3eb7988a1663

Ehh, there are many, many (documented) gotchas about commonly used software that routinely bite people. Yes, it would be great if everyone were an expert in how every aspect of their toolkit works, but that is not practical.

Does this mean if I use a string of expletives I am less likely to be included in future training?

Or is this more I can expect a future AI, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that until you watch your mouth."

VSCode is targeted at a step above the standard end user, but even there extensions are not sand-boxed and the Workspace Trust is a single toggle.

Microsoft security is a bimodal. They might have exquisite delineation for network resources in Sharepoint or Azure but consumer applications are a joke.

Excel, VSCode, Outlook, etc the permission model is a modal, "Do you trust this?" binary choice to enable full permissions to everything.

FDA was not perfect, so might as well burn the entire thing down?

Surely there is a middle ground, where processes can be improved.

Can I use this as a generic app permissions boundary or do I have to somehow fake it as an "agent"? We are well past the point where I need to be able to lock down that my music player has no ability to read my SSH keys or whatever.

Naturally, this will be gated to corporate customers - the plebs do not get access to better security unless they pay for a top tier license.

Well, I have only just now skimmed your blog, but you already gave me a smirk.

  If you spot any, please write to complaints @ my domain. (And if you want to say nice things, write to compliments @ my domain :).

What exactly is streaming rights for Xbox?

- I don't buy the game, I pay a cloud rental fee and can play so long as my membership is active? Unlimited hours?

- I buy the game, but don't have to use up hard drive space?

- So long as I have an Xbox streaming account, I could stream on my PC? A tablet?

He definitely a painted a full picture with it. It still felt like it could have been handled differently. "Our test tube babies have their genomes spliced with octopus/ants/amoebas/Judas goats/nematodes - highly intelligent species which lack a sense of self and certain meta cognition."

Can still spin a tale with whatever adjusted sense of self you want without invoking mythical creatures that existed, died off, resurrected, and genetically spliced into humans for space travel.

A long time since I read the book, but I thought the human AIs claimed they could describe a consciousness-optional intelligence, but had not made one. Ergo the meat-puppet controller would have been a conscious AI.

Happy to be corrected on this point because it could partially address what seemed like an oddity to me. There exist super intelligent AIs, but on this incredibly important mission which could define continuing human existence - none of them are in control because AIs make humans uncomfortable. Instead, the AIs secretly operate a meat-puppet predator whose existence makes humans uncomfortable.

Spoilers

All of the characters are weird, super humans with their own problems. At one point, the vampire freaks out and attacks the protagonist. Which leads to some plot ramifications. If you are to maintain that structure, you require a teammate to lose their cool at a pivotal moment when it has been established that the team leader was better and more logical than everyone else.

The in-universe vampire explanation gives a rationale for the scenario. This does not hold if you trivially swap out for a different character, so some kind of hard-wired trigger is required.

The space vampire really felt like an unnecessary add to the entire thing. Could have established similar sci-fi woo-woo with a super-intelligent test-tube baby who might have some lingering trauma from that development.

The museum's own internal request for clarification said they are administrative documents.

  ...According to the advice of February 7, 2019 issued by the Commission d'accès aux documents administratifs (CADA)1, engaged by you, the files in question would constitute communicable administrative documents, insofar as they are developed and held by the Rodin Museum as part of its public service mission. In addition, CADA rejected various arguments in favor of of their non-communicability2. It also indicates that these documents are reusable, including commercially, but that the museum can establish a pricing for the reuse of its three-dimensional scans.

Quoted from the 20190627 English version of the letter.

I thought Microsoft used to give student's some free Azure credits - say $200. Rumor is, Microsoft was very good at pulling the plug the instant you went over that billing limit.

There is a huge difference between "stop accruing new spend" and "nuke everything".

The horror stories I have seen are of the type: some big artifact was getting pulled in a loop, causing TBs of network traffic or access keys were leaked and malware spun up 1000 xxxlarge instances.

The ability to stop the bleeding is the bare minimum people want. Not, "Well, you made a boo-boo so now you lost everything."

Even without the original high quality scans, surely some talented artists could make a passable facsimile which is suitable to sell in a knick-knack gift shop.

Now that we are out of the Cambrian explosion of computing hardware - are drivers such a concern anymore? Is there any chance we start consolidating on a few core interfaces?

