Perfect employees! No wonder executives are rushing to replace all of their employees with AIs. This is what they've always wanted.

I just had a really, really good technician leave my lab. She was amazing. Tell her to go find a bunch of papers that support hypothesis X, and she'd come back with the goods.

The current ChatGPT 4o is almost, but not quite, as good as she was. With a really, really big difference: it's about 100 times faster.

So it isn't that you can hire 3-4 PhDs for the price they're charging for model access -- you'd have to hire 10-15, maybe 20 to get the same potential rate of information.

This statement is so much truer than I ever thought it was when I was younger. Almost every one of the significant moments in my career have happened during the socialization part of conferences.

Jets?

In early 1953, the government convened a meeting of researchers in Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of inertial navigation.
"Doc" Draper and his MIT team stuck their prototype INS unit in a B-29, but had no time to test it before flying non-stop from outside Boston.
After 2,500 miles of flying with no input from the pilots, it was only 10 miles off.
Draper went to the meeting and said that yeah, it was possible, since he'd just done it.
I feel sorry for whatever presentater followed him.

I realized the linked post about a very complex technology in an article is intended for a general audience but even by that standard it is very confused.

Chip scale atomic clocks have been commercially available for 20 years

https://www.nist.gov/noac/tech...

and continue to improve in accuracy, durability, and reliability. Reading some of the commercial supplier listings to the point just before they stop and say "DOD customers call your sales rep" it appears that there are CSACs designed and qualified to be fired inside artillery shells so I think we can conclude they can be made pretty tough.

I think the article is trying to say that what is needed is an atomic clock that would fit in an aircraft electronics rack that also has the accuracy of a cold atom fountain clock, which is the current NIST/NPL/NRC standard. To which laboratories around the world say, please, bring it on. And all the national labs have been working on such for quite a while, not only NPL.

I saw this headline before any comments and thought "wait, didn't Walmart just recently announce plans to outright buy one of the brands whose TVs they sell?" So I checked and they did, but that was Vizio, not TCL, so I decided to let it lie rather than being the first commenter. But yes, certainly, TCL is a brand I associate with Walmart.

At some point it becomes rocket fuel.

(OK, I had to look it up ... lithium ion batteries are two orders of magnitude away from rocket fuel when measured as MJ/kg.)

Brexit was an additional anvil on the pony's back, but the basic problems were not rebuilding the heavy industrial economy into a high-tech industrial economy (the US hasn't been totally successful at this but has done much better than England*) and transferring most of their wealth into the financialization center of the City. The latter is the most devastating long-term: whatever financialization and investment capital run by the 0.5% touches it destroys. And it touched most of England.

[*] yes, I do mean England not the UK. Scotland and Wales have their own problems and of course also suffer when England it damaged, but the worse effects are in English. Northern Ireland was doing OK until Brexit destroyed its value as and import/export coordinator.

"Midnight on the Firing Line" was awesome. First episode of the series (after "The Gathering").

Let's move back to Gopher

Mozilla can issue as many blog posts and "clarifications" as it likes; only the text of the EUA matters.

One thing I relied on Skype to do was support calls to US toll-free (800) numbers from abroad. That saved my patootie a number of times. Will need to find another means to do the same thing, now.

Anyone have suggestions?

It seems ridiculous and invasive on the face of it but I'm guessing Mozilla's lawyers are looking at the UK Online Safety Act, similar bills introduced into US state legislatures with a non-zero chance of enactment, and talk in the US Congress of repealing Section 230 and telling their executives that the operation of the browser - which by nature does see and pass all the information the user exchanges to/from the rest of the world - could be construed as being an accessory to violation of those laws and upcoming laws. A more extreme version of photosharing sites needing some sort of license to your work to be able to display it.

A variation of this was demonstrated a while ago:
https://www.independent.co.uk/...