Animats

I did, for a long time, but we're past that point now. Someone else got something done in three months that took me years of hand coding.

Youtube, and in spam folders.

I have enough ad and tracking blocking that the ads I get are totally misdirected. I get ads for drugs for diseases I've never heard of. I get ads for equipment for processing and bottling olive oil in bulk, despite being nowhere near that industry. I get ads from China for very large hydraulic presses, despite not having any great need for metal-forming equipment. And World Dairy Expo wants me to attend, although I don't have any cows.

> That is a massive shame, although I stopped reading it a very long time ago...

That why Salon is disappearing. I used to read it, and I thought it disappeared around the time Brill's Content and The Standard went under.

I haven't seen Salon in a Google search result in years.

I'm not doing enough to rent my own GPU farm.

Embarrassingly, I don't have one yet. I'm mostly still writing code one keystroke at a time. I've used Github Copilot to translate between languages and look things up, but haven't trusted it to write new code or fix anything.

Claude Fable is now good enough that I should be using it. The latest Claude version is said to be comparable to a mid-career graphics programmer, which is about what I need. Six months ago it wasn't good enough to use for such work, and probably would have made a hash of my code. There's been progress.

But Anthropic's business practices are scary. They have a reputation for cancelling accounts for random reasons, offer rather bad terms, and have no customer support. I have a strong aversion to services with a reputation for cancelling services arbitrarily. They will apparently cancel based on their system's guesses as to what you're working on. Sometimes they guess wrong. What I'm doing (metaverse clients) is so far out of the mainstream they may guess wrong.

I'm currently stalled signing up for Claude because their verification email system can't get to my inbox. (Some problem with their using Constant Contact, a spam system, to send transactional emails to my own domain, which, long ago, I had blocked at the Constant Contact end. I think. The verification email never touches the inbound mail server.) It's very important to Anthropic that you sign up with the "right" email address, and it may not be possible to change it, so using some disposable address is not a good idea.

Suggestions?

Yes, you need some ultraviolet to attract insects. That's why bug-zappers have near UV lamps. They're usually compact fluorescent bulbs. Some ads say 365nm is the right color.

You meet the other side now and then. In my days at the aerospace company, we got an applicant from Russia with really good credentials from the Moscow Institute of Mathematical Sciences. They were really good in person, too. But the decision was "they had to be a plant".

I used to go to parties at Hacker Dojo in the early days of AI. Google wasn't into AI yet and Hacker Dojo had classes, often attended by Google people. (I learned way too much about support vector machines, in a class taught by a guy from BlackRock.) There were a lot of very good looking Chinese women at the parties who were very interested in what people were working on. They were very bright, understood the subject, and had business cards from small companies no one had heard of. Then one day they all disappeared and were not seen again. I regret not asking one how she liked working for the Third Department.

Nope.

That surprised me, too. This was marked down to -4.

This is how Skycam, the camera system for sporting events, works.[1] Four cables, four winches, coordinated.

[1] https://www.skycam.tv/

We're going to need languages which both humans and AIs can read and write. We don't know what those look like yet. Contracts aren't a bad idea, but C++ has just become too big. Even people who used to be C++ language lawyers have said that.

At this point, changes to major programming languages have to adapt to a world in which AI systems generate and change much of the code. C++ contracts may be good or bad, but they are from before strong AI coding systems. So it's time to rethink.

And we have no idea what AI systems will be doing in 2027.

Is it wise to buy this until someone has taken one apart and checked for backdoors?

I can't even get that far in trying to sign up for Claude. Years ago, I told Constant Contact's (a/k/a Constant Spammer) legal department to block all emails to "animats.com", which was an option hidden away in their terms of service. Back then, they were just a spam service provider. Now, legit companies use them for "deliverability". Anthropic, which has some kind of co-marketing thing with Constant Contact, seems to use them for verification emails. Signup verification emails can't reach me. So I can't even start sign up.

I used to have a label system called Neato, which provided round CD labels you could make on a printer, along with a tool to press them accurately onto the non-recording side of a CD-R. There were even transparent labels, so the resulting disk looked like a commercially produced disk.

As long as the S-1 is honest, the SEC is doing its job.

