tommiegannert

Or a way to take money from green investment funds: you're never finished, but you're always only two years away. Both directly from governments and from mandates on the oil companies to do green investments.

Yeah, you're right. Sorry.

I forgot it was several kilograms of shavings. So not just a poorly assembled engine.

> Vice Adm. Jan Christian Kaack, the inspector of the German navy, said at a press conference on Tuesday that the damage involved "more than one unit."

> The Emden is one of the five new K130 corvettes that Germany ordered for delivery in 2025 to fulfill its NATO requirements.

Ugh. Could that be five damaged units? Finds metal shavings in new engine. Touts it as sabotage without explaining further. Spends the rest of the article on fear mongering. If this was an internal investigation, that would have been great. Doing a press conference about it? Sounds more like "before we investigate where it came from, should we take the opportunity to do some propaganda?"

(With all the recent subsea cable issues, yeah, something is going on in these waters, but this is not a good press release.)

The comment section is funny. The first 3-4 comments complain about the screenshot showing a column break, failing to notice it's from the suspected 1959 origin paper.

I can't tell what the publishing time was, but the first two comments are within eight minutes of each other. The third is an hour later. Sensible comments didn't start to trickle in until six hours later.

How many of those comments are from bots, and maybe human trolls?

Ferroelectric soft materials formed with alkanolamines and unsaturated fatty acids

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016773222...

I don't understand cyclic voltammetry, but it seems from Fig 4a this tops out at about 75 µW/cm²?

> CFPB is simply not delivering on its purpose, but wasting $700 milly per year just for some bureacrats to sit on their asses and do nothing

In Europe, we call that an unemployment mitigation programme. Well, we don't call it that, but that's what it is.

It might be referring to job role rather than "age." A Staff Engineer is supposed to be inspiring (both up and down,) so doing quick tests fits the bill, and that's something LLMs are great at supporting. Mid-level is mostly about delivering reliably.

The question is if LLMs/tools could drag mid-level earlier into senior level, or if it's a phase one has to go through. Ultimately, the tangible promise of LLMs is to push the entire timeline up, so that junior tasks are automated and you go in and control the LLMs. Expectations on what it means to be a software engineer are sure to change, at some point. (I like the software craft as-is, but fact is most of our lumber is straighter now that we have automatic saws. And I've never heard a carpenter pleading to split a log manually.)

Putting it your way, I'm saying it might break short-term, but long-term it would be fine.

I reject that claim as-is. In what situations would it break? Standards evolve. Changes to cookies, iframes, newly required HTTP headers all "broke" the web. Not to mention Flash deprecation. But somehow we survived.

Sure, this would theoretically be a backwards incompatible change. But if no one is using insertBefore without really meaning moveBefore, it's not a concern in practice.

Why isn't it better to redefine insertBefore of an already inserted element to being state-preserving? If I want to kill state, I can do a remove first.

Part of DEI at Google is to engage with universities to understand why some prefer not to study STEM/PR/whatnot. Shutting it down at Google will also affect the education pipeline.

Agreed on PR (or avoidance of negative publicity) being the main driver for Pichai to engage in the discussion, but there are many people at Google who care.

Disclaimer: worked at Google in Europe.

> makes me think we are in a war

Dr Pippa Malmgren (political advisor) also pushes the idea that WW3 is on-going, and it will look nothing like WW2. She appears on podcasts once in a while and has a blog. Not sure if I care for calling it a war if it doesn't look like a war, but there sure are human conflicts all over the little ball of life now.

I'm in the business of data collection, to some extent: building a support system for residential solar panel installations. There's a bunch of data needed for simulations, purchase estimations, legal and tax reasons. Not insane amounts, but enough that filling out a form feels tedious. LLMs are great in that they can be given a task to gather a number of pieces, and can explain to the user what "kWh" means, at many level of technical depth.

We play around with LLMs to build a chat experience. My first attempt made Claude spew out five questions at a time, which didn't solve the "guiding" problem. So I started asking it to limit the number of unanswered questions. It worked, but felt really clunky and "cheap."

I drew two conclusions: We need UI builders for this to feel nice, and professionals will want to use forms.

First, LLMs would be great at driving step-by-step guides, but it must be given building blocks to generate a UI. When asking about location, show a map. When deciding to ask about TIN or roof size, if the user is technically inclined, perhaps start with asking about the roof. When asking about the roof size, let the user draw the shape and assign lengths. Or display aerial photos. The result on screen shouldn't be a log of me-you text messages, but a live-updated summary of where we are, and what's remaining.

Second, professionals have incentive to build mental model for navigating complex data structures. People who have no reason to invest time into the data model (e.g. a consumer buying a single solar panel installation in ther lifetime,) will benefit from rich LLM-driven UIs. Chat UIs might create room for a new type of computer user who doesn't use visual clues to build this mental model, but everyone else will want to stay on graphics. If you're an executive wondering how many sick days there were last month, that's a situation where a BI LLM RAG would be great. But if you're not sure what your question is, because you're hired to make up your own questions, then pointing, clicking and massaging might make more sense.

Isn't this about the funds, rather than using Vanguard as a broker? Can't you buy Vanguard funds while on Fidelity, or vice versa?

Hmm. $13M is three minutes of additional US money printing.

https://budget.house.gov/press-release/us-national-debt-surp...

