colinng

It is an amazing feat and can put the US on excellent footing.

But I’m not sure it is a fair comparison because the Space Shuttle also returned a crew with each launch. Starlink can afford to pay the cost of lost cargo, or diminished fuel reserves for sub-optimal launch altitude, on launch failure.

Still, I hope it continues on this excellent path and doesn’t fall into the complacency trap that skydivers have to watch for. It would be great if the Falcon 9 launches can fund the eventual completion of Starship, and that Starship goes on to become the first fully and rapidly reusable - and hopefully safest - ship.

I think the tone of the article was really strong and, to me, it seemed biased because they repeated multiple times that “the buyers only care about looks.”

A more in-depth article might point to the CyberLandr, and until I went 4x4 camping, camped out of a truck, I didn’t realize how awesome a CyberLandr might be, or how nice it is that “Mother Nature’s pin striping” is a solved problem for a stainless steel skin. Or how nice it would be to do all that without all the engine noise (I get accused of “not being a car person” simply because I like peace and quiet - but EVs are cars so why can’t we love those too?).

I think the article intentionally mischaracterizes the reasons for wanting a CyberTruck, and prescribes that “you must be a shallow person who doesn’t care about practicality or reliability.”

Well thank you for telling me who I am!

Oh and why would anyone slander Tesla? It’s not like they are a publicly traded company where slander and praise affect the share or option prices. Surely they couldn’t have ulterior motives.

We don’t need to recreate Bell Labs.

We have SpaceX and Starlink - that’s where innovation is happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period) on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink who’s allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I.

We don’t need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy. Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.)

What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual innovative companies (they “own” OpenAI for all intents and purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF. And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real computer - the iPad Pro can’t do real work like build you an App or site with VS Code - it can’t even run Apple’s own XCode.

We don’t need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their spacecraft not leak.

Exactly what happened to me. These bastards planned that. That’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world, because they knew how to trip their customers into buying shit they didn’t need to buy. And pricing RAM and Storage way, way out of proportion to the cost.

Don’t forget - they solder in the flash too even though there is no technical reason to do so.

Unless “impossibly far profit margin” is a technical requirement.

They will maliciously comply. They might even have 4 sockets for the 512-bit wide systems. But then they’ll keep the SSD devices soldered - just like they’ve done for a long time. Or cover them with epoxy, or rig it with explosives. That’ll show you for trying to upgrade! How dare you ruin the beautiful fat profit margin that our MBAs worked so hard to design in?!?

I tested Llama-3-70b-8192 on Groq against ChatGPT 4, and while Groq ran it super fast, it hallucinated one answer, and didn’t get the logic correct on another question.

So, ChatGPT 4 is still more reliable for my use case. But if I were to want an LLM to process data, summarize, and so forth, Llama-3 on Groq is very fast.

Questions:

Do you know anything about Intel Hala Point?

Groq: bullshit, but admitted it when I called it out. ChatGPT: did a Bing search (it knew what it didn’t know).

Question 2a (separate chat): If you’re in Canada, what’s the best way to use a TFSA?

2b: Okay, if your portfolio has some tech stocks, some cash cows, and some government bonds, which should be allocated to the TFSA?

The reason I chose Question 2 is that most banks are happy to recommend bad products if it benefits them. Llama-3’s answer reflects the bank bullshit. ChatGPT 4 gives the advice your trustworthy and financially savvy friend would give you.

Follow-on questions for Llama-3:

2c: You have it backwards.

2d: Why did you get it backwards? Were you influenced by the glut of “advice” proffered by banks?

If only all tech news were this way. Then I’d waste no cycles on hot garbage.

They’re really light and last a long time, but are not rechargeable.

The time value of money is always more than inflation. The classic simple example is that if you need food today, the money for food is worth much more today than it is worth a year from now.

Therefore to ask someone to surrender money today, they have to give you more money to return it to you next year.

This isn’t the same as growth (ie you’re doing a job, but next year they expect you to make 25% more sales, or else…)

If we had a better Blue Bin system it might work. Remove tags at home and place in compartment of Blue Bin, and at the recycling centre they get sorted out and sent back to the retailers.

But if we really could scale RFID tag production down to 1 cent each, then we’d likely just throw them out. Not that I’m a fan of throwing away silicon…

Sam Bankman-Fried defrauded people. He didn’t intentionally create a digital black market, where everything from hit jobs, narcotics, poison, weapons, and human trafficking could (and were) conducted.

And since there are many well-known marketplaces for legal activities (eBay, Craigslist, Kijiji, Facebook Marketplace, AutoTrader.com, need I go on?) then the only defining feature was that this was a black market.

One cannot “accidentally” do this. So yes, aiding and abetting countless crimes and possibly murder —> life sentence.

In that context do you still find it unjust?

Scam Bankrun-Fraud? Couldn’t happen to a nicer person.

The on-his-way-out CEO is David Calhoun. Accountant.

https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun

Calhoun has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.

