RachelF

The fact is there is BullSh_t and hype on both sides.

Both Zitron and AI execs have good points, but both are trying to sell you something. The murky truth lies between the two extremes.

IMHO, having Zitron around is a counter to the AI leaders. Is he the best? No. Is he the loudest? Yes.

Dan Ariely's fraud is pretty widespread.

He sold his research to an insurance company, who should have known better: https://www.lemonade.com/blog/oh-behave/

Looks good. However, an RF question: Both CC1314 and LR2021 are sub 1GHz components, are you not working outside their spec at 1.090GHz?

This thing has been in the wild since 2024, so it had a good run.

It looks pretty bespoke, so there are likely other variants.

Also targeting the anti-virus executable is a smart way to hide. I don't think this backdoor was cheap to develop.

Yes, this is ironic - it was the tinkerers using CUDA on cheap graphics cards that made Nvidia stuff useful in constrained academic environments.

True about Intel and ECC, but AMD now does similar things, even with their consumer CPUs and chipsets.

These three companies now make very sure that consumer products can never canibalize those juicy data center profits - so they make sure to limit what the consumer segment can do.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models.

Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.

I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

Linus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with'

His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.

One more trend I'd like to reverse is the always on cellular data connection, reporting back to the car manufacturer where you are and how you are driving.

Remember it was MIT that dobbed him in.

MIT then helped the criminal prosecution even after JSTOR settled with him.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case...

Don't give them ideas!

True, I have to agree with you. The AI giants might be investing a huge amount of money in generation 1 technology. There might be a much better way to do it just around the corner. They might know this and thus the hurry to IPO.

A rough analogy would be if the first generation of ISP's spent billions on dial-up exchanges, when fibre could be invented next year.

I have a bad feeling about this.

US companies have spent hundreds of billions on their models, and they are not much better than the cheaper open Chinese models.

Perhaps they can out-compete them. If not there will be increasing calls to limit access to open models on the grounds of "safety".

Basically, if you can't beat 'em, ban 'em.

To me, the amazing thing is that we now have local models that rival the reasoning of high end models from about a year ago.

I hope this trend continues.

So true. The levels of indirection from a pointer to an actual DRAM chip address are insane.

Then there's the electrical bus: DDR5 runs so fast it need channel characterisation (sorta like the old model dial up sounds) on the lines between the controller and the DRAM. No more 5V and 0V for TTL signals there.

Try Kagi translate to LinkedIn

https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=linkedin

To me the most interesting thing here is that AI did it, albeit with very good prompting.

Claude AI just created something in a few hours, perhaps, that teams of intelligent developers at the time struggled to do in years of effort.

Many. They did an overly generous self examination a few weeks ago.

Generally, they are a trailing indicator, like someone appearing on the Forbes millionaire under 30 list (Theranos, FTX). However, they are not always wrong.

Think of Economist writers as intelligent interns - people who couldn't make it in the world of finance, and with a particular ideological bent imposed on them by their editors.

It is amazing how war accelerates technology development. Radar and the Manhattan project are cases in point, probably squashing 20 years of normal research into 3. Drones in Ukraine are a contemporary example.

However, when the war is over, things stagnate: The UK bombed the Falklands in 1982 with a radar which was essentially an upgraded wartime H2S/H2X set.

>As soon as things get in range for motivated amateurs, progress skyrockets.

So true. The reverse is also true - when greedy companies overprice their initial release so that it is out of range of the enthusiastic hobbyist they stall progress and adoption.

This is true for hardware (eg failed Intel Optane, Knights Bridge) and software that does not have a cheap or free basic plan.

The BBC "Secret War" series and RV Jones' books are superb. I would recommend also reading his "Reflections on Intelligence" - it was written later and is slightly more philosophical. By that time Jones had been burned by bureaucrats - he compares his small efficient wartime office to the post-war bloat.

The BBC series is really good. They don't make documentaries like that anymore. The "Still Secret" episode on Enigma is easily the best coverage of how the system worked, was cracked and the organisation behind it. There is also an accompanying book, which has many more details.

>I think The "Battle of the Beams" is one development that gave us the basis for what we use so much now in general aviation.

Actually it started the other way around. The beams were based on pre-war blind landing Lorentz system.

They should not call it "age verification" - it is actually identity verification.

Flowers had to begin building Colossus out of his own pocket. The British government eventually repaid him, but not in full.

Dolby was just pre-emphasis of the higher frequencies before they were written to the tape.

It will sound the same with 8 bits. 8bit quantization will give you 48dB dynamic range (best case). Call it 36dB practical, around the same as an average cassette tape.

The original timedemo was how fast Sopwith game from 1984 crashed the plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)

Benchmarks are like the SP500 index or IQ measurements: They distil multiple variables into one number. In doing so you lose details, but do get a useful measure.

Yes, they are imperfect, but they do broadly measure how fast a processor is, and can be used for comparison.

Yes, Australia destroys his whole argument. They went the Swiss way with a single provider (NBN).

But then broke it badly when a major lobbyist (Rupert Murdoch) wanted to kill streaming competition for as long as possible.

Yes, at the time the Commodore drive was jokingly referred to as "the Cadillac of disk drives" - long and slow.

Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.

Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.

No, not if it involves a web browser. Most web sites today will not work on a 2012 web browser.

The PC stopped existing in isolation, for most useful tasks now, it needs an Internet connection.

In some way it is short-sited, as radio is a good backup medium for global communications in case the entire Internet ever goes down.

Vacuum tubes also aren't vulnerable to nuclear weapon electro-magnetic pulses.

However, other than ham radio enthusiasts I guess no one listens to analogue radio anymore.