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Comment Re:There is no single use case (Score 1) 129

You're both right but talking about different things. They are talking about battery storage as a grid supplier in a time of need. MW numbers quoted here are very much in terms power provided by batteries, not total energy stored. CAISO had over 49GWh of energy capacity back in 2024 already.

It is industry nomenclature to call power provided by storage facilities "storage" and talk about MW or GW when talking about how much it can instantaneously provide to the grid. These units don't come from journalists, they come from the California Energy Commission directly.

Comment Re:MW is not storage! (Score 1) 129

MW is storage, or rather the power provided to the grid by storage. The journos got it right as far as the nomenclature used by the California Energy Commission. They are talking about power capacity provided from storage. It's 17GW from battery storage. The actual stored energy capacity (I don't have current numbers) but was already 49GWh back in 2024 when the storage system only provided 12GW total.

Comment Re:VR requirements (Score 1) 32

VR is guaranteed flop

There are more VR headsets that Nintendo 64s and Gamecubes combined, and the VR community is very active. It's a niche yes, but there's nothing "flop" about it. The question is one of price and performance. Apple flopped on price.

Also listing weight along shows you have no idea what you're talking about. Weight distribution on the head and the head mounting arrangement is orders of magnitude more critical than weight alone. The 100g numbers is arbitrary and useless.

Comment Re:I just want a nice VR headset for my PC (Score 1) 32

No, the latency is a number that is bigger than you arbitrarily care it to be, nothing more, nothing less. Latency always exists, the question is what is the performance criteria required for the latency number.

That's where you fall down. You play racing games? Great. Now tell us how the 70ms affects you directly. Right now you're only complaining about a number, nothing more. You've provided no objective performance criteria, nor defined how it affects you.

We've tested both ways extensively, and the extra 16.67 ms is noticed in blind testing. It matters.

I call bullshit on your blind testing. The requirements for a test setup to measure this in a blind way are extensive, and frankly useless to anyone unless you can link to your university paper where you've done so.

Anyway the reality speaks against you. What you measure, what you care about is irrelevant. The reality is virtually no consumers give a shit about latency that's even worse than the product you are talking about here and are successfully using it every day.

Don't like it? Don't buy it. But don't pretend it is unsuitable to produce a product with better performance than other products that countless people have already agreed is suitable.

Comment Re:Sounds about right (Score 3, Interesting) 13

1. It did not happen

2. The two papers are not similar in their approaches. And the OpenAI one is more innovative and tackles a much harder problem (Buckmaster had only solved Euler).

3. Buckmaster distorted what happened. For example, the claim that he asked for Levent to be removed from his own paper the paper because he worked for OpenAI? The context is that one option that OpenAI proposed to Buckmaster was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It was in the context of having Tristan rewrite OpenAI's proof to take claim for it that Bubeck said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because he felt it would be inappropriate to invite an Anthropic employee to rewrite an OpenAI paper.

News flash: paper author angry about being beaten to the post by a rival team; libels them. Details at 11.

Comment AI companies stealing business secrets? (Score 2) 13

Could anyone seriously be surprised to find that AI companies utilize this perfect scenario where naive people voluntarily hand over all their "business secrets" to them? Other "cloud"-services at least had to put in the effort to comb through all what is stored on the computers they rent out in order to find something of value to sell... but hosted LLM services pretty much only get the "interesting latest development" stuff handed to by their users, and those users already pay for the service to semantically analyze these inputs. A dream scenario for data brokers.

Comment Should have made an AI agent the lawyer (Score 1) 26

"Human lawyer using AI tool" clearly is not the way to go these days, instead the lawyer should have been replaced by an AI agent (owned by some big corporation), because we all know when such AI agents do wrong, nobody gets fined, and the event would even be good for some marketing press releases.

