Animats

If the missile is spinning, you can do it with one. The original Sidewinder air to air missile worked that way.

The article is just restating US copyright law for people who don't know it. The title indicates a recent change in policy, and there hasn't been one.

Now, this is US law. Much of the world does have "sweat of the brow" copyright. But the US does not. See "Feist vs. Rural Telephone". There must be human creativity because the US constitution reads "(Congress shall have the power) To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That limits the power of Congress to change this.

So a lot of things are uncopyrightable in the US. Feist is the big case, and it was about telephone directories. No copyright. Useful objects are not copyrightable, which is why there are third party auto parts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are databases of facts. Nor are pictures of public domain art. Nor is automotive sheet metal, despite lobbying by automakers.

That's what leads to AI-generated content not being copyrightable. Model weights don't seem to be copyrightable either.

Voyager I is leaving the solar system again! [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1189/

The ancestor is not Braitenberg. It's Grey Walter's turtles.

In 1948, W. Grey Walter built two simple robots that could sense light and touch.[1] Much complex behavior emerged. That's where this idea started.

Watch the video.[2] It's very impressive for 1948 and tube technology. If you've seen an original Roomba, you've seen a similar level of intelligence. Rod Brooks went down this road. But it didn't go very far. There are severe limits to purely reactive robotics. It doesn't work well for anything that moves fast enough that inertia matters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_and_Elsie_(robots)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLULRlmXkKo

He's still on social media. He just wants a better bullhorn for his own position.

"Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick. Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreements with both of these trends." (This is the guy behind Ethereum.)

So he built a tool that allowed him to post simultaneously on multiple services. That's not digital minimalism. That's a spamming tool.

> The Nautilus series is unwatchable.

I never saw it, but after reading the synopsis [1], that appears to be fortunate.

There is worse. Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel.[2] Vaguely Verne-inspired. Very vaguely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(TV_series)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wkH_dlcVSg

We're in trouble. Four of the top ten items on Hacker News are security breaches.

That's sort of a random heading put on reports of Q3 earnings.

The big news is "Alphabet shares record their worst day ever, shedding $500 billion in value"[1] Google ad revenue has dropped. AI results from search engines don't generate the click-through revenue that search ads did. That's scary for Google management.

Roblox reports user counts are down. Reddit traffic is down and management blames AI search not referring users to Reddit. None of this seems to be closely related to AI costs. That's losing the competition for attention.

Intel reports PC sales are down. That's likely related to RAM costs, which made price/performance of new PCs drop.

There are issues with AI costs, but they don't seem to be the cause of these reported Q3 earnings drops.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/alphabet-google-sto...

Another guy pardoned by Trump.[1]

[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...

At some point, the pick and place machines, which can handle a limited number of different components at one time, have to be loaded with something. How does that work?

> sounding identical

In AI-generated entertainment, the names "Marcus", "Chloe", "Sterling", "Meridian", and "Apex" keep appearing. Those aren't common names, but LLMs seem to prefer them.

In my aerospace days, our buildings had both ionization and temperature detectors, plus water flow on the sprinklers. Any detection would sound loud buzzers locally, but two sensors, or water flow, had to trigger before everything powered off. That's common in big installations.

We once got an alarm because the heating element in a computer room air conditioner had turned on for the first time ever. It was defective and started to smoke. Smoke detection tripped, buzzers sounded, lights on a panel showed where the problem was, and alarms went off in the security control center. But this didn't trigger building evacuation or full power down. That took confirmation from a second sensor.

Someone ran into that computer room, saw smoke coming from the A/C unit, and pulled the big red power switch, installed by the safety people, on the air conditioner. Then we had time to shut down normally, the safety people came to clear the alarm, and the HVAC people came to fix the problem. I kept the burnt heating element on my desk for a few days for people to see.

This is typical for big industrial plants. Bad stuff will happen, and you have procedures for it.

Worldwide, gasoline-only powered cars are now less than half of worldwide sales.[1]

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/10/05/gas-cars-fall-below-50-percen...

So how is the part feeder setup automated? That's the big problem for short runs. Board making, solder paste, pick and place, reflow, and inspection were all automated already. The usual short run setup bottleneck is that someone has to put the tapes of parts into the feeders, then load the feeders onto the pick and place machine.

The video doesn't show how that happens. The robotic systems seem to be moving boards around, not parts. Yet that's the big manual part.

EHang keeps demoing their flying cars, without getting much attention. [1] They're scaled-up quadcopters. Their newest model transitions to winged flight to get better range. They've been testing versions with expensive solid-state batteries to increase the range.

Archer Aviation has been flying their electric air taxi over the SF bay this week.[2] Cost is about $5 million, though.

The big event for flying cars will be the 2028 Olympics in LA. VIPs will be shuttled around in Archer craft. That's about the right demo market - trips are short, but congestion on the ground is a problem.

[1] https://www.ehang.com/

[2] https://www.archer.com/news/archer-completes-historic-electr...

Right. The S.S. United States was built for winter North Atlantic conditions, with a power plant, hull, and watertight compartments more like a warship than a cruise ship. She could be converted to a troop carrier if necessary, something that had been done to big liners during WWII. Cruising speed 30MPH, top speed 44MPH. Great for getting across the Atlantic in 3 1/2 days. Not so great on fuel economy.

Cruise ships today look like hotels mounted on barges [1]. About half the speed. A refurbished SS United States was never going to compete in that market, and plans to do so were never funded.

[1] https://www.royalcaribbean.com/cruise-ships/icon-of-the-seas

> Zeppelins, though. Those, I will grant you, have gotten scarce.

