“GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks. Chinese AI lab Z.ai’s latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster”. #simonw #AI
simple cluelessness and complex cluelessness in #EA. #toread
#Anthropic system card #PDF: “Claude #Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available.” #security
discussion of #Bitcoin and #QC #security #toread #cryptocurrencies
Neha Narula advocates post-#QC designs for #Bitcoin, somehow. #security #toread #cryptocurrencies
#hardware #electronics explanation of “process corners”.
discussion of #spreadsheets and in particular Maas Lalani’s TUI program called #sheets.
#Geohot plans to own a zettaflops of 4-bit flops before he dies. “$10M for the machine. $10M for the solar panels. $10M for the land and construction.”. #AI #performance #futurism
nostrademons reports that #Google’s biggest regret was not using #ECC RAM in their early cheap servers, because, “If you look through the source code & postmortems from that era of Google, there are all sorts of nasty hacks and system design constraints that arose from the fact that you couldn’t trust the bits that your RAM gave back to you.” #fault-tolerance
this guy, "Mark K", says he can’t put a photo of his face on his #Microsoft account because it gets flagged as child pornography by #PhotoDNA. #privacy
files for #3D-printing a nice-looking #Wago junction box
files for #3D-printing another nice-looking #Wago junction box
Spectrum PET-G FR V0 flame-resistant #3D-printing filament for US$60/kg. “The filament is designed according to UL 94 V0* flammability rating requirements, meaning that the vertical burning of the filament or printed part does not exceed 10 seconds.”
“#Hegel is a universal property-based #testing protocol and family of libraries, built on #Hypothesis.” #PBT
#mpweiher’s blog post about KVO observers and Cocoa “bindings” in #Objective-C (which he thinks are too hard to debug: “They are too simplistic, too fragile and solve too little of the actual problem to be worth the trouble. It is easier to just write that damn state maintenance code, and infinitely easier to debug it.”) and #reactive programming. Embeds a video of Borning’s ThingLab. #toread
the original hosting of #Eliezer’s #fiction #Harry-Potter and the Methods of Rationality
WP article on #Eliezer’s #fiction #Harry-Potter and the Methods of Rationality
#Maciej predicts #Artemis-II might crash tomorrow. “It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?” #space #flying
“#Artemis-II Heatshield Concerns” 18 pages. #space #flying
“the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment” as documented by Bloom in 01984. #education
“Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: his consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death.” #many-worlds
The USSR farmed Kazakh dandelions in WWII for #rubber #materials, and Continental has been selling bicycle tires made from them since 02019. #history
Gay terminology I wasn’t familiar with: “Power bottom: A dominant person who prefers to be on the receiving end of anal #sex.” #dating
Discussion of Jack #Rusher’s “Stop Writing Dead Programs”; I got onto discussing #Forth.
#Conal Elliott explains what Functional #Reactive Programming really is.
NYC water has copepods in it, so OU recommends filtering it to observe kashrut. #Judaism
“a reference guide on antipatterns in replies; unproductive expressions that aren’t conducive to pleasant, productive, and focused discussion.” with items like “condescending reveal” and “fallacy labeling”. Someone said, “like TVTropes, except the examples make me angry.”
#PDF translation of #Leibniz’s #Nova-methodus.
Tom Brown’s “Solar and #batteries can power the world”. He summarizes, “Solar and batteries are cheap enough that most people can get most of their electricity from them, and save money. This equation gets better and better over time as their costs decline,” and more specifically, “solar and batteries can supply 90% of electricity for 80% of the world’s population at less than 80 €/MWh (including a fuel backup) with 2030 assumptions.” He doesn’t rely on wind, but does include it. He thinks stored fuel is the solution to Dunkelflauten. Based on “the Danish Energy Agency Technology Database for 2030 in 2020 euros: solar PV installed cost 384 €/kWp, lithium-ion battery installed cost 157 €/kWh.” Open code and data. He’s summing up his computations for “the 9196 1° by 1° pixels that contains more than 10,000 people, which is enough to include 99.86% of the population,” using capacity factors for wind and solar per pixel, though I’m not sure where his pixels are from. He assumes no demand response (conservative) and no seasonality (overoptimistic). #pricing #solar-energy #energy
#solar-energy #datasets from the Danish Energy Agency Technology Database. I didn’t know GitHub rendered #CSV.
#PDF of Martin A. Green’s “How Did Solar Cells Get So Cheap?”, including #Suntech, #China’s support, his own research group at UNSW from which Suntech’s founder Zhengrong Shi came, etc.
