I don't think it's particularly hard or anything. The bigger issue is getting it signed by Microsoft. Because it's a very low level driver that can interact with critical parts of the hardware, like controlling your fans and power management, the bar is naturally a bit higher than a driver for some random USB device. Therefore every time it gets updated, Microsoft has to check it and sign off on it.

There was some company that was updating it, basically just rebuilding it to keep it compatible with the latest Windows version and getting the driver re-signed. Really though it's something Microsoft should take on themselves and create an API for. I think Gamers Nexus were trying to create some common API for RGB, but I don't know how far they got.

It's going to get nasty when home batteries and solar really start to become the norm and being totally reliant on the grid gets much more expensive. It's inevitable as the cost of solar and batteries keeps falling, while the cost of distribution stays the same or rises due to climate change. As ever, it will be expensive to be poor and not be able to make the up-front investment.

It might not just be a lack of appropriate compensation, although that is chronic in my country. It takes time to train people in this technology, and there is sometimes no substitute for experience. There are lots of different people needed too - some to install the batteries, some to handle the electrical side at the local level, and some to deal with them at the grid level. There can be delays anywhere along the chain.

If you look at how China did it, the government said that adding battery capacity should get priority, and even then it took them a few years to really ramp up. Also their grid is quite different, newer and with less regulatory capture. 220V as well, giving them a bit of an edge with things like EV charging and heat pumps.

Hopefully they make significant gains when it comes to maintainability and readability as well. A lot of AI generated code looks superficially properly commented, decent variable names, that sort of thing, but in reality is a pain to deal with and only likely to ever be worked on again by more AI.

I'm reasonably confident I have a pretty good understanding of what doing math is like given that I'm a published mathematician. Heck, I'll be a little egotistical and just to my own recent paper directly https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL29/Zelinsky/zel14.html. But this also isn't terribly relevant.

LLMs have been very good at doing searches. But they've done a lot of things that are pretty obviously not mere searches. For example, in the case of Erdos 1196, the LLM solution constructed a Markov chain using a weighing via the von Mangoldt function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mangoldt_function. That wasn't in the literature at all. In the case of the Jacobian Conjecture for n=3, the AI constructed a complicated polynomial which was certainly not in the literature, since the entire reason the polynomial is of interest is as a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture.

It is true that a Fields Medalist does not imply expertise in other areas. But these are people who have also spent time working with these systems. And understanding *how* an LLM functions in this way isn't as important as them being able to see what the system can do. One can evaluate that a black box is useful for specific purposes without knowing anything about how the black box functions. And this is not just the Fields Medalists, this is almost the entire community of mathematicians, including people like the one I linked to who is explicitly very anti-AI. This doesn't mean that they are necessarily correct by itself. But it should be a pretty serious warning that these are not mere "morons" here and that you possibly are just mistaken about what capabilities these systems have.

No one needs to believe in magic to see that these systems are highly useful to do mathematics, At this point even the mathematicians who are unhappy about AI use and are advocating mathematicians not use AI are more than willing to acknowledge that in practice these systems are able to do a lot of math, but think that other ethical concerns mean they should not be used. See e.g. https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/08/09/the-ai-dissenter-viewpoint/ . At a certain point, it should occur to you that if nearly the entire mathematical community thinks these systems are powerful and useful, and that includes Fields Medalists like Terence Tao, James Maynard, and Tim Gowers, that maybe the people you disagree with are not "morons."

Not what is going on. While we initially thought that having these systems try to generate Lean proofs or proofs in another formal language would be a good approach (Deepseek tried that for example), almost all the success has been with models reasoning in natural language and only after they've constructed a natural language proof has there then been attempts to solve the problem in Lean. As you can see here https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/1625eff6-5ac1-40d8-b1db-5d5cf925de8b/unit-distance-cot.pdf there's no use of Lean. And in that case, there could not have been Lean usage, because while the proof was later verified by mathematicians, it uses a whole bunch of algebraic number theory ideas which were not yet defined in Lean when it ran. You can look at other traces as well. The brute force here is not randomly generated constructions but rather trying a whole bunch of different methods and then seeing what works. The Unit Distance conjecture reasoning chain looks pretty close to what I'd expect to see if a mathematician kept a very careful diary of all their attempts on the problem over a multiyear period.

