There’s Matilda, the widow who built her web by the front door. She comes out each night. I haven’t seen Gretchen, the garage widow, in a few months.

The inside has a bunch of pholcidae, many of whom are getting collossal. If you get too close they do frantic press-ups in their webs.

Thank you for creating arachnid content!

That mechanic is what’s letting them succeed.

Rather than winner-take-all elections where Party B spends 4 years unwinding everything Party A did in the last 4 years, the decisions can be made inside a party framework built for continuity.

A legitimately interesting take.

I can see two angles:

1. AGI is implicitly expected to become ASI because many useful technologies have scaled to levels natural evolution didn’t.

Our strongest weightlifters didn’t grow into thousand-horsepower cranes. Our quickest math savants are not cranking out a teraflop of FP32. But conversely, that’s why cranes and CPUs are economically interesting.

2. Not really sure being able to carry on a plausible conversation on a “new subject” like the game example is much of an evidence of intelligence. ELIZA did it with a few kilobytes of RAM and some manually hardcoded rules. Having a huge set of training data just expands the opportunity for a plausible match.

I think the lack of self-improvement and finite contexts are sort of damning. Outside of rare neurological disorders, I can’t make intelligent people forget how to ride a bike by reading the phone book to them.

That’s a dangerous metaphor to bring to the table. People will start talking about Wayland like it’s just some sort of bottom surgery, but it’s actually way more risky and regretted.

Gender’s more like a window manager. It provides a set of conventional frameworks for how you make yourself beautiful, but if it’s breaking your workflow or won’t give you the tools you want, shop around.

AFAB: Assigned FVWM At Boot.

At this point I can see parallels with Intel in the 2000s.

If you remember then, they went all in on the Pentium 4/“Netburst” architecture. It was sort of a dog from day 1. It ran hot, it wasn’t very powerful, you needed purpose built power supplies and weird RAM at first. But it was the future because they planned to scale it to 10GHz which would make up for all its limitations. Sounds a lot like AI-- it’s expensive and still dodgy, but the planned future design solves it all.

Narrator Voice: they never made it to 10GHz. Even at 3.8 it still sucked, and the thermals and power needs made it unviable to go further.

The LLM industry is flogging their metaphoric 3.6GHz Pentium 4 now. Maybe you can get one or two more sales cycles out of the current paradigm, but not much more. If a costlier trillion parameter model is only marginally better than a 200B model (that was only marginally better than a 25B one…), how do the economics justify the hundred-trillion parameter model? Training costs likely rise nonlinearly, too. It becomes harder to find fresh content for the model. If we need to scan vintage out of print books, we must have exhausted the easier sources.

Whether you’re a true believer really chasing AGI or just surfing the grift, you’re going to have to pivot hard soon if you have any business strategy that avoids commoditization. We’re reaching the largest economically feasible versions of the current design. Intel survived by having such a pivot in their pocket; the replacement Core series CPUs were originally the “B-team” designs for laptop chips quickly scaled for a new use case. Does any big-dollar AI platform have something that paradigm-breaking to drop?

I know every so often there will be a small fad for making low-powere desktops from laptop CPUs.

Wouldn’t soldering a mobile GPU on an x16 card be a business model if thry’re more available/affordable?

I recall during the crypto fiasco they tried to sell crippled cards (not sure how much was hardware vs drivers) that wouldn’t hash as fast to make it look like they were throwing a bone to gamers, but here the mask is totally off that thr core constituency is gone.

There are quite a few shops like that for reptiles, likely because of the special care requirements.

On the one hand, you don’t want a minimum-wage no-training staffer who cam barely keep a hamster fed killing a $4000 lizard by not setting the heat and humidity right.

On another, it’s sort of weird to sell pet and feeder rodents together.

I can sort of see the vision, even if the execution is sus. A car designed as “self driving first” provides a chance to reconsider interior design. I figure we’ll know self-driving has arrived when there’s a keg mounted between the front seats, or maybe the front seats swivel 360 degrees if the “driver” no longer has to keep an eye on the road.

I could see offering a different workflow for “emergency move the car out of traffic”, like a plug-in override console limited to 5km/h or something.

Comparable: they used to make railway locomotives designed without a full cab, since they were usually sold in sets with another loco with a full cab. You could decouple them and they had a minimal control stand just useful to nudge them around, but you wouldn’t want to out one up front.

And yet I can imagine an even stupider idea: to allow first-responders override access, let them pair an Xbox 360 controller to operate the vehicle.

This goes swimmingly until one picks up a family visiting a GameStop.

I don’t get it either.

If they said “requires a beefy dGPU or one of the handful of high-bandwidth APUs” that feels like it would make more sense than just 64G RAM. I thought most models weren’t optimized to run on a CPU even with gobs of RAM.

And plenty of firms don’t ship their devs 64G machines, especially in ghe current RAM crunch. Mine sent me a 16G machine in like 2023 and only replaced it with 32 on request because Win11+Docker were heavier than the old Win10/external server workflow.

Up to 1990, PRC banknotes had different portraits. I suspect many of them were “representatives” for different types of labourer or ethnic groups rather than idolizing a single figure.

For example https://en.numista.com/211574

The 100-yuan of the series features Mao with three other early leaders of the republic, but the lower notes are representatives.

Didn’t they figure this out the first time two kids had to cut a cake?

Make sure the “out” group has to approve the gerrymander the “in” group drew.

If the committee that draws the maps is 75% red, the committee that approves it has to be 75% blue.

It just came out.

There was an outcry a few years back where they prepared the whole movie and intended to scrap it rather than releasing it for tax purposes.

It’s not half bad, given the material they’re working with.

The Fisher brand was named after Avery Fisher who founded the company. They were very well regarded in the tube era, but after solid-state took over, they got sold a few times and ended up in Sanyo’s portfolio where they dragged around as a low-end brand until the 1990s.

I have one of their early 1980s amplifiers which is fairly heavy, but not nearly as well put together as most '70s kit.

I’ve been using the CoW compositor lately and it has a neat, but possibly accidental, feature:

You get that “virtual desktop with additional screen space” feature, as was common on older X11 setups, with a little minimap that shows the real screens within the context of the virtual space. What’s unusual is that it’s possible to move the individual screens on a multi-monitor rig independently, rathrr than as a group.

Great, when can I get the organs on AliExpress? I could use a couple backup pancreases.

Instead of selling loosie cigarettes, you should sell the individually wrapped packets of saltines like you get with chili at a low-end restaurant by the till. Show you care about the customers’ health.

And instead of an “automotive” section that contains two bottles of motor oil that long ago seperated into its component chemicals and one filter that fits only a 1992 Daihatsu Charade, there should be an entire Dongfeng DF4d diesel passenger locomotive in the middle of aisle 3. Again, it’s all about nudge philosophy: stock the alternatives that customers should be choosing.

I think it’s the easy gotcha. “A planned economy wouldn’t generate your beloved Geforce 4090/Warhammer figures/boxes of comics.”

Maybe with sensible labour planning there would be enough free time and broad access to disposable income for art and culture, evwn popular forms.

She has such beautiful eyes (insert blobcat emoticon with hearts)