Are we reading the same sources? The ex-CEO, David Calhoun, has a degree in accounting.

https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun

Calhoun has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.

So someone whose dream job is to make airplanes that are innovative, fuel efficient, safe, and long-lasting and economical - goes to… accounting school?

Yes, the Pinecil (both versions) are awesome, and if you buy several and split the shipping with friends, affordable.

But a majority of the work was done by the RalimOS project (firmware for several soldering irons). In the end, the input is DC or USB PD, a thermistor, accelerometer, volt meter, two buttons, and the output is a heating coil and a status screen.

For the soldering iron to work is several orders of magnitude lower complexity than a phone.

I’m sure they’d love for someone like Ralim to come along and write the entire OS for them. The problem is, as other posters have mentioned, there just aren’t enough millionaire programmers with nothing better to do than write a phone OS for you for free.

Ditto Lucifer and 2 other variants. Does it have the same ring as, “all right, Satan” or is it actually a nice name in Iceland?

Gosh I am not a fan of long articles that read like a mystery novel.

Software has its absolutes - and those are often good things. Security, ability for backup, redundancy, scalability. We value these things.

Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users.

And over time we may have started with systems that are centralized because our abilities were young at the time, but distributed systems are very popular and often the goal. One example is version control systems: all the systems prior to Git/Mercurial and those after.

With social networks, the network effects are dominant, but I am hopeful that distributed systems will eventually dominate.

Thanks for the article. But then it points to the Betacel, USA 1970s (60 pacemakers implanted by 1973).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacel

I’m not trying to dismiss a wonderful invention, I just want journalistic integrity. It’s not a first if someone already made a product in 1973.

How is this the “world’s first micro-atomic energy battery”?

Didn’t the USA do this in 1966?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238#Nuclear_powere...

Ditto on this. I want to not buy an A100 for $20k, or even consumer GPUs, but the truth is that for LLM inference, to run large models like LLaMa2 70b with INT4 quantization so it could fit

A100: 1248 TOPS

MI250: 362.1 TOPS

M3 Max: 18 TOPS

Yes, 18. Unless Apple has accelerated INT4 workloads but just forgot to document it.

Honestly, I’m an Apple fan, but when they go on stage and say “AI” they mean it can do speech recognition or tell a dog apart from a cat, or autofocus a camera. It can’t run ChatGPT-like things by a loooong mile.

It also led to MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) and playing God for the therapist.

Edit: then again, don’t out the therapist. I don’t want anyone getting sued for libel. The world has enough problems.

Neat! An upgradable laptop made with high quality materials!

I know nobody asked for my opinion, but I saw the [Ethernet card](https://frame.work/ca/en/products/ethernet-expansion-card) and was a bit sad. How about something like 3Com XJACK to keep it small and without protrusions when travelling?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XJACK

Or the spring-loaded swivel down port from Lenovo?

https://www.reviewgeek.com/p/uploads/2021/05/c9c310c4.jpg

That said, I’m not their target audience…

Apple makes some great hardware and software.

But here are things I think they drag their feet on:

1. iPhone on Lightning. USB-C is everywhere now, the only charging port on every MacBook for years, and on iPad Pro.

2. macOS not on iPad Pro. M2 processor is pointless, but they price the iPad Pro as though the M2 would benefit you... somehow.

3. you pretty much have to jailbreak iOS and iPadOS to compile real code (not Playgrounds), or to do your own things on hardware that you... own.

For each of the above there are obvious monetary reasons not to make progress.

1. MFI lock in, licensing fees.

2. if iPad Pro could run macOS, there would (rightfully) be a lot of "lost" MacBook Air sales

3. if people could write real code on an iPad (or use "real" tools like XCode or Visual Studio Code, or just about ANY IDE), lot of "lost" Mac sales

I would like to think that if Apple reversed course on their foot-dragging, they would actually gain a much wider market share, making up for any lost sales. Also, people would not think twice when a new iPad with M3 would be announced. As for myself (and I suspect a growing number of tech people), I refuse to spend one red cent, precisely because I refuse to reward this kind of behaviour.

I have both the H2 and H2+, and it runs fine off 12V. I have tested the system down to 11V, and possibly lower.

The 12V or higher is required only for the 12V rail used power 3.5” SATA drives directly from the board.

Just curious, what were you trying to sell? Were any of the items prohibited, or something that might run afoul of some law somewhere? For example, certain computers or game consoles cannot be sold in certain markets (export restrictions), or devices that might be used for practical jokes (TV or radio jammers), that sort of thing.

It helps readers to know what might in turn get them banned.

Much thanks,

Colin

Next news article: r/WallStreetBets followers spend lifesavings on underwear in hopes of propping up economy.

Apologies in advance if I’m mistaken, but isn’t your Constitution supposed to protect your right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”

How does one have life and liberty if they have a crushing burden of medical bills?

More simply, how does one have life if the medication needed to save you - is $750 a dose? or $300 an injection (and expiries with no refundable “core charge” whether you use it or not)?