Comment Every company wants its own VR flop (Score 2) 32

It almost appears as if every vaguely related company out there really wants to experience a VR investment flop of their own, like it is a trophy to put up on your wall. I don't see any compelling reason why "this time" specifically their new VR headset should find an audience outside of the relatively small group that already enthusiastically tested the previously existing ones. I for one have had my 15 minutes of "ok, cool effect, but now let's do something else"-experience with a number of those devices, and I really don't see how the next one could lure me into wearing a headset for any extended period of time. (And no, it is not nausea I experience with VR headsets, I just think they are uncomfortable to wear.)

Comment Re:Half Life: Alyx _was_ a good game (Score 1) 32

You're applying an early adopter approach to products which are no longer early adopter category. At the start of any new technology you can expect precisely the problems you described, it was an incompatible cluster**** of problems.

But that was close to a decade ago now. The reality today is that anything that works on the Quest 3 that supports the hardware of the Quest 2 still works on that 6 year old headset. The reality is that anything you bought on PCVR for the a Rift CV1 back when you connected cables to your headset from your GPU in 2016 still works today on the current line-up.

Time to update your knowledge of the industry.

And frankly I've never head of Half-Life Alyx not running on *ANY* headset. Being a PCVR game targeting SteamVR means it runs completely independently of anything any headset manufacturer does. If your headset still supports the Oculus API, or Revive for the Vive API, or supports WMR, then there's zero reason that Alyx would crash for any reason other than you screwing up something on your PC. Alyx doesn't care what hardware you use, it only sees the SteamVR API.

Comment Re:I just want a nice VR headset for my PC (Score 3, Informative) 32

There's nothing "foolish" about this. One of the biggest problems with early VR was tethering via cable. It was a miserable experience in every way and on that not infrequently caused people to actually ruin their headsets.

As for the latency, sorry but you are talking rubbish. VR is one of the most latency sensitive things we do. The slightest latency causes motion sickness and makes any fast paced gaming impossible to play. And yet both work perfectly fine with countless PCVR fans happily using the system from everything to high speed rhythm games to fast paced shooters.

The latency issue is something complained about by people who have not used the product. What you want is something you made up in your head, not a realistic requirement.

Comment Re:They distilled human knowledge (Score 1) 94

Yeah, I used to do that too. Decided to stop bothering with the quotation marks a couple months ago.

We're not going to spend the rest of our lives putting quotations around words when talking about models. "Think" and "reason" the words we have in English for what is going on. No need to tiptoe around it. Again: models are not humans. They are not the same as us. But those are the words we have in English for what they're doing.

Comment Re:They distilled human knowledge (Score 1) 94

They are, by definition, Markov chains.

Even in your attempt to be pedantic here (in which the universe and everything within it is a Markov chain), no, it's not. The hardware state is Markovian but the linguistic processing is a Nth order autoregressive process; it depends on the N previous states. Also, your argument is akin to saying "a Boeing 747 is just an arrangement of quarks, so don't get hung up on aerodynamics." it entirely ignores the relevant architectural details, and instead substitutes a model that blows up exponentially explodes in size within a small number of states.

If you tried to build a Markov model to do what LLMs do, and could store one probability in every unit of Planck space across every unit of Planck time, it couldn't handle a prompt longer than about 2/3rds of the first sentence to A Tale of Two Cities.

Comment Re:AI Goes to the Moon (Score 1) 7

It would be good if it could locate lava tubes as well. Unlike lava tubes on Earth those on the Moon and Mars are sometimes kilometers wide and can run for hundreds of kilometers. if the interior of a section could be sealed it would create a huge habitat for minimal investment.

Comment The illusion of US model superiority (Score 1) 94

The scores of Chinese models like Kimi K3 are pretty much the same as the scores of the US frontier models - even if you could somehow prevent "distilling from US models", that would mean nothing for the rest of the world. And since several Chinese models are open-weight already, there are no horses left any AI company could keep in their barn. (Even if those horses were not stolen from others, before.)

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