FTFY: Don't use whitening agents. Your washer will implode.

Infrared are longer wavelengths. Probably too long to be trapped the way they describe. I immediately wondered about microwaves, i.e. radar. But those are way longer waves, so no as well. The reason they can put a mesh screen you can see through in the door of a microwave oven, is because the wavelength of those radio waves (that is really what they are) are so long they can't get through. Finally, black items can radiate heat, you just can't see it. So sure, if it trapped enough visible light, it could be 'converted' to a longer wavelength (infrared) as the fabric tries to shed the extra energy.

Yeah, it's not even worth considering for something like 15-20kg. A full pallet in this case is 464kg :) Years worth of supply for me.

The current "AI" is a predictive engine.

And *you* are a predictive engine as well; prediction is where the error metric for learning comes from. (I removed the word "search" from both because neither work by "search". Neither you nor LLMs are databases)

It looks at something and analyzes what it thinks the result should be.

And that's not AI why?

AI is, and has always been, the field of tasks that are traditionally hard for computers but easy for humans. There is no question that these are a massive leap forward in AI, as it has always been defined.

It is absolutely crazy that we are all very very soon going to lose access to electricity

Calm down. Total AI power consumption (all forms of AL, both training and inference) for 2025 will be in the ballpark of 50-60TWh. Video gaming consumes about 350TWh/year, and growing. The world consumes ~25000 TWh/yr in electricity. And electricity is only 1/5th of global energy consumption.

AI datacentres are certainly a big deal to the local grid where they're located - in the same way that any major industry is a big deal where it's located. But "big at a local scale" is not the same thing as "big at a global scale." Just across the fjord from me there's an aluminum smelter that uses half a gigawatt of power. Such is industry.

That "ruler study" was ancient. It's mentioned in peer review at least as early as 2018, and might be even older.

Believe it or not, people in the field are familiar with these sorts of things that you just read about.

Most of these new AI tools have gained their new levels of performance by incorporating Transformers in some form or another, in part or in whole. Transformers is the backend of LLMs.

Even in cases where Transformers isn't used these days, often it's imitated. For example, the top leaderboards in vision models are a mix of ViTs (Vision Transformers) and hybrids (CNN + transformers), but there are still some "pure CNNs" that are high up. But the best performing "pure CNNs" these days use techniques modeled after what Transformers is doing, e.g. filtering data with an equivalent of attention and the like.

The simple fact is that what enabled LLMs is enabling most of this other stuff too.

Jevons Intensifies

"You really think the region ruled by Hamas would end up being better for both the Jews and the other residents? After all their acts from Oct 7th on?"

You don't seem to be paying attention to the actions of Israel from October 7 on. Or before it for that matter. Why is that?

By stay away do you mean stop funding it? If so, how do I subscribe to your newsletter?

I wonder if it was supposed to be used in lost PLA casting and then wasn't, or if they were just very very stupid

I thought the garage was where people put their guest bedroom. :-)

Not entirely correct. It is the only *active* pad with that infrastructure. There are decommissioned pads that have been used for manned missions in the past. What state they are currently in is an unknown, but it has been speculated that equipment could be salvaged from them to repair the damaged pad.

It's because it's very difficult to imagine circumstances other than what we live in. I agree with what you're saying in general but only in general. Plenty of liberals live in small towns and plenty of conservatives live in big cities.

But a LOT of liberals have only ever lived in a big city and a lot of conservatives have only ever lived in rural areas. And for those people, a move is transformative

For the conservative, the idea that government can do anything useful seems insane. But move to a big city where government services form the backbone of your water, sewer, mass transit, snow removal, etc and it's really hard to look at government and say it can't do anything right. Government somehow keeps Chicago clear of snow. Like -- really think about that. That's an ongoing and ENORMOUS project and it goes off largely without a hitch. It's difficult to see that in person and really say "government can't do anything right."

For the liberal, the opposite is true. They've spent their life surrounded by largely competent government. They move to small town America and suddenly the entire local government is run via the good-ol-boys network. Distance makes it all but impossible to actually get services to the people who need them. Taxes seem like they take a lot out of your pocket and don't put much back.

The problem is that our votes -- especially at the national level -- govern both groups.

I've done my first test of buying a whole pallet of filament straight from a Chinese manufacturer. It's a risk - it could be all junk - but if it's usable, the price advantage is insane. Like $3/kg for PETG at the factory gate (like $5/kg after sea freight and our 24% VAT). Versus local stores which sell for like $30/kg.