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dpe82

2,035 karma · joined January 30, 2011

Tokens->atoms @ New Metal (newmetal.ai)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpemmons

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dpe82··on Google cleared 300 hectares of Finnish forest
I agree; but that's also not a very useful observation. Modern society depends on industry of all types, and national independence depends on at least some of it being local. We can try to make it cleaner, and to some degree we can choose which types to implement. But we do not have the option to just wish it all away.

It would be very nice if we could have our cake and eat it too.

dpe82··on Google cleared 300 hectares of Finnish forest
Some perspective is important, I think.

This is unpopular in the current climate of hysteria, but it's worth reminding ourselves: data centers are probably one of the least polluting industrial sites imaginable. That's not to say it's nothing, but contrast it with, say, a refinery. Or mineral processing. Or basically any other type of industrial activity on which modern civilization relies.

They hum. That's about it.

dpe82··on Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years
"playdates" is in itself a tell. That didn't used to be a thing. Kids would just... go out and find their friends and play. No parental scheduling or coordination required.
dpe82··on Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke
Effectively nobody considering buying into the IPO cares about Anthropic's source control system. They could be passing around floppy disks and so long as they were still shipping nobody would care.
dpe82··on AlphaNIST
A shout-out in the paper, perhaps? But co-opting their naming convention for unearned publicity isn't cool.
dpe82··on Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics
Some of us have been working on precisely that for a while; preparing for when the models are ready. And they're getting close!
dpe82··on Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study
A simple thing would be: those areas can no longer produce lumber. So what should have been a renewable resource was depleted after a single use.
dpe82··on T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97°F
The slop generator's gotchu: https://suno.com/s/gT2YhaQyNdlkzgeU
dpe82··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
Those are not OpenAI's concerns - they just need to scare NVidia enough to lower their prices more than they'd otherwise want.
dpe82··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
NVidia has enormous operating margins, so a competitive solution doesn't have to match or beat NVidia's scale efficiencies; it just has to beat delivered cost.

One objective of the project might be simply to provide credible negotiating leverage when dealing with existing suppliers like NVidia. You don't have to deploy at scale for that to work, but you do have to look like you could if pushed hard enough.

dpe82··on The Library of Ashurbanipal (2025)
> There are simply too few historians trained to read them to be able to cope with the supply.

Surely this is something AI tools will (eventually?) be able to help with?

dpe82··on Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
> even the MON navaids are having maintenance issues resulting in outages

Which is exactly why we previously had such a dense network: to provide redundancy in the face of inevitable outages.

dpe82··on Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
Another thing to add to all this is FAA has been steadily removing from service non-GPS navigation aids.
dpe82··on Claude Opus 5
`claude update`
dpe82··on Schema Harness Achieves ~99% on Arc‑AGI‑3 Public
Humans (exhibiting "general intelligence") are tool builders; virtually all our capabilities stem from our ability to create and use tools - often extremely specialized to a task. Why would an artificial general intelligence be any different?
dpe82··on $65K to work at Anthropic? Debate ensues amid IPO wave
Seems roughly in line with UCSF's entry-level post-doc compensation: https://postdocs.ucsf.edu/pay-and-benefits

That too, of course, is too low to live comfortably on your own in SF.

dpe82··on The last Romans are still around
After 2000 years everything mixes together at least somewhat so trying to draw hard lines is an exercise in pointless semantics, but it's worth acknowledging that as a system, common law is pretty distinct from the Roman tradition of civil law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
dpe82··on The last Romans are still around
> *English Common Law* has entered the chat
dpe82··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted.

I've used GPT-5.5 and Opus both for FPGA design with good results. We built a lot of tooling around it to help the models, but even without that they're definitely capable of designing digital logic.

dpe82··on SpaceX launches $25B notes offering, source says
They won't all be fulfilled. I would imagine this is part of the price-discovery process.
dpe82··on Dallas Fed: 30% of housing cost increase driven by unauthorized immigration [pdf]
Seems like a fairly neutral term to me.
dpe82··on US Air Force B-52 bomber crashes after takeoff, Edwards Air Force Base says
Nit: at some point you start getting metal fatigue issues (see Aloha Airlines Flight 243) but in general yes: fuel efficiency and fleet standardization.

Also airliners usually just become cargo planes for quite a long time before retirement. Eg. there's a bunch of DC-3s still being commercially operated. Jet engine noise regs killed a bunch of early jets, but older prop aircraft are still going strong.

dpe82··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
That wouldn't stop their development and use in the rest of the world...
dpe82··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
Why would foreign (relative to the US) models suddenly sit still? There's enormous incentive to improve; surely they'll be able to figure out how just like their American counterparts?

We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.

dpe82··on There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
As we learned with export restrictions on crypto in the 90s, that disadvantage will be short-lived and backfire in the long-run.
dpe82··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
Also known as: supply and demand.
dpe82··on Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
And there were a bunch of WYSIWYG editors in the mid-late 90s. It seems like everyone had one, including Netscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
dpe82··on Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality
Oh don't worry, the enforcement is extremely selective.
dpe82··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
Thinking about it as a system:

If every university were subject to similar constraints, the average "quality" of research proposals would go down (everybody would have less time to spend on it) but since the pool of research dollars is assumed constant everyone would still get roughly their same slice - just with less overhead.

dpe82··on Cisco Workforce Reductions
The press release states it clearly.
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