azornathogron

Digital cameras made photography more accessible to people though, even if they didn't improve it (in an artistic sense) directly.

Being able to take pictures at effectively zero marginal cost, and being able to see them instantly, both make it much easier to get into the hobby.

What indications do you see of significant and effective societal pushback?

I would love to believe this but I don't see it yet. I see a lot of anger in some circles, but I also see the machine marching on as normal.

LWN.net doesn't exclusively cover Linux kernel issues. From the FAQ,

What is this LWN thing?

LWN.net aims to be the premier news and information source for the free software community. We provide comprehensive coverage of development, legal, commercial, and security issues.

https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn

The reason that total atmospheric CO2 is increasing is because the rate that it's being added is a lot higher than the rate that it is reabsorbed by the various natural carbon sinks (including plants).

Only about 10% is reabsorbed quickly [1], the rest stays for hundreds or thousands of years. That may not be "trapped" in a pedantic sense, but it's pretty close.

[1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carb...

Plastic straws are definitely a common form of beach trash, but they were never the "vast majority" of it. Not by item count, and certainly not by mass. They do rank in the top 10, but not at the top.

Ocean Conservancy has annual reports that include statistics from trash cleanup projects. The 2026 report[1] has a "global top items collected" list that covers 1986 to 2026; straws (& stirrers) are 5th at about 16 million items collected. Drinks bottles are number 3 at nearly 27 million. Cigarette butts are top (65 million)

Looking back at the report from the year 2000[2] as a comparison (this one lists numbers just for the year 2000 cleanup projects), straws are number 10 out of 12, cigarettes are still top, various other plastic items (not all of which are classified) are above straws.

[1] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026... [2] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2000...

Pilots can do that because they go through a ton of training and they deliberately do things to maintain their manual flying skills, including regularly taking manual control outside emergencies when the autopilot could fly perfectly well. And when a pilot takes control "for practice" there's no reduction in productivity for the airline compared to if the pilot is sitting in the seat with the autopilot engaged.

How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set? What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?

Is "token" a directly perceivable unit for the LLM? If you ask it "how many tokens are in this sentence?" can it count them (again, not guessing or making a tool call)?

I've never tried it and it might take some thought and effort to conduct an experiment to find out properly, but I would be interested in the answer.

Which are you referring to as the primary comparison?

If I'm understanding the book's structure correctly, the comparison at the end of Part 1 (chapter 18 "Can we live on renewables?") is based on estimating existing demand. Deployment of heat pumps in Britain even today is woefully low, and when the book was written it was no doubt even lower, so of course it wouldn't make sense to include heat pumps as a significant factor when comparing actual demand when the book was written with potential supply.

Chapter 27 "Five energy plans for Britain" discusses large scale ways to make the energy budget "work", and those hypothetical comparisons do include use of heat-pumps. Maybe those numbers are inaccurate and a better hypothetical could be produced today, but I would first put that down to the difficulty of forecasting the future.

It's been a long time since I read the book fully though. Did I miss something?

Heat pumps, and their efficiency (getting more than X Joules of heating for X Joules of electricity) are discussed in chapter 21 Smarter Heating, see for example the diagram and discussion on page 150: https://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_150.shtml

I imagine the economics (and perhaps technical improvements) of some things may have changed more than the book could forecast. But heat pumps were definitely understood by the author.

Page and Brin together hold over 50% of voting shares, even though their economic share is lower as you suggest. Different share classes.

https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-alphabet/

Going to the doctor for expert advice is often inconvenient, or time consuming, or expensive, or stressful. I think a lot of people want, and seek out, information and advice based on their symptoms, as a first step before a possible doctor's visit. Before LLMs, WebMD (and excessive self-diagnosis based on WebMD) was a meme for a while.

So with regard to LLMs, for me the question is not purely "how often does it get it right?" the question is "how does it compare to the sources and self-diagnosis methods people use otherwise?"

Of course, I agree people should be careful with any form of self-diagnosis or LLM-diagnosis.

The way this used to be handled is to sell new versions.

Oh, interesting. That does make sense.

Sounds a bit like imitone https://imitone.com/ (I have no affiliation)

FYI, Imitone has a patent, I don't know what it covers or claims though.

I don't know anything about it, but I find this interesting, perhaps slightly surprising. It doesn't suprise me that it would fade, but, that being a presumably known problem, do the color checkers not have a good cover/case for storage? (something foil backed or similar to really block out the light)? Or do they even fade quickly just from being taken out briefly for use?

Do Zuck or Altman have charisma?

(Jobs I'll give you.)

Neither Mythos nor Gemini are open-weight models (right?) so I'm not sure what model(s) this is actually referring to.

> chronyism (not sure of that spelling)

Since you mentioned you weren't sure: it's "cronyism", no 'h'.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cronyism

This is despite having an etymology that - at least according to etymonline - does come from greek "khronos"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/cronyism

Yes.

From the release notes:

2002-06-17 (2.5.0), "Parse (but do not implement) foreign keys."

At one point there was also a tool which would generate trigger rules to enforce foreign key constraints. (2008 Oct 15 (3.6.4), Added the source code and documentation for the genfkey program for automatically generating triggers to enforce foreign key constraints)

Armadillo Aerospace was Carmack's own rocket company.

And tbh I'm not sure it was ever a plausible contender for commercial success, more like Carmack wanted to play with rockets. But that might be unfair; I would happily accept a correction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace

Surely satellite collision avoidance is not based on visual checks?

I would assume it's a combination of globally shared known trajectories plus radar tracking stations.

They store energy but there's a limit to how quickly you can get that energy out, hence a limit to power. And I suppose you can kinda talk about them "storing power" in the sense that power is what you might be interested in getting out of them.

At least, that's my understanding of it.

What makes it "production grade"? How are you defining that?

Taxis (and Uber etc) also take up space on the road when they only have their driver and no fare paying passenger on board, so I don't see that a Waymo is any worse than that.

Both human-driven and robo-driven taxis are financially incentivised to spend as much time as possible carrying fare paying passengers and as little as possible driving empty to pick someone up.

Anyway, I agree that walking, cycling, and public transit, are all IMHO preferable to any form of taxi.

In type system theory I think what you're looking for is "effect systems".

You make the type system statically encode categories of side-effects, so you can tell from the type of a function whether it is pure computation, or if not what other things it might do. Exactly what categories of side-effect are visible this way depends on the type system; some are more expressive than others.

But it means when you use a hash function you can know that it's, eg, only reading memory you gave it access to and doing some pure computation on it.

You might be referring to a different period, but I'll note that the anti-war protests in early 2003 (immediately before the invasion of Iraq) were quite literally record breaking.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040904214302/http://www.guinne...

It may have in the future. Crubit is one effort in this direction: https://crubit.rs/

For one of my projects my server needs a private key, and it reads this from a file descriptor on startup and then closes the fd. The fd is set up by the systemd unit, which is also configured to restrict filesystem access for the server. So the server reads a key from a file that is never visible in its mount namespace.

I don't doubt you're correct about the incentives, but one point seems amiss...

> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.

You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?

If you scroll down slightly you get a low contrast button "○ PREFER STILLNESS? READ AS PLAIN TEXT →", which takes you to a plain text version with a rather patronising introduction that says "You chose the quiet version. No animations. No counters ticking up. Just words. That's a valid choice."

Edit: to be just slightly nicer about it: having a plain text version is great, that's a really good thing. But the "that's a valid choice" paragraph is unnecessary and just distracts from your actual article. If I pick the plain-text version it's because I want to just get straight to the point (other people may have other reasons), and I certainly don't need your validation.