ignirtoq

My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be “on” or “off,” your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it’s within 40% of the expected “on” or “off” state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don’t have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

I’m really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.

Vibe coding anything more complicated than the most trivial example toy app creates a mountain of security vulnerabilities. Every company that fires human software developers and actually deploys applications entirely written by AI will have their systems hacked immediately. They will either close up shop, hire more software security experts than the number of developers they fired just to keep up with the garbage AI-generated code, or try to hire all of the software developers back.

Did blockchain solve it? Is blockchain actually pragmatically solving that problem better than existing alternatives? Or is the cost of adopting a blockchain payment system as the primary payment system, with all the risks inherent in it, higher than the benefits when compared to alternatives?

misused

Give me an example of a real world problem that was either unsolved before blockchain solved it, or blockchain solves it better than existing alternatives.

I’ll go ahead and save you “decentralized currency/finance between untrustworthy entities” (i.e. cryptocurrency) because it doesn’t actually (and can’t actually) solve that in the real world. Humans are too error-prone, and an immutable ledger presents too high a risk for business-ending mistakes for any business with any alternative options to adopt it for their primary revenue pathway.

Several years ago I created a Slack bot that ran something like Jupyter notebook in a container, and it would execute Python code that you sent to it and respond with the results. It worked in channels you invited it to as well as private messages, and if you edited your message with your code, it would edit its response to always match the latest input. It was a fun exercise to learn the Slack API, as well as create something non-trivial and marginally useful in that Slack environment. I knew the horrible security implications of such a bot, even with the Python environment containerized, and never considered opening it up outside of my own personal use.

Looks like the AI companies have decided that exact architecture is perfectly safe and secure as long as you obfuscate the input pathway by having to go through a chat-bot. Brilliant.

A balloon full of helium has more mass than a balloon without helium, but less weight

That’s not true. A balloon full of helium has more mass and more weight than a balloon without helium. Weight is dependent only on the mass of the balloon+helium and the mass of the planet (Earth).

The balloon full of helium displaces way more air than the balloon without helium since it is inflated. The volume of displaced air of the inflated balloon has more weight than the combined weight of the balloon and helium within, so it floats due to buoyancy from the atmosphere. Its weight is the same regardless of the medium it’s in, but the net forces experienced by it are not.

At least it was better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.

I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.

They keep tasking these LLMs with things that traditional programming solved a long time ago. There are already vending machines run by computers. They work just fine without AI.

Honestly the computer controlled vending machines are already over-engineered since many of them play ads when you walk up. The last customer-focused feature added was credit card support, and that just needs a credit card reader and a minimal IoT integration. They really shouldn’t even have screens.

Why are they… why are they having autocomplete recommend medical treatment? There are specialized AI algorithms that already exist for that purpose that do it far better (though still not well enough to even assist real doctors, much less replace them).

It’s mixed with other artificial sweeteners (I know of at least the monk fruit in my pantry) to get better weight to sweetness ratios. Most of the most popular artificial sweeteners are far stronger, sometimes hundreds of times stronger, than sugar. So they mix them with erythritol, which is less sweet than sugar, so you can replace 5g of sugar with 5g of the artificial sweetener in recipes and get the right sweetness.

The size of the cut is what they use for the appeal to the public to build their social narrative, but legally/economically speaking it’s not really the problem. The problem is that Apple effectively forbids developers from having any other mechanism to transact with customers except through their marketplace where they take the 30% cut, hence the lawsuit being about monopolistic practices, not the amount they’re charging.

Valve handles things completely differently. Sure, listing on the Steam store requires giving Valve a 30% cut of the purchase price, but Steam doesn’t demand a 30% cut of any and all transactions that happen within or related to the game like Apple does. You also don’t have to buy a game from the Steam store to load it and launch it from the Steam client. And Proton works with a lot more games and applications than just those on the Steam store.

The fact that the two companies charge a similar price for a single relatively similar business case oversimplifies a lot of how the two companies operate.

The article talks about “Ultraviolet (UV) light boxes, which emit only a narrow bandwidth of light that is not linked to skin cancer,” so it’s possible the UV treatment and the drugs can be combined.

Even more surprising: the droplets didn’t evaporate quickly, as thermodynamics would predict.

“According to the curvature and size of the droplets, they should have been evaporating,” says Patel. “But they were not; they remained stable for extended periods.”

With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable.

I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.

I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!

The use of “quantum leap” isn’t about comparing the absolute size of the change to quantum phenomena. It’s about the lack of a smooth transition. Quantum leaps in physics are instantaneous transitions between states with no intermediate. That’s the idea with the colloquialism: a sudden shift from one state to another without a smooth transitional period.

What’s the y-axis, and how exactly are you measuring it? Anybody can draw an exponential curve of nothing specific.

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People are making fun of the waffling and the apparent indecision and are missing the point. Trump isn’t flailing and trying to figure out how to actually make things work. He’s doing exactly what he intended: he’s holding the US economy for ransom and building a power base among the billionaires.

He used the poor and ignorant to get control of the public institutions, and now he’s using that power to get control over the private institutions (for-profit companies). He’s building a carbon copy of Russia with himself in the role of Putin. He’s almost there, and it’s taken him 2 months to do it.

The author hits on exactly what’s happening with the comparison to carcinisation: crustacean evolution converges to a crab like form because that’s the optimization for the environmental stresses.

As tiramichu said in their comment, digital platforms are converging to the same form because they’re optimizing for the same metric. But the reason they’re all optimizing that metric is because their monetization is advertising.

In the golden days of digital platforms, i.e. the 2010s, everything was venture capital funded. A quality product was the first goal, and monetization would come “eventually.” All of the platforms operated this way. Advertising was discussed as one potential monetization, but others were on the table, too, like the “freemium” model that seemed to work well for Google: provide a basic tier for free that was great in its own right, and then have premium features that power users had to pay for. No one had detailed data for what worked and what didn’t, and how well each model works for a given market, because everything was so new. There were a few one-off success stories, many wild failures from the dotcom crash, but no clear paths to reliable, successful revenue streams.

Lots of products now do operate with the freemium model, but more and more platforms had moved and are still moving to advertising ultimately because of the venture capital firms that initially funded them have strong control over them and have more long term interest in money than a good product. The data is now out there that the advertising model makes so, so much more money than a freemium model ever could in basically any market. So VCs want advertising, so everything is TikTok.

The open availability of cutting-edge models creates a multiplier effect, enabling startups, researchers, and developers to build upon sophisticated AI technology without massive capital expenditure. This has accelerated China’s AI capabilities at a pace that has shocked Western observers.

Didn’t a Google engineer put out a white paper about this around the time Facebook’s original LLM weights leaked? They compared the rate of development of corporate AI groups to the open source community and found there was no possible way the corporate model could keep up if there were even a small investment in the open development model. The open source community was solving in weeks open problems the big companies couldn’t solve in years. I guess China was paying attention.