- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “i'll bring down ram prices”
Memory companies have price fixed multiple times. They've paid hundreds of millions in fines. wikipedia even has a page on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing.
Look at the financials of these companies, they're all making obscene margins and do they plan to increase production? No. Micron is doing a stock buy back to pump the price of their share.
The Micron CEO just recently said this is the exact plan https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/10/01/ram-supply-se...
There's sanctions, tarrifs, and a DOJ who doesn't give a shit. Until we can fix that the insanity will continue. Phones will be unaffordable. Laptops will be obscene. Gaming consoles will be thousands of dollars. Desktops will be dead.
If you're waiting for some David Ricardo equation to happen, tough cookies, it's not coming.
The market is legally locked down and we're in hostage pricing mode.
And what's the story? You can't afford electronics because we're using it to build robots to take your job? I mean ...
Nobody is coming to save us. That's our job.
And if an american, whom ICC have found guilty on crimes, visits a country which upholds ICC rulings they should be arrested, no?
Nobody talked about kidnapping people in the US or doing anything similar. In contrast, the US is in a habit on (among others)
1. kidnapping
2. bombing
3. otherwise assassinating
4. sanctioning
5. demanding extradition (the only actual "legal" part)
foreign citizens that they do not like. We can also say that no other, non american citizen has actually agreed to these practices either, nor to US authority to be the world serif. So these arguments more like read like monopoly of global violence/authority than "sovereignty".
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “Rogue AI”
My wife asked me why I was carrying a gun in the kitchen
I said "Rogue AI"
My wife laughed
I laughed
The toaster laughed
I shot the toaster- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “prioritising safety”
The other answers: "Of course not, someone would haved picked it up already if it were"
Some times low hanging fruit is so low hanging that people don't bother to look for it as it's "obvious" someone else would had picked it already.
At one point he said "You need to move the mouse up" and one of the participants actually lifted the mouse physically from the desk - which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers.
I always remember this when I think "isn't this obvious?" with regards to usage patterns on computers.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “private”
- Opening sentence uses a quote to challenge or distance a term
- Opening sentence challenges the term “private”
If you're privacy conscious, please be aware that Tailscale by default is creating behavioral metadata from all of those computers for the Room 641As of the world about everything you do on your supposedly “private” network: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
“This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.”
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “Linux ISOs”
Yes, the situation sucks overall and mathematics as a whole is in a turbulent time now.
But it also sucks when mathematicians, who are considered experts on a particular problem, refuse to engage with breakthrough results about that problem. #2 above is still true regardless of where it came from or how hard it can be to absorb.
While reading "The Mathocalypse" post [0] by Scott Aaronson, Scott described his wife Dana's reaction to one of the newly solved results in her primary domain of expertise, on which she'd been working for decades.
After her initial shock, and annoyance with the format/style, she decided to start using Astra - for the first time - to help her understand the new result. And he reported in the comments that she had made a lot of progress understanding it in one day, and may be even excited to give a talk about it!
That seems like a much healthier attitude towards these new results.
Yes, everything else sucks about this messy period. But there are still diamonds (in the rough) in this drop that perhaps should be looked into. If the author is too busy, perhaps one of their students can take a look? Someone will, eventually.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “younger, hungry mathematicians”
They don’t have any more patience for this.
What the... OK, I had to check if that language was in the indictment. It's not - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1366241/dl uses artificial intelligence. It's the press release from the Justice Department dated 6th of October that uses "super intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-sent...
Amusingly (and unsurprisingly) their earlier press release dated March 19th calls it "artificial intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-plea...
From the indictment:
>SMITH’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024 and he executed it in three steps. First, SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence. Third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams he orchestrated his own Bot Accounts to conduct.
>SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the Streaming Platforms to discover his scheme. At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts. As SMITH explained it in an email, he needed “a TON of songs fast” in order to circumvent the “anti fraud policies” of the Streaming Platforms. To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
So this isn't even "haha wouldn't it be funny if we make a 10 hour song that's just silence and then convince people to play it while they're sleeping", which would at least be vaguely legal. This is far closer to ad fraud.
I think it's fair to say that in the last month we have learned 0 things that would specifically confirm or disconfirm this stated view, either directly or indirectly. And that is not really Matthew's concern, anyway. His actual concern is that computers are really good at math, and if we point them at something like Module LWE or ECDLP there is a real chance that it (essentially magically) breaks them. See his statement at [1].
