the two first).
The game is really cool, but it allowed me to cheat on mobile when asked for coastal lines: it shows the actual coastal line for a second, then draws the rest of the map over. Also, it said Belgium is landlocked.
Right now I would hesitate to buy a used car with 5 years and a 100% of 300 km range but down to 250 km due to battery wear, when I could buy a new car with 500 km range. Owners of first Leafs got hit by already low initial ranges (~120km), so even a 20-30% battery wear have huge impact or car usability. That would change when ranges stops growing (about 700 km, maybe, the same as ICEs?), and used cars have the same range than buying new. 600 km instead of 700 km? Good enough.
Wait, insurance includes repair costs? What kind of insurance are we talking about? In Spain, mandatory insurance plus some perks is about the same: includes damage to others, own car broken glasses, theft and fire, and road assistance. Maybe Tesla is slightly more, expensive because the horsepower of their cars is too high, and it gets in the group of cars with over 300 HP, so insurers assume it is a bit of a sports car. Anyway, the difference with similarly powered ICE car is negligible.
My comment was more on the line "when given options, people will massively choose Windows" just out of familiarity or fear of the unknown, and by people I also mean management. If I was manager, I wouldn't force Linux (which I use exclusively since c. 2000) unto my workers, unless I am ready to set Linux familiarity as a CV minimum requirement, reducing my hiring pool by 90% at least.
The parent comment implies there is some dark conspirancy behind the scenes to force Windows unto us. There might be a couple decades ago, today it is just what people choose if given choice. Windows 11 nags its users all the time, yet they accept it as it was normal and unavoidable.
Europe is already heavily nuclearized. Even the nuclear lobby recommends a "10% nuclear power in the mix", which many countries en Europe already meet... or way more than that. On average 24% (varies between sources) of European mix is nuclear. Yes, there are a couple of countries (Germany and Italy) that banned nuclear, but there are also the most nuclearized country in the world (France, 60% nuclear), and countries like Slovakia (60% nuclear), Hungary (40% nuclear).
Europe produces almost no uranium, and France has a historical problem with uranium mining in Africa, is not like Europe is giving up a free-of-trouble energy source. Honestly, sometimes it feels that some pro-nuclear won't be happy until 100% of the base load is nuclear. They are asking for more nuclear than the nuclear lobby does.
I am author in two author papers, but also in 200 author papers. Nothing wrong with it. In our field they are studies among a dozen centers, where each center has to do something and the results are pooled to some central hub. If I do a relatively easy data prep before sending to the hub, I go among the authors, it is just the way it works. A huge work that is spreaded thinly, or else can't be done unless you ask people to work without attributio. That might work once or twice, but not more, if you are the person who ask for favours but returns nothing.