comicjk

8 ms·

1.
by comicjk 10d ago
"The way that Hugging Face defended itself was with an open source Chinese model, GLM, because they didn’t have access to the high cybersecurity models on the other side. They’re too dangerous." This is not what happened. HuggingF
2.
by comicjk 14d ago
My labor makes other people's lives better, so I would expect something that replaces my labor to do the same.
3.
by comicjk 15d ago
Watermarking will not flag something you wrote unless the AI rewrote significant chunks of it. AI watermarking works by exploiting the fact that lengthy phrases can be expressed in exponentially many ways, such that the selection of a singl
4.
by comicjk 21d ago
Uranium-235 isn't useful for dirty bombs: it's too long-lived and not radioactive enough. Making dangerous levels of radiation requires short-lived isotopes. Some of these are the products of uranium fission, which is why spent ur
5.
by comicjk 26d ago
I did this for the last college programming course I taught (2025) as an anti-LLM measure. Every class started with a very short closed-book auto-graded multiple-choice test on the reading. I was careful to specify which was the core readin
6.
by comicjk 3mo ago
Historically, this is the norm. The British Navy in WWI was a behemoth, but still couldn't force safe passage through the mines and cannons of the Dardanelles Strait against what was considered a third-rate power. "A ship's a
7.
by comicjk 4mo ago
I have bad news about reading the internet...
8.
by comicjk 4mo ago
It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than expected) or like nuclear fission react
9.
by comicjk 5mo ago
A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter s
10.
by comicjk 6mo ago
People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.
11.
by comicjk 6mo ago
Not everything on Wikipedia is true, but the parts Elon Musk hates most are probably true.
12.
by comicjk 8mo ago
This context is very important. "Little by little, over-inflated results and breathless breakthroughs betray trust. They throwing dimes in a wishing well which people rapidly start to expect will never pay compound interest." &quo
13.
by comicjk 8mo ago
The climate shock from stopping aerosols would be a crisis for the planet, but we would have more than weeks to stop it. First it would take months for the aerosols to leave the upper atmosphere, and then years for the earth to heat up to i
14.
by comicjk 9mo ago
I gave my engineering students a CO2 removal design problem once, and at the end, asked why the theoretical efficiency had increased in the time since the textbook was written. The answer was that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere
15.
by comicjk 9mo ago
It is tough to beat classical computers. They work really well, and a huge amount of time (including some of mine) has gone into developing fast algorithms for them to do things they're not naturally fast at, such as quantum chemistry.
16.
by comicjk 9mo ago
Yes, in fact they might be useful for chemistry simulation long before they are useful for cryptography. Simulations of quantum systems inherently scale better on quantum hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_
17.
by comicjk 1y ago
Regardless of what funding mechanism you would prefer in its place, turning off the existing system with no transition plan is a huge mistake.
18.
by comicjk 2y ago
What are the actual numbers you think are fantasy? Most of the time when I see someone claiming economic statistics are fake, it's a misunderstanding or lack of context. For instance, people will say the US unemployment rate is fake be
19.
by comicjk 2y ago
Growing and sequestering enough biomass to slow down climate change means effectively running the fossil fuel industry at the same scale but in reverse. In that spirit, I'll point out that most efficient way of moving carbon-bearing so
20.
by comicjk 2y ago
Another apt ancient example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a
21.
by comicjk 2y ago
Plants still perform respiration using oxygen. Photosynthesis lets them create their own sugars, but their process for using those sugars in the mitochondria is similar to how we do it. Plants release more oxygen than they consume because t
22.
by comicjk 2y ago
That analysis is from the perspective of the scammer . The scammer has limited time to write to each victim once the responses come back from the initial mass-email, so the scammer is better off if only the most gullible people reply. From
23.
by comicjk 2y ago
Texas is not going to secede. In the 2020 election, the vote was 52:46 between Trump and Biden, meaning almost half the state supported the overall national winner. Compare this to the actual secession crisis election in 1860, where the vot
24.
by comicjk 2y ago
The method you describe would be an example of what is called a "thermostat" in molecular dynamics (because the speed of molecules forms what we call temperature). Such adjustments to the speed can definitely paper over issues wit
25.
by comicjk 2y ago
Both the original writing, and the surviving manuscripts, have uncertainty bounds of decades in their dates. The oldest physical pages we still have come from the years 100-200 or so. And assuming that a description of an event can't b
26.
by comicjk 2y ago
The "camel means rope" story, while cute and not implausible, is basically a guess. All the earliest available sources say "camel" - there is no actual evidence of this mistake beyond speculation (though it is admittedly
27.
by comicjk 2y ago
We're talking about negative externalities, of which pollution is a perfect example: the effects of pollution are spread across everyone, no matter who emits it, so no one has an individual incentive to change their buying habits. It&#
28.
by comicjk 3y ago
Probably a symplectic Verlet method instead of Euler or Runge-Kutta, since you want energy and momentum to be conserved in this simulation.
29.
by comicjk 3y ago
You would end up with the "religious week" and the "standard week" moving relative to one another over the years, in a classic case of trying to fix messy details and thereby adding more details (as in https:/&#x2F
30.
by comicjk 3y ago
I agree. The author's description of what is "reasonable" sounds like a blueprint for many of my late nights struggling with Windows: "apps that assume that printing works will still behave in a reasonable manner: You’re

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