lambdaone

My job, like I imagine the jobs of most people here, involves mostly abstract symbol manipulation, with the occasional meeting. When I'm not working, I do physical things; climbing, hiking, and making and fixing things with my hands. I derive deep satisfaction from all of them.

Sure, I might take three months to make something I could have bought for $1000, but price is not the point. The thing I made is a unique reflection of my own self, and the experience of making it has value that no money could ever buy.

XKCD saw this coming a long way off: https://xkcd.com/538/

See also https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks/blob/maste... , with examples dating all the way back to 2014.

I've always thought that company names like "Entrust" are hostages to fortune, daring the Fates to intervene. In this case the Fates are the browser vendors.

There's now also the problem of competing with a free alternative that increasingly almost everyone knows about.

If you read to the end (or indeed just scroll down to the last few paragraphs) the answer is "almost certainly yes, but only if we have the will (and budget) to do so".

What puts fusion development in peril is the rapid improvement of known renewable technologies, and the likelihood that 100% renewables is possible in the near future using only those technologies at lower cost.

Well, solar concentrators can in (traditional physics-based) theory increase solar cell efficiency substantially: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3727/13/5/01... . Whether that's cost-effective is a different matter.

But that's not got anything to do with Brilliant Light's claims, which so far do not stand up to scrutiny.

Their lack of progress in producing power from their system suggests otherwise. Meanwhile the standard quantum mechanical model of matter goes on making correct, testable predictions. Including in fusion experiments.

There's absolutely no reason to believe that fusion power is impossible. It being very, very difficult and very, very expensive to reach a practical system is the problem.

But you're right about better alternatives. Right now that alterative is a combination of solar, wind, hydro and storage, with perhaps a bit of more exotic systems (wave power? solar towers?) in the mix.

That's certainly a hard limit for a cell with a single P-N junction. However, with a bit of ingenuity, we can do much better than that; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...

Fascinating watching Microsoft morphing from intellectual property absolutism to this. "What's mine is mine, what's yours is also mine."

It's not a foregone conclusion. We have managed to ban chemical weapons. laser blinding weapons and biological weapons on a global scale. If there was sufficient will to do so, we could do this for autonomous weapons as well.

The argument that "bad people will do X", so we must do X to them first, is a race to the bottom.

This article is, however, very revealing about what Palantir wants to happen, without ever mentioning the profit motive.

Remember that the passenger cars are not the only thing that can scale; if you can automate the mapping and data preparation part of the process sufficiently, you may even be able to reduce it to mostly a matter of driving a few sensor cars around for a few weeks; maybe even cars that are adapted versions of your normal taxi vehicles, but with a human driver behind the wheel while you are mapping.

I would imagine that while Waymo's mapping efforts have been very human effort-intensive so far, they will be looking at developing this automatic map-making capability as a high priority for rolling out new cities. Scaling the rate of expansion is then mostly a matter of throwing hardware and compute at the problem.

NTP is a ubiquitous network service that runs directly exposed to the Internet, and that seems to me like a good thing to harden. Making NTP more secure does not stop anyone else from working on any other project.

The U.S. seems to be able to maintain a quite impressive railroad system for freight purposes, in what is still the largest rail transport network of any country in the world. Passenger transport withered away as long-distance road travel and cheap air flights out-competed it. With sufficient ingenuity and capital expenditure, I wonder if perhaps it could be revived?

Perhaps this could be solved by having the planes run at ground level, using some sort of guideway, and using either the guideway itself or overhead wires to transmit the power by direct contact?

Their product search is... interesting. I used to think that it was programmed by idiots, and wondered how Amazon, with the ability to hire all the expertise in the world, couldn't do better. Then I realised its function is not to give you what you are looking for, it's to maximize Amazon's profits, which it clearly does fantastically well. I would imagine that a lot of heavy-duty machine learning goes into Amazon's product search to make this happen.

The same thing will likely be true of raw files, as we get better (and probably machine-learning based) algorithms for decoding those into standard image formats. I wonder what fraction of projects currently preserve their raw files?

Can you quantify your claim, or provide sources to back it up, or are you just guessing? I'm not saying your claim is necessarily wrong -- it would actually be very interesting if true -- but I think the burden of proof lies on you to provide evidence for this.

