LostXOR

I’m so glad I deleted my Instagram account.

It’s a good plot for a book, but as for actually happening in the real world haha no way.

That comes out to a speed of 7.5km/h or 4.7mph, barely above a brisk walk. Good to know if I ever need to outrun humanoid robots it won’t be hard. (The self-driving cars are another matter).

Robots are a lot more energy efficient than humans. Human muscles are around 25% efficient while robotic motors can be >90%. However they lose massively in energy density. 100 grams of carbs has 1.7 MJ of energy, which is equivalent to 2-3kg of lithium batteries. A human can run for hours on a kg of calorie dense foods, while a robot would need a bulky battery or constant battery swaps/recharges.

A small test reactor paves the way for bigger, more practical reactors. You can’t start with a full-sized gigawatt model; you need to test and validate your designs at a small scale first.

Let me guess, the old “change the text background to black” redaction trick? A classic.

Minecraft itself is really easy to pirate; if you don’t mind it not being open source you could just do that.

Dang, everyone else here has 4 or 5 figures while I’m sitting at $101. And I know for a fact 40% of that was Kerbal Space Program.

I’m guessing how that goes is you pay them, they do actually make you a page, it gets quickly deleted for not meeting Wikipedia’s standards, and then they go “sorry no refunds”. Step 0 to getting a Wikipedia page about yourself is to be notable enough for one, which >99.9% of people are not.

Yeah honestly that’s fair.

By the time I need to upgrade it’ll probably be more cost effective for me to drive the few hours to Canada and buy PC hardware there. Wouldn’t mind a trip to a more sane country honestly.

New tariffs could raise iPhone prices by about 40% in the U.S.

Apple’s overpriced phones have quite a high profit margin; surely they could absorb most of the tariff costs while still making a profit? Or would that not be greedy enough for them?

Ah yes, let me pay $450 for a console that I have to pay an additional $80 for every game I want to play. What a sound financial decision.

Even so I think it would be totally reasonable for them to block web scrapers, as they provide better ways to download all their data.

Computers: Have a whole variety of standardized ways to allow software to communicate with peripherals.

Coolify: Hmm… How about Wi-Fi?

Sell it to the merpeople, they’ll be happy to have a proper house for once!

Quantum entangled particles can’t influence each other; they just allow you to infer information about one particle by observing the other. It’s like if you randomly put a red and a blue ball in two different boxes without looking, then moved them far apart. Opening one box and seeing a red ball instantly tells you the other box has a blue ball, no matter the distance, but no information has been transmitted faster than the speed of light (because the boxes can only move slower than light).

True, my estimate for tokens may have been a bit low. Assuming a 7 hour school day where someone talks at 5 tokens/sec you’d encounter about 120k tokens. You’re off by 3 orders of magnitude on your energy consumption though; 1 watt-hour is 0.86 food Calories (kcal).

Around a year ago I bet a friend $100 we won’t have AGI by 2029, and I’d do the same today. LLMs are nothing more than fancy predictive text and are incapable of thinking or reasoning. We burn through immense amounts of compute and terabytes of data to train them, then stick them together in a convoluted mess, only to end up with something that’s still dumber than the average human. In comparison humans are “trained” with maybe ten thousand “tokens” and ten megajoules of energy a day for a decade or two, and take only a couple dozen watts for even the most complex thinking.

I liked generative AI more when it was just a funny novelty and not being advertised to everyone under the false pretenses of being smart and useful. Its architecture is incompatible with actual intelligence, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just fooling themselves. (It does make an alright autocomplete though).