From the discussion of Tom Brown’s #solar-energy calculations, ronb1964: “I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM #batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium.” morphle gives #pricing: “15kWh 48V LFP battery around $1800 with low quality battery management system in metal box on wheels. Car batteries need more expensive inverters if you want to fast charge them (150kW-950kW) and super fast discharge them while driving fast (>100 kW). (...) The Mercedes eSprinter 56kW van costs around $80000 new but we sell 3 year old vans like this for $4000 without battery. So refurbished and converted to eCamper with 1800 mile range you pay $6700.” #vanlife #energy
“🪨 why use many token when few token do trick — Claude Code skill that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like caveman” #AI #humor but actually it might work
someone thinks teamwork is just a way to hide slacking off
discussion of the announcement of #Hegel from the #Hypothesis and #Antithesis folks. #PBT #testing
#DRMacIver’s announcement of #Hegel. #Hypothesis #Antithesis #PBT #testing
#AI psychosis ruining people’s lives
“It is a custom PCB designed to drop directly into the Z80 DIP-40 CPU socket of any legacy Z80-based computer. Rather than using a discrete #Z80 processor, the board hosts an RP2350B microcontroller — a dual-core 150MHz Cortex-M33 device capable of running at up to 300MHz — whose programmable I/O (PIO) state machines take full, cycle-accurate control of the Z80 address, data, and control buses.” Basically an ICE with Wi-Fi. #RP2350 #electronics #hardware #retrocomputing
#Bunnie helped design “the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC”, with an improved version of the #RP2350’s PIO peripheral. Instead of a special-purpose instruction set like PIO, you have BIO, four of Claire Xenia Wolf’s PicoRV32 #RISC-V processors each with 4KiB of RAM, running at 700MHz, modified with a trick from his PhD thesis ADAM to map the non-RV32E registers to FIFOs; also they can DMA to and from the main CPU’s RAM. But it’s slower than PIO, can’t bitbang DVI. #Baochip #electronics #hardware #toread
Panasonic’s expensive alumina-substrate thick-film “anti-surge” ERJ P series of SMD resistors are still sold at a #pricing of only 1.46¢. The 0805 resistors are rated for half a watt.
The #Baochip is “the latest step in the #Betrusted initiative, spurred by work I [#Bunnie] did with Ed Snowden 8 years ago trying to answer the question of “can we trust hardware to not betray us?” in the context of mass surveillance by state-level adversaries.” #security
> a SoC featuring a 350MHz Vexriscv CPU + MMU, combined with a I/O processor (“BIO”) featuring quad 700MHz PicoRV32s, 4MiB of nonvolatile memory (in the form of RRAM), and 2MiB of SRAM. Also packed into the chip are features typically found exclusively in secure elements, such as a TRNG, a variety of cryptographic accelerators, secure mesh, glitch sensors, ECC-protected RAM, hardware protected key slots and one-way counters.”
How did he get it fabbed? “I “hitchhiked” on a 22 nm chip designed primarily by Crossbar, Inc. I was able to include a CPU of my choice, along with a few other features, in some unused free space on the chip’s floorplan. By switching off which CPU is active, you can effectively get two chips for the price of one mask set.
He expects to have thousands of them to sell later in 02026, and you can pre-order the “Dabao” evaluation board for earlier delivery.
#Primitive-Technology #video about drying roof tiles on the heated ondol floor of the new heated-floor hut. He used his heated-floor chimney to smoke some firewood stacked inside the hut (to get rid of insects?) but then it collapsed in the rain, so he rebuilt it with dry-stacked fired bricks, which was more economical in material as well. He made a new lightweight mold for roof tile curvature from bark whose tree had rotted away, and having laid out some 45 roof tiles on the floor, he heated it back up to dry them out. #bushcraft #bootstrapping #scouting
Chris Cecil #ccecil on #hoarding ewaste pick-and-place machines #toread
#CodysLab #video on distilling isopropyl alcohol #materials with a countercurrent tube-in-tube heat exchanger built in a 20ℓ bucket on top of a mini-fridge, with a plastic tube on the outside of a copper tube. So he can distill at room temperature (and below) without needing a vacuum. He’s distilled about 250mℓ in a day with airflow driven by an aquarium bubbler.
You can preorder Dabao #Baochip evaluation boards for US$10. #electronics #hardware
“An attempt to recreate the #RP2040 PIO in an #FPGA” gateware similar to the #RP2350 #electronics #hardware. Bunnie recommends using it to debug your PIO code with Verilator.
#Bunnie’s #dissertation #pdf on “a decentralized parallel computer” #toread #hardware