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Comment Re:Damn, I'm old (Score 1) 91

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 1) 71

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

Comment Re:That makes sense. (Score 4, Interesting) 70

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

Comment Curl ism’t myths “target" (Score 1) 63

As I understand it Mythos’ “big leap” is not in finding specific flaws it is in chaining them together into a “bigger” flaw. So finding a minor issue in curl that lets you put a file where you shouldn’t, plus a flaw in something that assumes some file location is “safe” and it doesn’t have to parse things with an advassery in mind, plus a flaw in something that relies on that thing, and so on.

When doing that kind of security work you don’t need to find a bunch of significant flaws in each tool, just a minor flaw in places that turn out to be useful when combined with say up to 9 other minor flaws. So from the viewpoint of cUrl which doesn’t rely on a lot of other tools to provide its services nothing has changed. The pain is experienced on a wider scale like over a whole OS where there are a lot of tools any of which might contribute a minor flaw so Mythos can find way to gain “the prize” (maybe remote execution, or a privilege escalation, or both).

Maybe a better way to think about Mythos is it doesn’t have to hyper focus on one tool like “can I break into the system using cUrl?” (and is not actually any better at that question then prior AI), but it does a far far better job at answering the question “can I break into the system using up to a dozen or so flaws together out of this pool of 1000+ tools?”. I assume it may be a bit better at finding flaws in single tool if the flaws require putting more bugs together or more steps to reach the state where an existing flaw shows up, but again that isn’t the big deal. The big deal is at a system level it puts multiple sub-critical flaws together to combine into a critical flaw. (queue transformers joke here)

Comment So I guess the real question is is... (Score 1) 46

Is Cuda a lock in because there is a critical mass of solutions written in Cuda and people that think about problems in terms of Cuda already so nothing is really going to unseat it that isn’t a close clone of Cuda and making one of this is for some reason impossible, or is the problem that you can make something else that lets you be expressive in the imprint ways Cuda is while giving the backend the same kind of flexibility to schedule operations, but nobody else has made one that isn’t “too buggy” to use on real world problems?

In the distant past very few C/C++ complies existed, they were “too complex” for small companies to make, and now we have very few commercial compilers and a billion open source projects that are all forks of gcc or llvm (or a fork of a fork of the llvm derived clang). We don’t have a billion non-C derived programming environments though (we have a few, JavaScript is popular, and I’ll argue Java is C-derived, although removing pointers form C doesn’t leave a lot, so I’ll also accept it as a distinct environment, but if so, so is Swift, and Rust also counts as distinct...still that is only handful). It doesn’t prove a lot, but I would say even the moat of a programming language and environment only lasts so long.

Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 3, Insightful) 71

there's no long term impact. it's just for construction.

Do you actually believe that? I mean, yeah sure “we asked them what was up and they gave a flimsy excuse” doesn’t mean you have to believe it!

The only thing that points towards them maybe telling the truth is it might be obvious if the data center were operating and you don’t want to get caught in a provable lie. However it is also possible the data center is partly operating while construction continues and they figure “hey there aren’t people coming and going, who will know if the data center is operating as opposed to testing equipment if we get caught!”.

Comment My suspicion (Score 2) 70

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Comment Meanwhile, at Carnegie Mellon... (Score 4, Interesting) 185

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

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