"Auto" usually means "self," so this would be a coup coming from already elected officials.

> Did peltiers ever get efficient?

Not compared to gas compression. For a relaxed take on it:

https://youtu.be/CnMRePtHMZY?si=jusDm81RWkDF_HJ0&t=900 (Thermoelectric cooling: it's not great)

Though part of the complaints about the mini fridge is due to lack of insulation. But he compares it to his usual fridge, which has a similar power draw as this 60W mini fridge, and there's a 50x difference in volume to cool.

I once asked a Canadian if she identifies as American. She did not, in 2014. As a European, I've unfortunately only had the chance to ask that question once. Would love to hear other Canadians' thoughts.

> Based on my research, the earliest computer to use the term "main frame" was the IBM 701 computer (1952)

> This shows that by 1962, "main frame" had semantically shifted to a new word, "mainframe."

> IBM started using "mainframe" as a marketing term in the mid-1980s.

I must conclude it takes the competition 10 years to catch up to IBM, and IBM about 20 years to realize they have competition. Setting a countdown timer for IBM to launch an LLM in 2040.

Thanks for researching and writing this up. It's a brilliant read!

For commit messages, the world seems full of bad commit messages, and commit hygiene. Does this do anything to help improve that? What I really want is a bot that groups my changes into logical commits. I.e. I tell what kind of change I want committed, and it stages only those patches.

I noticed today that one of the big hardware stores in Switzerland has started using LLMs to generate descriptions. As expected, it's just drivel:

> Do you need a new sealing ring for your washbasin siphon? No problem. The Geberit plug-in seal is exactly what you need. With a diameter of 32/46 mm, it fits perfectly and ensures that everything is tight. It has a height of 5.5 cm and a length of 2.3 cm, making it easy to handle and quick to install. It's simply worth its weight in gold when everything fits at the first attempt and you don't have to worry about whether the quality is right. So, whenever your washbasin siphon needs a refresh, the Geberit plug-in seal with its 3.2 cm is your first choice. Simply insert and you're done.

https://www.jumbo.ch/de/bad-sanitaer/installationsmaterial/d...

There was a study published in 2022 suggesting that there's a link between Epstein-Barr and Multiple Sclerosis (where the immune system attacks the neuron insulation layer), and that when you get infected affects the outcome. Cleverly, they used blood samples from US service members, who have to do it multiple times in life.

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.abj8222?src=... [PDF]

> Components often still use 0.1 inch pin spacing.

This changed with IC SMD packages. It's now mostly even 100-micrometers.

SMD passives seem to be in a state of limbo, but mostly still using inches. Mouser lists resistor size codes as both inch and mm. It's a bit confusing.

This is the Italian data protection authority acting on a report from an Italian consumer group. The EU doesn't seem involved in this particular inquiry.

Hopefully.

If we're talking about the Chinese state, I'd say it's viable. Perhaps not breaking AES 256 outright, but screwed up implementations of cryptography. And perhaps even backdoors.

It could also be a distraction from them cutting and inserting their equipment somewhere else along the line. Dunno how detailed the monitoring is of these cables, but visibly cutting it one place would apparently give them two weeks to play around along that cable.

Or they're just being bullies, or testing willingness to defend. At this point, I'd assume it's some type of aggression, at least. Unless cables have been cut all the time, but now suddenly it's becoming headlines for political reasons...

I don't know you, but respectfully, people didn't start dying in my life until I was in my mid-30s.

The most heartbreaking experience I've had was my 88 year old neighbor ringing the door, and informing me that his wife of 60 years had just died. He managed to say three words. Before the fourth, he broke down in tears.

My wife has died.

Such a simple sentence, but a sentence that had 60 years of unconditional love behind it. And an entire family. Their life. His wife was lovely. I miss her, and cannot even pretend to imagine what this was, and still is, like, for him.

Behind him, at my door, was my other neighbor. He was the first to have been told. He just stood there, silently, while I gave the husband a long hug. He never said a word, his mere presence saying everything that needed to be said.

You are not alone.

Using ASML for leverage.

Given they're not part of the EU, and you have to pay import duties and VAT, that makes more sense than Poland/Germany.

> “Most reverse osmosis membranes don’t remove very much boron, so desalination plants typically have to do some post treatment to get rid of the boron, which can be expensive,” said Jovan Kamcev, U-M assistant professor of chemical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering and a co-corresponding author of the study. “We developed a new technology that’s fairly scalable and can remove boron in an energy-efficient way compared to some of the conventional technologies.”

Goes on to explain how this is post-processing for boron, after reverse osmosis:

> This diagram shows how boron is removed by the researchers’ electrodes. First a majority of the salt ions are removed with reverse osmosis. Then the water flows into a cell containing a membrane with positive (pink) and negative (orange) layers. Similarly charged electrodes face the membrane layers, and when a current is applied, water molecules at the interface of the membranes split into hydrogen and hydroxide ions. The hydroxide ions stick to boron, causing it to stick to the positive electrode.

So the scope of this is boron reduction, not desalination. Useful, but the PR department is taking liberties.

GP is arguing that exactly because there is no backlight, the contrast between on/off is uncomfortably high on modern screens compared to the CRTs where Windows 2/3 was running.

I agree. Most websites with a dark color scheme use a dark grey background and even off-white text.