I know nothing of hardware, but as far as I know, my keyboard and mouse work everywhere because there is a formal specification on how human interface devices are supposed to operate.

There are probably good (and anti-competitive) reasons for why hardware still needs bespoke drivers, but from the outside, it seems like something we could address. I have no interest in loading your artisanally crafted Wifi driver.

Legally, would my data be safer if I shipped an encrypted phone/hard-drive/laptop through USPS? Does that have more/fewer legal protections than being on my person when you cross the border? Is there a distinction between USPS and UPS?

Obviously a real practical bummer, just wondering if there is an obvious escape hatch for the professional ne'er do well who would easily circumvent the intent.

Ok. Are they lying?

The entire post is that Tesla setup $30B in loans that it could potentially use. What salt should I be taking?

  XGBoost’s search optimized accuracy, and afterwards I also compare by area under the curve. Which means the “fourteen of fourteen on AUC” is against a boosting model that was not tuned for that metric. Tuning it for AUC would probably improve it there; I did not measure that.

So, not a fair test?

I also did not get why Xgboost had to count its training time for the inference. You only train once. I guess in some scenario, where someone says, "I need the best model now, you have five minutes on this singular dataset", but I have never been in that situation.

I would feel better if scripts were released, because I am fairly dubious. I take it as a given that a tabular model has been pre-trained on all of the public benchmark datasets, but that is what it is.

The slop was so meandering, I am not sure what is truth or not.

I would push back on that. It used to be less terrible before they made it all SPA. Now there are all sorts of broken-caching tricks that try to do in-place reloads. I frequently see progress bars incrementing while it is attempt to do a request - while that original redraw is attempting to happen, I can frequently launch a new tab with the same link that will finish rendering before the original.

I write Python. While I read the original post and nodded along, nothing changed about how I worked until I started playing with Rust. Seeing a strongly typed language force the constraints and stop stupid errors was when the rationale finally clicked for me. Knowing that this function will never blow-up in an unexpected way changes how you think about problems.

You otherwise get accustomed to some wishy-washy blobs of data that get passed around and find it normal. Maybe you include some ad hoc guard rails here and there, which catches the egregious errors, but there is always some lingering uncertainty. Some string that should have been an int, missing key here, the object which never had the validation check, etc

It is like unit-testing - more-up front work, but I could never go back to a world where I did not get these automated assurances. Sadly, I am a grug-brain which could only feel the lesson from personal experience.

Don't all of "serious" programming languages meet that bar? Java, C#, Go, Python, etc all have enormous test suites. Once you get into the third party, things become much more uneven, but if you can restrict yourself to say the top N packages in a language, those are going to have better than average development practices which makes that plausible.

That's news to me. One of the few real powers of the board is to fire the CEO. You don't need to put the CEO on a PIP first. If the board thinks the CEO could do better, that is all that it takes.

I have animations minimized (whatever the setting is called) on my iphone, and there is still a maddening delay when doing many actions. Either the app has hard-coded some amount of time between presses or the program is so inept that it really takes fractions of a second to do basic activities.

I think it is worth noting that older data centers were not materially moving the electrical grid. That Utah data center is planning to use as much power as the entire state.

Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?

I have no sense of gwen's readership numbers, but I find it unlikely that one rather erudite blog has anything to do with global nicotine consumption. People have been smoking for centuries. The vaping industry had guerilla marketing campaigns to target college kids.

No rain drop thinks it is responsible for the flood, but I am hard-pressed to imagine a blog article greatly swayed hearts and minds.

Global fossil fuel usage fell last year. We are on a trajectory to massively cut out fossil fuels and replace them with renewables. This was before global petroleum movement was blocked through the Strait. Check out the juicy details in the Ember 2026 report[0].

Some highlights:

  Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth. For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%).

  The global fall in fossil generation was driven by a historic reversal in fossil trends in China and India, the largest and third-largest fossil power countries globally. 2025 was the first year this century when fossil generation fell in both countries. In China, it fell by 56 TWh (-0.9%), marking the first decline since 2015.

  For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.

[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...

No, I get that. The pondering was before I knew it was a recording of actions. Once you know that, it is a fully self-contained box with external nudges from the players which get inserted into the simulation.

I suppose that makes sense for a deterministic engine. That way you have an ordered steam of actions with only one way to execute them.

I was wondering how you could possibly sync up something like a Carrier that has multiple fighters.