madaxe_again

Care and education, and whatever they can manage with whatever’s left over. Same as pretty much every council everywhere.

Pretty sure you could manage launch control with nothing but a bunch of ESP32s and home assistant. Sadly there are no rad hardened ESP32s I know of, but that’s what the silo’s for.

I like that you chose ten examples.

> s/you must/thou shalt/g

There’s a server running behind a Wordpress site. If you have RCE, you can run whatever arbitrary code you like there - mine crypto, run a botnet, all sorts of fun and profitable stuff. Hey, you can even make the site make the site’s users your unwitting hosts, too. You don’t go hack a Wordpress site, you go grab a few hundred thousand of them and do industrial scale crimes.

They hadn’t been paying since 2008, hence it was all derelict trash - they don’t even have the budget to maintain the roads or keep the school open, never mind monitor river levels.

My interest was not drowning, rather than pecuniary.

Ditto. They come and trim my trees for me and pay me £300 a year for the privilege. I really don’t mind, barely even notice the lines are there.

Yup. I live on a river. We flooded catastrophically in 2019, which made me suddenly care about the government’s network of river level meters.

Turns out, they abandoned most of them in 2008, as it was the local council who were meant to maintain them, but they couldn’t afford it - a chat with the president revealed they’d been paying €15k a year for each station to maintain it and they’d cost about €100k each.

I went and looked at the battered remains. Sounding tube. Ultrasound transducer. Box of 90’s electronics.

Anyway, long story short I banged out six of them for them for about €80 a piece - the expensive bits were the batteries and the dinky solar panel. ESP32, ultrasonic transducer, GSM and LoRa (as two are outside of the cell network), haven’t had to touch them in five years and we now know when it’s time to evacuate, rather than wading out in the night while trees sail past us at 60kph.

So much stuff like this.

You don’t even need this. You just ask “what did we do last Tuesday”. A scammer will hang up, even if the actual answer is “I haven’t seen you in two years”.

I once ran rm -rf on a live NFS mount that the live operations of a major brokerage depended upon.

I challenge any agent to do worse than an intern with root access.

I’d pay $1,000/mo for the best model - but it would have to be good enough that I could reliably concierge out my existence to it. I spend way too much of my time wading through a diffuse mire of admin, and if I could farm that out for that little, and have it done and done well, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

The first thing I used Sol for was to assess 5.6 on our workflows - previously, it was 5.5 for everything, as the quality on simpler models was just not good enough. We’re doing a mix of text and image analysis to extract explicit and implicit structured data from a steaming pile.

They do work pretty much as advertised. The bulk of our workload is now going via terra, which has cut our cost in half by itself, as well as improved response times by 50% - luna I am using as a backstop for opencv hits, and it is good enough, and so cheap as to almost be free - but very limited - and very fast. Sol only gave marginal improvements over terra for our workload.

I’ve also gotta say I’m impressed as to how well Sol ultra carried out the assessment itself - it made sound recommendations, and gave me a nice big dossier of “you should look at these outputs yourself and compare and consider” along with raw and digested data, and cpm for queries.

Anyway. Spent nothing beyond my pro sub, let Sol gnaw on it for a few hours, and my cost basis just dropped 50% and throughput improved by 100%. Win.

There was an interview with him the other day on LBC in which they asked if he wasn’t worried he might have his vote split with the MRLP - Monster Raving Looney Party - but he pointed out quite adroitly that they are just as likely to split reform’s vote, so the more the merrier.

Isn’t it the democratic ideal though? Of the people, for the people. If a representative democracy is to truly be representative then the elected representatives should be… representative? Tuberville and Mullin I wouldn’t say were thick so much as they’re pretty average.

It really depends on what’s in your cup at relatively low gs - some things will deform, others will brittle fracture, others yet will just stubbornly sit there, but if you keep on cranking that gravity dial you’ll get degenerate matter, which behaves quite a bit like a liquid.

Your intuition is correct, and what you’re describing is cavitation - which the article goes on to mumble about a little. Honestly, I am also struggling to see what the novel result here is. You can snap off a drip of pitch by pulling on it - if you shear it, it will probably just bend - yank on the droplet and it comes off with a satisfying snap.

But then again I suppose if you lead a cosseted life, never played with the contents of a shed, and had your first practical experience of actual hands on behaviour of viscous liquids in a lab… you might shout “Eureka”.

I’m a physicist, so I’m biased, but my experience of pure maths was about the same. We had to do it, but at no point was any utility actually demonstrated - that was left to the physics professors. It was all just “look at this thing I can do with these symbols” without any actual tangible relationship to anything.

Then again, I remember how we were taught calculus at high school - we were taught how to mechanistically integrate and derive everything under the sun. At no point did anyone think to explain that we were measuring the areas under curves, or their rates of change - it was all just “memorise this operation”. Again it was left to the physics teachers to explain why this was useful, and what we were actually doing.

Poor teaching, if you ask me, and it more often than not left me retrospectively wondering if said mathematicians had actually understood any of what they did, or if they just had little blind symbol manipulation Turing machines in their heads.

Subagents can help enormously…

On which note I recently convinced codex to use the ChatGPT web client to run subagents. Means I only pay for the slavemaster, and all the slaves I can eat for $20 a month. Actually works surprisingly well - I currently have it crunching through a large dataset, which would have taken weeks on a single thread - started last night, nearly done this morning. $20.