A real risk is the market cap, including insider holdings, being large enough to force the stock into major indices. That makes the stock a must-buy for index funds. That in turn props up the stock regardless of how crappy the financial position and how small the float. That was controversial when Space-X went public. It went into several major indices despite not really being that big in terms of revenue.

The Case club's web site hasn't been updated since August 2025. They may not be very active.

If you follow the links, the first thing it tells you is "Download the app".[1]

Vehicle Data Sharing appears to be opt-out, not opt-in. They do say "If you’d like to ensure you’re not sharing data, check Vehicle Connectivity in your Settings menu in-vehicle and toggle it off." After doing that, someone should check to see if the wireless modem is still emitting.

[1] https://www.ford.com/data-and-privacy/manage-your-settings/c...

And SF tech workers don't even have a hukou that gives them the right to go back to their village.

China has a "return to village" program for people who didn't make it in the big city. Here's the propaganda version of that.[1] Return to the land. Go back to being a peasant. Survive on 0.3 hectare? That's a back yard, not a farm.

[1] http://english.scio.gov.cn/in-depth/2024-07/30/content_11733...

That's what they did. See [1], Fig. 3. (Which, amazingly for Nature, has a free download of the PDF.) This isn't something that shows up in a plain load vs time graph.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02144-0

The effect is apparently small enough that they had to use Fourier analysis over many minutes to see it in the noise.

The four-color theorem appears to be case C. That was the first really long computer-assisted proof. No one has since found a concise way to do that proof, and it's been half a century now.

Sceptre, in southern California, has a line of dumb displays.[1] HDMI/HDCP in, and that's about it. Walmart sells them, and of course they're on Amazon.

[1] https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U650CV-UMS-65-4K-UHD-TV...

"Polish this paper. Check all proofs with Lean. Try to find shorter proofs of lemmas where possible. Write for a undergraduate math student. Add brief explanatory material as needed. Cite previous work where relevant. Check all citations. Convert to LaTeX."

Useful reference to "Colossus - the Forbin Project".[1] Watch starting at 00:30:00, and see this scenario predicted in detail, half a century ago.

[1] https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970...

For now. It once took Deep Blue hardware to beat Kasparov. Now most laptops can do it.

There's a long collection of comments by mathematicians at [1]. A large number of workers in the field are rather discouraged. The main quality complaint is that the proofs are ugly, long, and incomprehensible. One mathematician comments that the first proofs of new major results are often like that. Elegance comes later. The main social complaint is that the social foundations of mathematics just changed, in a big way. The main practical complaint is "what do I do now", especially from PhD students who just lost their thesis topic. They sound like the Uber drivers fighting Waymo.

One comment was "A common piece of wisdom is that mathematicians only have a few tricks in their bag – which they skillfully apply again and again." Feynman made that point in his autobiography. For various reasons, he had a different set of mathematical tools than others in his field, and that helped him to solve problems that stumped others.

A big AI model has access to all known tools. AIs have more breadth than any human. Some of these breakthrough proofs seem to come from applying techniques from areas different from what people in the field tend to use. I'm not qualified to comment on math at that level, but the comments by mathematicians seem to hint in that direction. That may indicate why throwing vast amounts of compute at these problems works - an AI can try everything.

[1] https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100...

> WICOP 3 generates white light from gallium nitride (GaN) alone.

Gallium might be a problem. "China accounted for 99% of worldwide primary low-purity gallium production. The remaining primary low-purity gallium producers outside of China included Japan and Russia. Germany, Hungary, and Kazakhstan ceased primary production in 2016, 2015, and 2013, respectively. Ukraine most likely ceased primary production in 2022. Several new gallium production projects were announced including those in Australia, Canada, Greece, Kazakhstan, and the Republic of Korea."[1]

The price of gallium has increased by a factor of 10 in the last 10 years. It's doubled since last year.[2] A huge new demand for gallium is going to be a problem.

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-gallium.pd...

[2] https://strategicmetalsinvest.com/gallium-prices/

The Intel claim it wasn't a problem: [1]

Today, it would be a bigger deal. In the age of AI, exploiting hard to exploit holes is so much easier. AI has patience limited only by your budget.

[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/intel-soothes-hyperthreading-...