The UK is never going to deploy vast amounts of solar, we donâ(TM)t have the insolation for it.

Indeed, but even so, we do get enough that relatively expensive rooftop solar is generally worth it.

But we sure as shit have the wind (and tidal) and thereâ(TM)s all the rest to do as well: EAFs, induction cookers, heat pumps, EVs, blah. We need to race or be left in the dust, like Americans with their shitty payments systems with cheques etc (and obviously with fossil fuels too).

Yep, we have a lot of wind, especially now with modern offshore building techniques.

I think with the right investment and incentives, we can also focus on batch industrial processes, things like arc furnaces and electric cement kilns which can be spun up and down fast enough to deal with weather variations where necessary. Sure depreciation is a bit of a pain, but having free energy in order to dump excess capacity is quite compelling.

Multiple reasons.

One is they have a very high power density, both specific and volumetric. You need quite a lot of power to vapourise water and lithium is the winner here. Largely speaking, small, especially disposable vapes appear to be limited by the power density of battery chemistries not the energy density.

Pouch cells are also really good for small batteries because they don't have a prismatic metal shell, and they can easily be made to custom shapes.

It is an incredible waste of resources.

I don't want to spend $150 on a quality headset that will become trash in just 2 or 3 years when the battery dies. But what choice do I have?

Buy a pair of fairbuds?

Brilliant! Why don't we find those "waste managers" and give them a good talking to, maybe even a vigorous finger wagging. I will find my waste manager forthwith and maybe fire him. Then maybe ask my butler to find a new one.

For the rest of the plebs who don't have a waste manger, they chuck stuff in the recycling bin. Unfortunately a small but significant number of arseholes chuck bad shit in there too.

That's 830K GBP average per fire which seems... rather high.

It's... not.

Most of the fires pass without notice and the facility will be back up and running in an hour or two. Occasionally one gets out of hand and a £40mn facility burn to the ground.

An two hour outage isn't free either, but the majority of the cost come from the occasional incredibly destructive one.

Don't these places have some form of on site fire detection and suppression? like some fire hoses or something.

I mean sure you can assume everyone who works in a field you know nothing about is a massive bunch of numpties who can't think of basic things like installing fire suppression. Or...

Well tell you what, if you're in the UK, why not come to the RWM expo in Birmingham (might even be free to non exhibitors) and have a look at the somewhat impressive range of industrial fire suppression equipment available for waste facilities. E.g.

https://www.ess-expo.co.uk/202...

These facilities have fire suppression. Lots of it, with massive water reserves and often diesel pumps in case the electricity supply goes down. And fire detection in a very dusty environment is also hard because too many false positives will overwhelm your operating margins.

.

Hopefully now this has been proven to work, we can accelerate the process.

The issue is political. A lot of people in London and the wider are poor, and can't afford a new car or even a used EV when petrol bangers are as little as a few hundred quid. At least sales of new ones are increasing steadily, and the Chinese manufacturers are offering them at reasonable prices. That competition seems to have driven down prices from European, Japanese, and Korean manufacturers too.

If they just popped out they could be reused cheaply. Most of them are going to be fine, ready to re-use without any more than a simple test. Some people collect them and build their own home batteries out of discarded vapes.

We could do with an EU level rule that such batteries must be removable without tools and use a standard JST connector.

In this case it's an open source driver that is the problem. Specifically this one: https://www.highrez.co.uk/Down...

The maintainer abandoned it, but everyone kept using it because it's the only real option for apps (including open source ones like Open Hardware Monitor) to access the motherboard SMBUS which controls fans and RGB lighting, among other things.

It's not clear exactly what the cause of the crash is, but it may be related to anti-cheat tech which basically rootkits Windows and then panics when it sees certain drivers installed.