Animats

> One of my favorite New Criticism corollaries is that an author, after a work has been published, is not in a privileged position from which to speak on its meaning.

That's a line which was more appropriate in a era before the majority of novels had sequels. Now we read series where the plot extends across multiple books. Events in earlier books set up situations to be resolved in later books.

For a recent controversy in this area, ask Google "Is Dumbledore gay?"

It's partly a thickness problem. Sockets add height to boards.

Besides, since RAM isn't getting cheaper for a while, this isn't a big issue now.

> I opened this with an open mind, but it felt dead and AI immediately to me.

Episode 1 is. He's getting better at this. By episode 3, the characters have come alive and the scenery is really good.

Now go watch "Kono Express". Disney laid off an animator from the Star Wars factory, and he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself. With Unreal Engine and AI tools, of course.

It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.

Yes. But you have to go beyond page one of Google results because there is so much slop, human and otherwise. See [1] for a technical overview. See page 14 of [2] for the strategic and political aspects of who controlled what in a crisis. "Cheget No. 1 (the Soviet premier's portable terminal) had priority status: its owner could enact heightened level of alert and, after the early warning system registered the launch of U.S. nuclear weapons, give launch order (transmit codes unblocking the launch command)." That's the key point. The premier of the USSR did not have personal first strike authority.

Putin, however, has said that he now does. Trump has first-strike authority too.

The definitive book on this seems to be "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces"[3], an English translation from MIT Press of a Soviet-era document. That's what the good sources cite.

[1] https://subhranil.com/the-dead-hand-system-a-technical-analy...

[2] https://npolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Controlling_S...

[3] https://search.worldcat.org/title/51969872

> The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.

Perimetr? That's misunderstood. The idea behind Perimetr was that the Premier of the USSR did not have first-strike authority. Only the Politburo did. After they got rid of Stalin, the later governments of the USSR were very wary of a leader with too much power. Further down, control was divided between the KGB, which controlled the warheads, and the Strategic Rocket Forces, which controlled the launchers.

The most the Premier could do on his own was enable Perimetr. If it detected actual nuclear explosions and could not communicate with any of the top command bunkers, it would, after a delay of hours, release the arming codes for ICBMs to lower levels of authority. So it only worked for a second strike where a first strike had taken out most of the leadership. That was more restrictive than the US system.

Today, both Putin and Trump have first strike authority. Sleep well.

That's an interesting point. Vending machines never became a big deal outside of Japan. Fast food was automated in 1964, with AMFare [1], but that was never deployed beyond one prototype.

Whether general purpose robots will change this is interesting. It looks like they're going to cost about as much as a car. (There are at least 18 makers of humanoid robots. The hardware situation looks good.) That's cheaper than humans. There are already companies that set up industrial robots and charge for them by the working hour, with all maintenance and setup included.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY

Over on the entertainment side, video is getting really good. Yes, there's a huge amount of AI slop, but the good stuff is quite good.

- Kono Express. [1] Disney laid off an character animator from the Star Wars factory. The animator decided to see what was possible with the best modern tools. He's using both AI tools and Unreal Engine. There are six episodes now, and each one is a bit better than the last, as he gets a handle on the technology. The first episode looks like generic sci-fi stuff, at good quality but not yet perfect. By episode three, he has this nailed. It keeps getting better. Episode six [2] is a delight. He's now almost up to current Hollywood quality. One person, turning out half an hour of content every few weeks. Who needs Disney any more?

- Asian vertical dramas. 17,000 episodes per day. Apparently 55% of China's AI capacity is cranking these out. Search for "asian drama creation tools". Amusingly, Google and Bing have completely different tool lists. These are all software as a service products, with accounts and token charges. Currently, visuals are quite good, with some notable errors. Complex patterns on clothing don't stay consistent, for example. Continuity errors remain common. Automatically generated audio is currently terrible, at least in the English translations. Plots are so cliche that it's clear people are re-using the same prompts. "Heiress girl returns from countryside" is very popular. Here's a recent drama, about startup working hours.[3] The plot is silly but the visuals are OK.

- There's starting to be a thing for turning out movies based on old SF novels. So far, these seem unauthorized by the original author, but that will change. In time, every good book will have its movie.

The good stuff in this space is getting to be better than the Marvel Overexpanded Universe.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XklUIGp6jH0

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7b9xNEkhlc

The real job losses are probably in commercial art. If you're making an illustration for an ad, that's almost certainly automated now. Looking at when the decline started, it's about when Stable Diffusion got going.

Some of this stuff is pre-AI, Photoshop smart tools stuff. Especially clothing ads. Nobody has a live model pose with each item color any more. Or even each item. (I used to know actress/model/waitress types in LA who did that. Grind job: "OK, the blue sweater is next, and hurry it up, we have 50 to do before lunch". But it paid OK.)

> But internally we are using it for so many things, for example we have brought 3rd party analytics tools in-house (cost reduction and ownership over our data) by writing our own internal tools, we have setup custom systems to give ourselves better visibility over the business to try catch issues earlier, we use it to produce internal reports, etc.

How much of that is automation of "bullshit jobs"?

Yeah, Colossus and the Crab sucks.

We're not seeing full automation for things that ought to be automatable now. Customer service chatbots still aren't very good. Salesforce ought to be taking over entire marketing operations, not just supporting sales but replacing it. The medical office side of insurance ought to be automatic now. The pick and place side of warehouse operations should be robotic. Shelf restocking in stores ought to be robotic. All of those things have been demoed, but didn't go to production.

