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Comment LLM embeds the image, not the same (Score 1) 57

This isn't a fair comparison. The amazing LLM "compression" is simply the LLM reproducing an image that it was been trained on and is recalling by reference. That's not compression the way most people think about it.

There are already compression algorithms that require a large shared data library on the decompression side that is used improve efficiency. It can drastically improve on zip, arj, rar, .gz etc but that's sort of cheating. Compression algorithms that don't use a library must embed the equivalent data in the archive itself rather than presume it's available.

Comment Turbines limited by material science (Score 1) 58

Modern industry and military researchers have spent decades trying to increase combustion temperatures in turbines in order to maximize performance, but inevitably the material science can’t keep up. Modern turbofans are materials strained above 900c and limited to 1400c. For an industrial process the lower end is a more practical bound. It is tough to beat combustion for a heat process.

Comment A bad result from a bad prompt (Score 1) 62

Putting Black Mirror in such a short prompt is what lead to the mash up of black mirror plots as an output.

A more clever prompt might be: write me a story about a near future period when a current technology has advanced further. The technology seems helpful at first but is now a negative for people is its advanced form.

As a second prompt ask ChatGPT to write the resulting story in the style of a black mirror episode

Comment Only LT Solution: Get a cheapy x86 PC (Score 1) 77

The ecosystem battles are ridiculous but here we are. The best long term solution is an old laptop or reasonably efficient desktop tucked into cabinet with hdmi to the TV. Virtually every service supports PC and always will. It takes some effort to get the interface clean but at least you get control. There are some ok media PC “remotes” out there to help.

Lots of us have old hardware in a closet or just get a laptop with a broken screen off ebay for cheap.

Comment Re:Rare earths required (Score 2) 111

Static weight on the top of the turbine matters very little. The overwhelming load consideration for a turbine is air pressure on the blades. That increases tremendously while they are spinning and harvesting power.

Direct drive generators with rare earth magnets are preferred offshore because of lower maintenance and improved efficiency, but in fact are *heavier* than induction. Induction motors use a gear box that is prone to wearing out but allows for a much smaller, lighter, faster spinning generator. it's right there on Wikipedia.

Most rare earths are not that rare just messy to extract, concentrate and purify, but once we have the material it will be recycled forever. The sooner we have that Nd in spinning magnets the sooner we are displacing carbon heavy generation sources. North sea offshore wind is a no brainer, especially considering the limited local solar resources from cloudy conditions and high latitude.

Comment Re:Hope this will spur the ARM world standardize (Score 1) 274

GPUs are one of the main offenders. I messed around with linux based SBCs for a while and they end up being stuck with a particular kernel and distro most of the time. The binaries just won’t play nicely with anything new and update to date. It’s a real shame and I don’t see anything fixing it.

Comment Re:I can relate (Score 1) 75

In fact "making peace" with your tinnitus and doing your best to ignore it is one of the few existing therapies. Fixating on the sound can strengthen it.

I have a high pitch whine all the time despite limited exposure to loud noise. My ears are just really sensitive. Ok, now I'm fixating on the sound... time to go back to ignoring it.

Comment Re: Storage (Score 1) 117

In this instance temperature keeping is pretty easy. Heat transfer is proportional to surface area while capacity is is proportional to volume. At scale, the surface area to volume ratio gets tiny such that losses are tiny. Your lab dewar flask is not a good proxy.

Also keeping the liquefied air cold is as simple as letting a bit boil off as needed. The vaporization takes huge amounts of heat with it. It's a loss for sure but small. Even lithium batteries have some self discharge to contend with. This whole operation is done on LNG tankers - it's well worn territory.

Comment Re:Engineer or Engineering Leader? (Score 2) 140

I have a different take. His previous development work existed purely in the digital domain. Even if he was successful running huge projects previously I think autonomous driving is a different beast that he was poorly prepared for.

For autonomous driving you need to integrate noisy sensor data from a chaotic real world environment and somehow use that data in a logic process that makes repeatably good decisions and fails gracefully. You need to understand the abilities and limits of the sensors, the range of operating environments and you need to iterate in consultation with the sensor engineers to improve the data delivered into the software in a cost effective way. This is all "get your hands dirty" real world engineering - not his background.

They hired a coder when they should have hired an engineer.

Comment Deep Space? Shielding is #1 problem (Score 3, Interesting) 120

Humans in deep space for any length of time will need serious shielding to avoid the health risks of ionizing radiation (gamma rays, etc). Traditional shielding is heavy and crowds out payload. Without a breakthrough in shielding manned space flight can't leave our planet's protection (the magnetosphere) for any length of time. No moon base - at least on the surface, no Mars missions, no Lagrange point space stations.

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