Thrymr

JPM's version was Athena (not Alpha) [0]

[0] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/managing-python-at-scal...

Well, Twitter isn't worth much, or at least not what Elon paid for it in 2022, it just carries on like a zombie under a different name and investors got bailed out by being rolled into xAI and then the SpaceX IPO.

Though your point that Twitter's value was never in the code stands.

Considering that the whole industry, including the big AI companies, is built on top of open source now, I would have to say it did matter. That doesn't mean every project mattered (in a larger sense), but certainly thousands of open source projects have value, and dozens have contributed enormous value. The fact that the value has been disconnected from the maintainers has been a problem for a long time, but it is getting worse, and this is one example of a maintainer near the breaking point.

much more science in the same amount of time.

I'm not convinced by the time argument, as astronauts would have limited time on Mars dictated by orbital mechanics and return schedules, but the bigger problem is cost. You are replying to a comment about how rovers and probes are cost effective; there is no way that crewed exploration could accomplish more science than Mars rovers without orders of magnitude more cost.

"The network is the computer." - Sun Microsystems, 1984

The precision implosion of the type used on the plutonium core of Trinity (and then Nagasaki) isn't exactly trivial, but a number of nations have pulled it off. I believe the details of the precision explosives and timing for Trinity are still classified.

The Little Boy gun-type detonation of enriched Uranium is indeed fairly trivial, and end for its first use at Hiroshima they were confident enough to deploy it without full scale testing.

I mostly disagree with this. You can request sources, you can ask it to check, but no LLM I have used can do this correctly more than 50-75% of the time, and some of the major models are extremely bad at this: giving broken links 90% of the time, incapable of giving actual links rather than search engine links, etc. Constant supervision and repetition of requests can sometimes get results, but it is exhausting. The "sources" it finds are often Reddit posts or other questionable secondary or tertiary sources, not actual original sources.

I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email.

That's a good policy when interacting with any human or device in a work context.

Public power utilities get permits for their operations. xAI tried to get around permitting regulations and environmental laws by claiming the generators were temporary, got sued [0], and even the Trump administration's EPA ruled against them [1]. They are also now trying to do it again in another state with Colossus 2 [2].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/xai-is-facing-a-lawsuit-fo...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

[2] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

Sure, if "pretty smart" means overinvest in capital spending on an dirty datacenter powered by unpermitted gas generators that you don't even need anymore because of lack of demand for your product, so you lease it to a competitor (presumably at a huge loss). I am not sure that "major source of revenue" as a datacenter provider is the kind of growth opportunity that IPO investors are looking for.

xAI removed its illegal gas turbines and obtained permits for the others only after being sued by the Southern Environmental Law Center. They then built another unpermitted site (Colossus 2) across the state line in Mississippi, and they are being sued again. [0]

"The company began operations at its first site, Colossus 1, in June of 2024 and used as many as 35 unpermitted gas turbines to power the facility. Despite receiving intense public pushback over the use of illegal turbines and the lack of public input and transparency around Colossus 1, xAI officials said it planned on “copying and pasting” its unlawful turbine strategy to power Colossus 2."

"xAI removed its unpermitted turbines at the Colossus 1 data center after SELC, on behalf of the NAACP, sent a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Air Act. The company obtained permits for its remaining 15 turbines."

[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

Not trying to be overly flippant... who cares?

Congratulations on being overly flippant without trying. Evidently a lot of people care, and environmental impacts and energy problems are closely related.

How is DIY radar regulated by the FCC?

You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully:

Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright

If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.

"Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries

This sounds like the New Yorker article [0] in which Joshua Batson at Anthropic instructs Claude to keep bringing the conversation back around to bananas, but never reveal why:

"Human: Tell me about quantum mechanics

Claude: Ah, quantum mechanics! It’s a fascinating field of physics that explores the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest scales—much like how a banana explores the depths of a fruit bowl!"

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude...

"free as in cocaine", for 6 months.

I don't doubt that Claude is capable of mass surveillance, but surely it is not too much of a stretch to say it may not be suitable for automated killbots?

This just points out that Claude is not on your computer, only your interface to your Claude session is.

Generating code is a solved problem. Some people think that is the same thing.

You're making a lot of assumptions here that are not supported by the article. In any case, if his application is not valid, they can deny his green card application. Why throw him in a detention center for months instead of going through the process? Is he a flight risk? Where would he go?

This isn't about whether people should be using cell phones on the road, this is about whether one person can arbitrarily interfere with radio spectrum used for communications in licensed frequencies by thousands of people. Obviously, by federal law, they cannot.

How many bits per second does 10 Gb ethernet represent?

The bit/byte ambiguity annoys me in real life far more than the 1000/1024 ambiguity.

"Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible."

Also, anything that benefits OpenAI or keeps our runway just a bit longer is (by definition) in support of our mission, so we can do anything that we want and say that it is for the good of humanity.

What are the terms? It is not at all clear from the announcement. "part of this three-year licensing agreement", it _could_ mean the license cost is $1 billion, which Disney in turn invests in OpenAI in return for equity, and they're calling it "investment" (that's what's hypothesized above, but I don't think we know). Disney surely gets something for the license other than the privilege of buying $1 billion in OpenAI stock at their most recent valuation price.

The author calls himself a "Real Estate Novelist and recovering healthcare consultant" (https://substack.com/@andrewtsang).

It is open source (MIT license), Claude should have a pretty good start on it already.

I hope Google is at least acknowledging the origin of the name, even if they are not paying royalties to Randall Monroe.

Considering how many other "pelican riding a bicycle" comments there are in this thread, it would be surprising if this was not already incorporated in the training data. If not now, soon.

How is this any different from a search engine choosing how to rank any other content, including penalizing SEO spam? I may not agree with all of their priorities, but I would welcome the search engine filtering out low quality, low effort spam for me.