Just saw a Zeppelin cruising over Woodside today. It's Sergey Brin's personal project, Pathfinder. It's a true Zeppelin, a rigid airship, not a blimp, and the world's largest air vehicle. [1] First flew in 2025, but, unlike the Airship Ventures craft we used to see giving tours over Silicon Valley, it's not flown often. It's normally parked in Hangar One at Moffet Field.

[1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/big-helium-airship-spott...

And yet Amazon has Alexa. They have a user base for a smart chatbot. What's Alexa going to run on for hard questions?

Full startup and shutdown of a coal plant can take days, but throttling down to about half power during low-load periods is normal. Power plants do this every day. Late at night, load decreases and plants throttle down. Every morning, between 0600 and 0900 local time, there's "morning load take-up" as load increases.

The big issue is what's called "ramp rate" - how fast can output power be increased or decreased? This tends to be around 1% to 3% of capacity per minute. See Figure B-2 in [1], which is a detailed discussion of how to improve your coal-fired power plant's ramp rate.

Natural gas plants have much higher ramp rates, and for batteries, it's under a second. Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, slowly, but since it's all capital cost, cutting output raises the price of the power.

[1] https://www.epri.com/research/products/3002012979

It looks like Energy Vault, the people with the tower crane and big stack of concrete blocks scheme, gave up on that. Energy Vault is now selling large battery systems that actually work.

Oh, Advanced Photonics Coalition, not American Power Conversion, the UPS people.

Most 3-letter acronyms have been used. If you're naming a new thing, check first. Use 4 or 5 letters if necessary to get uniqueness.

Not by this result. But it opens up a new area of problems to hammer on that might get somewhere.

That's true at the beginning of a new field. I'm noted for some advances in network architecture. But when I did that, everybody working on the Internet could meet in one large classroom. If you were reasonably good, you could make major progress.

Computer science used to be tiny. In the late 1970s, AI was a few tens of people at MIT, at Stanford, and at CMU, with a few smaller groups elsewhere. I met about half the greats of my generation, as did everyone else who was serious. There were almost no textbooks in the early 1970s. When Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms came out, it was great to finally see what had previously been folklore on mimeographed sheets in an actual book.

I was involved with Autodesk in its very early days. Even went to the founding meeting. The feeling was that PCs were finally getting big enough to be interesting. The founders were all mainframe programmers, and the people who came up from 4K memory on an 8088 had no idea how to organize a big program. But mainframe people did.

There was a vast emptyness in the product space ready to be filled. Products considered were a window manager ("AutoScreen"), a text editor (Kern Sibbald actually built that), a database, and a CAD program. None of those existed yet as successful products. CAD was picked because the productivity gain was so huge vs. paper and pencil drafting. At the time, the state of the art in drawing editing was drawing on mylar and using an electric eraser to delete. Then you ran the Mylar master through a big copier to make blueprints or whiteprints. A CAD system on a PC was a very easy sell.

So all you had to do was make it work. No need to overcome the noise level of a thousand similar "apps".

There are hard problems where the worst case may be exponentially hard, but the average case is much faster. Linear programming and the traveling salesman problem are like that. The faster approaches are considered "probabilistic solutions".

In cryptography, most of the problems believed to be exponentially hard, such as factoring, don't have proofs of an exponential lower bound. There's some risk of a breakthrough that makes those problems easier. A probabilistic solution would be good enough to break many cryptosystems.

I suspect that people at the cryptanalysis agencies worldwide are staying up late tonight, trying to figure out the impacts and risks of this new result.

This is a big deal. It's Reuters, not some blogger, saying this. The STAR50 index of AI and semiconductor stock in China is down 40%. P/E from the index dropped from around 250 to 100, which is still high. The investment community in China is concerned about other indices over-weighting tech stocks with high P/E ratios. Then index funds pick them up and funnel capital into them. AI stocks are 42% of China's market capitalization, so index funds are bent way out of shape.

Tesla's P/E is somewhere around 450, incidentally.

In a few years, assisted suicide will probably be offered as a feature of offboarding packages.

"Your work is done. Why wait?" - (to paraphrase George Eastman's suicide note.)

> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).

It's improved. When cell phones first came out, I kept getting run into by teenagers in stores and on sidewalks who couldn't both use their phone and navigate the world. That skill is now generally present and it's no longer a problem.

He didn't start getting it right until around episode 3, "The Reckless Newcomer".

> The vast majority of papers that I see with obvious LLM writing ticks are also frankly incomprehensible.

That's a classic problem with academic writing. There are too many papers where, after you finally figure out what they're trying to say, you realize they didn't have much to say. Relevant XKCD: [1]

What we seem to be getting from LLMs is more words per unit of useful knowledge. I wonder if academic papers are now bloated to allow for more ad slots. Many web sites with semi-academic content throw in an ad in the middle of the text every screen height or so. It's beneficial to the publisher if the author is wordy.

The same problem now plagues AI-generated videos, especially the pseudo-historical ones bloated to allow for more YouTube ad slots. These videos have a consistent structure. About 15% into the video, there will be something like "we have to go back to", followed by a large insert of filler material. Around the 50% mark, the relevant content starts. Around the 80% mark, the topic has been covered and there's some general blithering to conclude.

It's enough to make one long for the days of the neckbeard talking head with the big microphone.

[1] https://xkcd.com/451/

> This is something like handcrafted leather bag, quality assurance of parts like zips are okay but value lies in the craftsmanship rather than industrial production.

Nah. The value is in the branding.

There was an embarrassment a few years ago when it was discovered that one maker of fake Rolex watches was using the same movements as the branded version.