I’m a guy who’ll leave his laptop on the floor and will bend double from a chair to use it, on the floor, because I have forgotten I can pick it up. I am ergonomically insensitive.

Anyway, I use my phone in my left hand, my right hand, or both, pretty much equally.

Interesting. I wonder what else it has access to within their Google account, that you could get it to volunteer.

I find the media stuff all works just fine - gotta say I control it all almost exclusively by voice, and it Just Works - but the navigation… sucks donkey ass. I hate that it only treats superchargers as possible charging stops - where I live they are few and far between, yet other high speed chargers are common. The routing is often abysmal. It’ll be like “heavy traffic ahead. Taking you into it.” The traffic camera database is incomplete. The behaviour between the mobile and in car app is wildly inconsistent.

You know, I don’t care so much about having CarPlay as I care about having Waze or ABRP or just any routing app other than Tesla’s.

That, but farther up the chain a generation of physicists was inspired by Escape From the Forbidden Planet, or on 1950s pulps reading about death rays and nuclear space battleships. Life imitates art, imitates life.

It’s just so hard to convey the sheer overwhelming size and complexity of it all - the feeling must have been akin to a mediaeval peasant who has lived their life in a thatched hut seeing a cathedral for the first time. Numinous.

I spent a week there between the LEP going offline and the LHC going online on a school trip - the scale of it is just unreal - as you say, photos are one thing, but as you stand there in a vast subterranean cathedral looking up at the frantically complex detectors (we hung out with ATLAS a fair bit) it’s… awesome. In the very literal sense of the word.

Don’t know if you visited the antiproton decelerator/LEAR but they’re similarly unreal - a vast cavern, half a dozen stories high and so large it fades into blackness beyond the floodlights illuminating the various buildings and experiments within there. You descend in a rickety cage loft surrounded by no more than a box of girders, to be greeted by a vision straight out of sci-fi. Vast lead megaliths tower around like the work of some very precise techno-druids, cables and ducts snake across the floor to join unknown experiments occluded by the henges, and in this place, they make the stuff the universe abhors.

Wild stuff.

Oh, I also got to tool around on Tim’s computer which was just sat in the cafeteria at the time.

Students do exams at home with an answer key. It isn’t possible to get a mark lower than 80, as this is emotionally damaging. If you require assistance a professor will do the exam for you.

Back in my day we’d sit down ‘t muddy corpse pit having questions screamed at us by ‘t dragon who were also ‘t drill instructor. Get one wrong, and that was that, fricassé.

Só Rio de Janeiro then?

ducks

The thing that goes wrong again and again and again with public and low cost housing is that they build housing, and nothing else.

Stick a bunch of people in a tower in a field with no entertainment, no work nearby, building rubble surrounding their environment, no maintenance happening, no follow through on planned facilities, and the consequences are absolutely 100% predictable. Literally last night I watched a pair of bbc documentaries about a new estate, one from when it was new in the mid 60s, one from the late 70s. The residents are there in the 60’s, going “well it’s a pain having to walk all the way up but we trust that the lifts will be installed soon, and we’re looking forwards to the leisure centre” - fast forward 15 years, still no lifts, no leisure centres, and surprise surprise the kids are setting fire to cars to have something to do. If government won’t uphold the social contract, why should citizens?

The implementation is entirely the problem, and unfortunately few seem to realise that it can be done well. You can’t just make containers for humans and expect that to solve everything.

Usually, signing things like this won’t particularly hurt you - largely because your inalienable rights are… inalienable. You can’t sign them away, even if some contract says you have.

The flip side of this however is that it’s a very worthwhile pursuit to know consumer protections and what your rights are in the jurisdiction in which you live - and how to enforce them.

Where I live, I unfortunately quite frequently find myself having to go “ok so you want to do the formal process with the regulator then?”, which usually gets them to reconsider - but not always. Three times in the last month I have threatened regulatory action - and of those three, only one chose that path. I have just reported a government agency here to the domestic and EU regulators for failing to fulfil EU FoM treaty rights - and they were even kind enough to put it in writing that they’re ignoring their own domestic laws.

I have yet to lose a case I have brought before a regulator or justice of the peace, and businesses usually only need to do this once, if at all, as it can quite quickly turn a €1,000 dispute into tens or hundreds of thousands of euro of damages and fines. By doing this, following these processes through, I help not just myself but society as a whole.

So - sign away, but have teeth, and know where to bite.

The preceding clause is just as bad:

> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie that’s been accepted by the masses

I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration.

Anyway. The belief that the author isn’t talking out of their ass is an insidious lie spread by dark forces. QED.

Yeah, I’m an actor who has been in game of thrones and the Alien franchise, apparently - but no such actor exists. There are only three findable folks with my name - one’s a felon, one’s been dead a couple years, one’s me.

Oh and sometimes I’m a dog food brand. Go figure.

Almost. The NT5 RCs, which became windows 2000, were better IMO - not massive differences but it hadn’t been slobbered upon by marketing yet.

Yup - given that it’s $60bn of stock, now is an excellent time to do it, as the current valuation isn’t even irrational. And I say that as someone who believes they have great long term prospects.