lambdaone

Should chips like the Jetson Orin module be regarded as dual-use technologies? Or have similarly powerful embedded processors now become widely enough available that it isn't worth making the distinction any more?

He's right, of course, for those people who already have a mathematical gift, but the problem with that is that Tao has never experienced not being a mathematical genius, and is no more capable of understanding what it's like to not be a genius as an ordinary person is capable of understanding what it's like to be one.

I found the use of <SYMBOLS LIKE THIS> throughout the text without explanation somewhat off-putting. Clearly some sort of technical usage is being suggested, but it doesn't seem to add anything to the text.

This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.

250 MB is exactly the sort of bloat you'd expect from this sort of daft web-browser-wrapper application, and Apple get it there. 1.2 GB, on the other hand, is 5x as much, and completely insane even when you start off with daft as your starting point.

I wonder if the same is also true of other high-spatial-complexity activities like rock climbing and professional dancing? (Exercise level would of course be a counfounding varable to be eliminated in these cases.)

This is a really weak argument. High-quality government websites exist, most notably the British gov.uk system. All this is beside the point - the current age verification proposals are wrong, and attempt to solve the wrong problem in ways that look very much as if they are primarily intended for surveillance rather than child protection.

'Child safe' internet access by default with a very low bar to let adults enable their devices to access the public internet is the solution. The UK's mobile providers already offer this by default - all you have to do is to call your network provider and ask for the restrictions to be turned off, and you have full internet access. Any legislation to create 'child safe' filtering should mandate that vendors provide ways for adults to turn the filtering off, easily, quickly and no questions asked - and that it should be viewed as the responsible moral default for adults to have full access to the world in order to be able to exercise their responsibilities as citizens, not some sort of option for degenerates. Whether you do this device side or network side is a technical detail.

The other sane way to do this - and what we should have done from the start, instead of providing kids with full access to the adult world by default - would be to have created 'child safe' devices to provide children with filtered access. Parents could then be in charge of whether they want their children to have that access and at what age. However, that boat has sailed.

Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.

However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.

And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.

I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.

This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.

Does this imply that Claude Opus was trained on Qwen output?

Windows XP and MacOS System 7 had pretty good looking GUIs. Since then, modern keyboard-and-mouse UIs have not really improved that much; it's mostly been just evolving and polishing styling. All the real innovation has been on touchscreen devices.

Algorthmic improvements in inference could make all that kit redundant very quickly - there are already moderately capable models that can be run on phones or laptops with specifications that are currently high-end but will be mainstream in another year or so.

This will lead to a superabundance of power-hungry compute power in the hyperscalers, and it's not entirely clear what can be done to consume it all and still run at a profit unless they manage to make ever greater gains for ever more compute-hungry models that cannot be run on consumer devices, unless they refresh their hardware at ever faster and more expensive rates.

The joke about data centers used to be that their core business was selling power at a loss; this may end up being true of the hyperscalers next.

I think Farage will probably win, but it will be a lot closer than he would like. While they will make no difference at all for his hard-core supporters, the financial allegations will be discouraging for at least some of his voters and will reduce his turnout, all serious anti-Farage tactical voters will vote for Binface as the most likely protest candidate, and a nontrivial number of voters will vote for Binface just because it would be funny to do so - Britain is the country of Boaty McBoatface, after all.[0]

According to the bookies, Binface is currently 8/1 to win (about 11% probability), and Farage 1/8 (about 89%), with the rest of the candidates nowhere. There's probably something Bayesian you could do to estimate the probability of various margins from that, but it's going to be uncomfortable for Farage no matter what - winning over Binface by an embarassingly small margin will not enhance his image, particularly if there is going to be another byelection called soon after with the financial issue continuing to be in the spotlight. The only way this works out favourably for Farage is if he scores a crushing victory over Binface with an increased voter share relative to his previous election result, and I think the odds of that are slim.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Nam...

This is a vastly superior, earlier, and more detailed article compared to the one being discussed here [0], and should replace it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888331

That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.

I'm working on improving my PCB synthesis system; given a KiCad schematic and some extra metadata it can currently lay out and route an entire double-sided PCB with about 50 components in 4 minutes without any human intervention.

I wrote it because I was too lazy to learn how to use KiCad's layout features properly, and thought 'how hard can it be?'. Several months later, I had this.

It's not intended to compete with Altium etc. but it certainly produces compact, valid and fully design-rule-compliant boards with much less work that doing it myself or using one of the low-cost remote labour platforms.

It uses constraint logic programming to solve the hard parts of the problem. Hierarchical decomposition of the circuit design helps reduce combinatorial explosion, which was a show-stopper for early versions of the system. Current indications are that I may be able to scale it further in the longer term to deal with more complex design scenarios and larger boards, without hitting the exponential cliff.

It's the 10% chance they are worried about. Reform is very much the Farage party, and him losing to a bin in their heartland would be catastrophic; he would go from being the presumptive next Prime Minister to a national joke.

Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.

Even if Farage wins, but with a reduced majority, in an election where the alternatives are fringe or novelty candidates, it will be hard for his dignity to recover.

To be fair, we really don't know what counts as smart business attire on Sigma IX.

His birth name, and I believe still his legal name, is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But he is "commonly known as" Boris Johnson, so that's what can go on the ballot paper, although his full name must still go on the registration documents. Count Binface is in the same situation.

Absolutely. For him the bloat is not a problem; it's a negative externality.

If only there was some way that countries could make international agreements on things...

IP-only != fibre. Try reading my comment above in its entirety. You can also read this for further enlightenment about SOGEA:

https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea...

I wish I had a link for the other thing, but it was deep inside some Openreach site that Google don't seem to have access to.

No, it's still sitting on my machine. It was just a quick-and-dirty shim on top of an LLM service, and not worth maintaining. And it ate tokens at an amazing rate updating every character's point of view.

Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-to-the-exchange.

They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.

It's half right (the worst sort of right) digital data is carried over ADSL/VDSL as OFDM analog waveforms, albeit with frequencies well above the audio range.

Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.

This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.

Even the bus route articles seem to have drawn sufficient reliable-sources attention to merit them being kept. The policy is clear and definitive.

For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything conscious being involved (unless you believe in retrocausality or the cosmic conspiracy theory, or in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas and also quite fun to contemplate).

I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain

[citation needed]

What makes this most interesting from my point of view is that this is a specific enough theory that it might be amenable to experimental investigation.