It is, however, in principle possible to prove that a processor implements the spec and only the spec; seach for "formal verification risc v" to find out more.

Of course if someone can sneak a backdoor into the spec, all bets are off.

At this point, if you are in the graphic design area, Adobe basically own you. There is really nothing that will substitute for Photoshop without a massive drop in productivity.

GIMP is better that it was, but not yet good enough to replace Photoshop in the same way that Blender replaces Maya etc; perhaps this will drive support for GIMP to get better, but I'm not optimistic.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points for a thorough treatment of this topic, with citations to the published literature.

That sounds really interesting, but web searching mostly brings up very old research. Do you have a link for any of the up-to-date work on automating the base?

I see the page has been vandalized; here is a link to the original:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStorie...

Given that all Wikipedia editors have explicitly consented to their content being released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License, they don't get a choice about their content being used for any purpose.

Redistribution of content is an entirely different matter, and the legal status of copyrighted material in relation to LLM training is an open issue that is currently the subject of litigation.

I think the best analogy here might be WHATWG and HTML5. Instead of creating an entire new and expanded 'second system' (as the W3C was trying to do with XHTML), the existing major players in that field created something that was a much more strictly defined standard that was carefully to be forwards and backwards compatible with the existing mess, with well-defined behaviour for non-conformant content, and then started building on that new standard.

The big players in email are now in the same situation as the big browser vendors. If they defined a strict subset of the existing body of de-facto email standards, critically with well-defined behaviour for non-conformant content, and then blessed that as email 2.0, they would then have something well-defined and workable to build on.

This might include mandating a restricted subset of HTML5 for HTML content, a canonical transformation of that content to plain text for interoperability, mandating plain-text email as acceptable (perhaps with a canonical transformation to HTML) the use of SPF, DKIM etc with specified defaults, SMTP with specified features enabled, etc, etc.

Then what is effetively a well-defined profile of traditional email becomes the new (forwards and largely backwards) well-defined email system, and we can all move forward from there.

But to do that, there would need to be the will to create an email equivalent of WHATWG.

Consider the set of functions that that map the reals onto other reals. Almost all of these functions are truly random, with no way of expressing them that does not require the storage of an infinite number of infinite strings.

Not only is there no practical way of creating such a thing, most formulations of physics preclude any possibility of making one by placing finite limits of the amount of space or time accessible to us.

(Not to mention that almost all reals are [Turing] uncomputable in their own right, but that's a more complex thing to demonstrate.)

I think the interesting question here is whether Penrose is claiming that the things of which the brain is capable (most notably the production of consciousness) are inherently non-computable by _any_ kind of artificial device, which is effectively a form of vitalism, or whether he is claiming that they _might_ be computable, but only with a quantum computer.

I'd be interested in learning more about the flight computers, and in particular the very lowest-level systems used to reset or debug the main systems.

Given the tiny amount of storage, there's presumably no scope for rolling back changes after an error, so are they at risk of bricking the spacecraft every time the flight engineers (and just for once, I think the term "software engineer" is truly justified) make a change?

This one-upmanship is very much part of climbing culture. From the top down, the hierarchy is: free soloists (climbing at height without any protection), trad climbers (carry the rope up with them, set their own protection), sports lead climbers (carry the rope up with them, bolts are set into the wall), top rope climbers (rope already there dangling from the top). Right down the bottom, you have aid climbing, when you use equipment to haul yourself up on a rope.

And then there's indoors vs. outdoors, with some dedicated outdoor climbers regarding anything done in a climbing gym as "not real climbing".

Most people don't take this literally, and it's generally considered to be a standing joke in climbing. Sadly, though, some people take it very seriously.

There are lots more variables to consider, particularly in lead climbing, even when you have a bolted route. And trad climbing is even more complex than that.

I'm sceptical about the usefulness of this for a number of reasons, including the points raised by others about hold recognition etc.

It's also difficult to see how the system would work out the 3D arrangement of holds. It can clearly try to infer 3D relationships from video of an existing climb, but it would be hard for it to work out the 3D position or orientation of any holds not used by the climber in the video.

These two put together make solving the climbing problem even more difficult, because appropriate body positions and moves are often very sensitive to even tiny differences in shape, relative position, and orientation of holds; and occluding volumes, arêtes, cracks and so can make the problem even harder.

But as a simplified demo, this is cool, and I salute it.