Reminds me a bit of the work of Shou Xin https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/shouxin-graphite-cat-drawings/

For what its worth, Slotin in particular knew the consequences. If i recall correctly, he had a reputation for being a bit of a “cowboy” when it came to experimental protocol. I believe the lab even had specially made tools for handling the core, but Slotin insisted on using a screwdriver because it was easier.

In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

An excellent talk from Doctrow as always. A lot of it I’ve hard before, but this part was new to me.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it’s a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That’s a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down

…

Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That’s why they’re so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That’s why they think it’s good that they’ve got a chatbot that “produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer.”

Producing code that isn’t designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

Every time I see a headline like this I’m reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There’s great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we’ll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it’s just so fun to play with.

Unfortunately its my understanding from this article that the type of RAM being demanded by AI data centers isn’t the same as standard DDR5 consumer memory.

I assume that means it won’t be possible to directly reallocate those chips to the consumer market when the AI bubble bursts. The manufacturers will have to switch their assembly lines back to consumer chip production and then supply will slowly ramp up as those facilities come back online.

my name is Cow,
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon
is shiyning brite,
and all the men
haf gon to bed -
i sneak inside.
i lik the head.

I’m hopeful that when the bubble pops it’ll be more like the dot com crash, which is to say that the fallout is mostly of the economic variety rather than the superfund variety. Sure, that’ll still suck in the short term. But it will ideally lead to the big players and VC firms backing away and leaving behind an oversupply of infrastructure and talent that can be soaked up at fire sale prices by the smaller, more responsible companies that are willing to stick out the downturn and do the unglamorous work of developing this technology into something that’s actually sustainable and beneficial to society.

That’s my naive hope. I do recognize that there’s an unfortunately high probability that things won’t go that way.

Volkswagen AG Group

Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.

A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like “are these two words on the same line?” Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a “line of text”, and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.

I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.

Copy pasting my reply from the last time this came up:

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. The only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

I’ve been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who’s interested in RSS but thinks it’s a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That’s all it takes to get started.

Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:

When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

From the incomparable line goes up

That reminds me, we should also never forget that around the same time Mark Zuckerberg got so deep into Metaverse hype that he renamed his company after it and sunk 10s of billions of dollars into development with nothing to show for it

It’s not quite the same tone as internet historian, but if you’re looking for an entertaining takedown of NFTs, I highly recommend Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas.

Not sure if this is an intentional reference to the Lonely Island song “Sushi Glory Hole,” but either way here’s a link

https://youtu.be/XbGchfT3yMs

I’m reminded of this video about how changes to the construction industry starting in the '50s resulted in the loss of ornamentation in architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4

It’s an interesting piece of tech ephemera, but devils advocate here, I’m not sure that I agree with the implication that this is a bad thing. The UI works. It gives you all the options you need with no major downsides or pain points. In this case, I think there’s something to be said for: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”