As a patient with metastatic cancer, my story is on the other side. I was going around to Dr's for a year or more trying to figure out why I was feeling more and more exhausted. (I say Dr's but don't remember if I ever got seen by more than a nurse practitioner). I kept saying I felt like it was something physical, but got sidetracked into psychiatry. I had visible lumps under my skin and everybody said, well it's probably just lipomas. In the end I got undeniable symptoms and was finally given a chest xray, which (unlike an MRI) costs like $99. By then it had spread everywhere. So far I have lived almost a year, which at one point was deemed highly unlikely, but it has cost my insurers well over $1M and counting.

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

If you can use your phone to control everything, then the only device you need with you is your phone.

And when you lose your phone or it's stolen? Or if it somehow gets bricked after an upate? Or gets compromised?

There's this thing called single point of failuare.

Agreed. If someone wants a movie or music or software, they can request it from the owners and can only use the item they were specifically given permission to use. Otherwise, they have to pay for it.

Legally that makes sense. Although, I really think AI's paying content producers for providing access to their information is the right way to go, long term. If NYT is going to hire reporters to go places and find out stuff somebody has to pay for it. AI is great partially because it bypasses the horrendous mess the Web has become, but that's too good to last.

The only reason they deleted the databases was because they were let go by Trump. Most likely because they were Biden hires.

How many other hackers who have served time are subsequently hired by the government? Should we complain about that as well? We know of at least one who ran a site which offered services to hackers, and he was given the keys to the kingdom. How much private data do you think he exfiltrated?

The real issue is, once again, a private company didn't follow basic security procedures and let these two have access while they were being fired. Standard practice is to disable all access and escort from building when being fired. Neither was done in this case.

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.

I'd love to see someone try to 3d print with a filament that melts at 162K. Where do you even buy xenon filament? ;)