That's Air Hollywood's B-747 set.[1] They have other aircraft sets, an air terminal set, and supporting props, such as uniforms, beverage carts, and such.

[1] https://airhollywood.com/aviation-sets/wide-body-747/

I thought everyone in AI, and most HN readers, had seen "Colossus - The Forbin Project" by now.

If you haven't, here it is: [1]

Modern trailer: [2]

Spoiler: At the end, Colossus personally addresses Forbin, and tells him that the world, freed from war, will create a new "human millennium" that will raise humankind to new heights, but only under its absolute rule. Colossus informs Forbin that "freedom is an illusion", it was better for all that he dominated humanity than humans dominating humans, and that "in time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love". Forbin defiantly responds "Never!"

And that's it. Colossus is in charge.

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

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0bpRo6V1Xg

The most successful push on spelling was when the Chicago Tribune switched to simplified spelling in the 1940s through the 1960s.[1] They started with about 40 words, and gradually expanded. But after McCormick died, the company gave up, retaining only "tho" for "though". That ended in 1975.[2]

[1] https://www.spellingsociety.org/uploaded_media/tribune-media...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/30/archives/thru-is-through-...

Give it a few years for some successes. The AI-run store in San Francisco isn't doing very well.

> LLMs are not the machines I am referring to, machine sentience, if achieved, will require a "state" and the ability to analyze, act on, and update it. LLMs are a small piece of what that machinery could look like but they are not really complex enough to get where we want to go on their own.

Yes. Which is why there are "agentic" systems where LLMs can talk to each other and to various Internet assets. They can also keep state of their own.

The next step is multi-agent systems which self-organize into something that looks rather like a company. Those are the ones that run all night, expensively, and prove hard theorems or find bugs in major software.

> I think somewhat of the opposite will actually occur. LLMs won’t formally verify LLM generated imperative style code.

This result is exactly the opposite. They're verifying at the machine code level, which is totally imperative.

That's a brutal way to do verification, at the machine code level. But it's worth it in today's threat environment.

This is a marketing pitch. The people behind this article are selling a "Certificate of Embodied Production".

People have been bitching about this since the player piano. In modern popular music, is it a consequence of electronic dance music? That tends to be tightly synchronized, since it comes from clocked devices.

Bookkeeping normally computes interest based on some accounting period - days, weeks, months, or quarters. It's a sum of discrete charges, not an integral. It was usually monthly in the paper and pencil era; today it is usually daily. Look up "double declining balance" and "Rule of 73".

Financial calculators do integrate, though. "Present value" is computed by integration.

Inefficient windmills are older than calculus. Efficient windmills need aerodynamic theory to calculate a good blade design. It's quite difficult to do that. It took several decades to scale up windmills.

(A small wind turbine is like a propeller in reverse. A large wind turbine is not, because wind speed varies across the blade circle enough that those stresses dominate the design. It took decades to debug this, and make large wind turbines stable under high winds.)

That's a neologism. But if it made it into the current Merriam-Webster, it won.

It's not like anybody really thinks Webster's Second International (1937) is definitive any more.

Hm. One example from the article:

    match map.get_mut(&key) {
    //    --- first mutable borrow occurs here
        Some(value) => value,
        None => {
            map.insert(key, V::default());
            //  ^~~~~~ error[E0499]: cannot borrow `*map` as mutable more than once at a time
            map.get_mut(&key).unwrap()
        }
    }

That's a limitation of the current Rust borrow checker. The problem is that the argument of match is never used again on the None path, which should end the range of the borrow before the None branch starts. But, currently, it doesn't. The range of the borrow is too closely tied to scope.

This is supposed to be fixed with the Polonius borrow checker. It doesn't require a new language, just something that ends the lifetime of a borrow at the last use.

Wasn't this covered yesterday with the article about the Vale language? It seems related.

Regarding cycles, that looks interesting. GhostCell dates from 2021 but got stuck at "alpha quality". The usual approach to cycles in Rust, or at least backlinks, involves Rc, RefCell, and Weak. Forward links are strong, back links are weak.

I've suggested creating OwnerRc, which is like Rc but not cloneable. That's a single owner Rc. If you drop an OwnerRc, it panics if there are any outstanding weak links. This is useful because you no longer have to check when upgrading a Weak - it always works.

So these are fixable language problems without the need for a new language and new terminology.

Such as Wikipedia. "Like" excludes the named item. When the named item is the only important one, this matters.

> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.

"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.

People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.

> I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus.

You need calculus to design a windmill or an auto engine or an electric motor beyond the "just sort of works" level. Most of analog electrical engineering is defined by calculus. Althogh, yes, you can get LTSPICE to do most of that for you.

Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge. Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath.

Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.

(But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area. I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)

Nice. These missions that tell us the basics about objects in the Solar System are more useful than, say, re-visiting the moon or Mars.

Venus and Europa could use some attention. Anything underway?

This is just the intro. If you keep on with the following articles, they're about visual effects for stacked notification popups. They have good visuals, but if you have a stack of open notifications, something is wrong. If you have enough that you need a stack, users are going to want some way to put them in bins, order them, and generally manage them as a to-do list, like emails. At that point, they're not notifications, they're incoming messages.

No more than N% of the time should a notification be pending. Probably under 5%. Otherwise a notification is the wrong tool for the job. You need an inbox.