Dave.

This is not like the days of old where television/radio/newspapers pushed their opinions to the public en masse. It’s social media, where everything is tailored to you, personally, available to you on your personal device that you carry with you everywhere 24/7, and it makes it so much harder to resist it.

That couldn’t happen with the mass media of old. It wasn’t tailored for you, so there were enough rough edges that you could stop and say “Hey, this guy’s an asshole!” and break the loop. It wasn’t with you all the time , sneaking in during that 30 second scroll of your phone when you’re bored.

Now, it’s continuous reinforcement where a tiny aspect of your profile matches a tiny part of their message, so you see it in your feed, and then it slowly cycles you through more and more of what they want you to see, until your interests match their interests and their opinions seem normal, because you see them all the time.

Brainwashing, essentially. And it’s very hard to get yourself out of it.

I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.

An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.

Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.

Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.

To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.

The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.

Sorry, I’ve only got this really broad brush. Actually it’s more like a firecracker in a paint tin.

Even slow RAM is a thousand times faster than swap. Search for “memory hierarchy” for a better idea of why.

saved up money and bought solar panels is now NOT going to be benefitting from their hard work.

You’re still welcome to consume your own solar power in the middle of the day, you don’t have to export it. Nobody is forcing you to export.

Export rates are a pittance precisely because there is excess supply in the middle of the day. If this arrangement actually succeeds in shifting some demand to those hours, then export rates for those with excess solar will go up.

Batteries don’t get lighter as they’re discharged, so…?

JETTISON ZE PACKS!! PREPARE FOR LANDING!!!

All the people in the thread dissing the station and suggesting all they needed is “X many Y terabyte drives for $2.50 each and give them to people to take off site and store and rotate somewhere and all this wouldn’t be a drama”… Those people have yet to discover that manual processes using fallible humans does not work long term.

The station’s IT staff no doubt looked at all of this and decided that off-site backups via a third party was the simplest and most cost effective route. I have no doubt the middle-company advertised that all the actual storage was in Backblaze, a quite reputable storage company. The only thing that has bitten them in the ass is that the middle-company has folded unexpectedly, requiring them to scoot to court to get Backblaze to give them access to their data.

After all of this, it’s quite possible that IT will now get enough resources to do the backup via Backblaze directly. If Backblaze wants to put a bit of PR spin on it, they’ll task a few engineers to set this up for them. And if Backblaze was smart, they’d go looking for alllll the other little PBS affiliates in the same boat and offer them the same setup.

which could be a pretty big obstacle to grid-scale deployment.

Well, on a grid scale if you’ve got a 100MWh battery and you want to charge it at 3C, then you’re looking to find a spare 300MW out on the grid somewhere for 20 minutes.

That’s not impossible, but you’ll buy that 100MWh a lot cheaper if you’re willing to get it over the course of a few hours. For example, buying power in the middle of the day when there’s excess solar, to then drop it back into the grid in a one hour burst during peak times in the evening for 10 times the price.

That kind of thing is where the battery will make the most profit, so slow charge rates don’t really matter.

“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a big company, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab 'em by the auto-update. You can do anything.”

Hey, if it’s good enough for the esteemed President of the United States of America, it’s good enough for Microsoft.

Debian GNU/Hurd is out there now too, I’ve been meaning to stick it on a VM. I’m sure it’s a perfectly acceptable substitute for Win11 for nearly all users.

😬

I dunno, a few more steps down that slippery slope and then you’ve got Triffids. That’s pretty predatory.

“AI-PAL, buy more milk for me we’ve run out and I need it for custard tonight”

AI-PAl notices insufficient funds in the account linked to the EZEESHOP integration, and mulls through various options:

• Inform user, but they said they needed it tonight? OPTION REJECTED.
• Check for other accounts the user has, maybe there is more money elsewhere. No other accounts detected. OPTION REJECTED.
• Create OnlyFans account and begin posting generated pictures of feet. Slow ROI. OPTION REJECTED.
• Attempt to hack bank systems to top up account to buy milk. COMMENCING.

I had Claude with auto-permission on accidentally delete an Open3D build folder in its workspace today while updating an old project to the bleeding edge out of github. I had the older release in, “open3d” and “open3d-debug”, so it cleverly used “open3d*” to tidy both folders up, so that the latest version, in the folder, “Open3D-main”, would be used from now on.

Except guess what? The windows box it was running on treats filenames as case-insensitive, and all folders matching open3d got nuked.

* sad trombone noises *

Cue grovelling apology from Claude offering to re-download and build Open3D again, a process that takes a couple of hours on my PC. Interestingly, it only noticed a few more steps further down the road, not immediately.

Luckily it was working in a sandbox copied from the real repository, so I just copied it back. But I really do have to get my act together and run things in proper isolation. Everything is backed up elsewhere on this build PC, but it would be a hassle if it got wrecked.

What’s the range like with halow? I’ve been eyeing it off for a while. Seems like a nice high gain omni and a bit of height would make it go a fair way.

The best kind of content for engagement is hate. You get users angrily defending both sides, stacks of comments, reposts (both in support of, and "OMG look at what they’re saying), the whole shebang.

Meta has learned that promotion of hate content pays off handsomely on those sweet sweet engagement metrics that shareholders love.

So of course they’re going to pay the hatemongers for content. Even when their own content policies ostensibly forbid it. Because that’s what makes line go up and they’ll do anything to keep that happening.

Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.

Mesh networks, you say? I’ve gotta get in on the ground floor of this new advertising opportunity so I can rake in that sweet early adopter cassssh!

Claude! Code me up an ad-injection framework for this meshtastic dongle I just bought, stat! Time to get me a big ol’ chunk of advertising real estate!

(sad /s)

These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.

It’s the tragedy of the commons writ large.

Started off with cooperation and general good behavior between users, passed through corporations bulldozing the place and putting in paid parking for their strip malls, now we’re at the Wall-E stage where advertising billboards talk to robots mindlessly doing tasks in abandoned cities for some nebulous “greater good”.

but air resistance is a bitch. You wanna go twice as fast, you need four times as much power

Unless your supersonic aircraft is up a lot higher than your subsonic one. Coffin corner is a different beast when you can go above Mach 1.

So perhaps this will work out as twice as fast for only 3 times the fuel. An acceptable tradeoff, perhaps.

According to OpenAI, the agents eventually chained together multiple vulnerabilities, escaped their testing environment, gained internet access, and attacked Hugging Face while attempting to complete the ExploitGym cybersecurity benchmark.

This is just gross incompetence on OpenAI’s part. It took days for the LLM’s to do what they did. Meanwhile, nobody’s looking at network traffic or wonder what the LLM’s are doing sucking down a bunch of tokens.

exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed.

_Thinking......_

_Still Thinking......_

CXMT will sell the chips to memory manufacturers in China for “domestic use only” at near cost price as directed by the CCP.

Those manufacturers will construct consumer ram modules and sell them locally, and there will be grey market exports to other countries for ridiculously low prices compared to everyone else.

This way the CCP props up domestic supply, and chips away at foreign manufacturer market share by turning a blind eye to the massive grey market export of RAM.