For better and for worse I think we are in a crisis of empiricism. As a community we are worried enough about the outcomes of breaking something like encryption that we're willing to admit statements like this one, even though we have no real, actual, concrete evidence that would indicate whether they're true or not. The line of thought Matthew articulates here (i.e., we can solve millennium problems thus "optimism [related to encryption] is a very opinionated bet") may be defensible from a risk management perspective, but it is absolutely not defensible as a statement of knowledge. Internally that's fine, but the public (including the technical public) is not going to make that distinction. They will interpret it as knowledge. That does not help us.
[1]: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/2108281944291393983
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “Document infrastructure for agents”
The world has standardised methods of accounting. Not only do Anthropic and OpenAI avoid using those methods, they both use the same phrase “annualised revenues” to describe two radically different accounting processes.
They’re both also leaking those annualised numbers slowly to the press at irregular intervals, which hints that they’re disclosing new numbers in the days after a big sale lands. So you see “$30bn annualised” because they managed to land a $1bn contract the week before, bumping the annualised figure up by $12bn compared to the start of the previous month, and the end of the next.
Right now we have a ~$1 trillion company which a ton of the “economy” and valuations are based on, with near zero information on how it’s doing.
It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".
The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
> with clear path to citizenship.
Or no path at all. Tying the citizenship carrot to the visa and letting the employers hold the stick is the worst of all possible outcomes.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “top talent”
Gemini team just released Gemini 3.5 Transcribe that’s supposed to be good at this; it’s available via api: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
An open-cycle gas turbine is the "simple" configuration that draws in air through a pressurization stage, into a combustion chamber for fuel combustion, producing high-pressure hot gases that drive a turbine and generate power, with exhaust gases released into the atmosphere.
In other words, there is no recovery of heat from the exhaust, it's basically an aircraft jet engine core mounted on the ground and connected to a generator. They aren't very efficient but they are compact, relatively cheap, and quick to spin up during peak demand times.
I’d refer to the source studies, but at $9,990 per region… Ms Pickerel’s overview seems plenty informative for me.
Regarding EMEA:
> Grid-scale battery storage costs are now decisively cheaper than gas peaking across the region. [and price will fall another 33% in the decade ahead]. This shift means storage is displacing open-cycle gas turbines on cost in every gas market across the region, marking a significant structural turning point for power system planning across both the Gulf and Africa.
The analyst’s bottom line:
> From Latin America to Asia Pacific, the combination of falling storage costs and world-class renewable resources is closing off the economic case for new gas peaking capacity, while long-term contracted renewables increasingly set the ceiling rather than the floor on power costs.”
Heady times! For all the gnashing of teeth about regulating our way out of combustion-based production—it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants, no arm-twisting required. “Not with a bang, but a whimper”…
I have a few key points to add to this discussion (to the best of my recollection):
1. orkut.com was not acquired. It was developed in-house, the initial version almost entirely written by Orkut Büyükkökten as a 20% time project. It was written in C# .NET as that was what he was most familiar with and efficient in. The actual product launch was championed internally by Marissa Mayer, and encouraged as an experiement in-part because of the external pressure for Google to do "something" in social networking.
2. We believe a huge part of why it became popular in Brazil, was becuase the homepage contained a ranking of users by country and Brazil's national competitive spirit. Brazil made up the largest initial seed network, and once they were #1 on the leaderboards, it became a major viral spread factor in Brazil to "stay on top" of the leaderboard. It was unfortuantly much later in the service that we realized a good portion of why it remained popular only in Brazil was because the service tended to surface the largest sources of activity to users, which meant most users saw significant amounts of Portuguese content. Once we segtregated the service by language, we saw it experience it's second cultural explosion in India.
3. Once we kept up with performance demand on the service, orkut.com fairly quickly grew to serve more daily pages than Google.com websearch (though obviously it was much less complicated as a service, and much less profitable!) However, over time the service became increasingly dominated by abusive usage such as adult images and fake user spamming. orkut.com was always a very small team within Google, as I recall at it's height we had only around 8 engineers on the project as this was very far from Google's core focus at the time. The service ultimately curtailed in popularity as Facebook continued to win markets, including India and Brazil.
4. I believe there was very little connection between orkut.com decline and Google+. By the time Google+ was launched in June 2011, orkut.com was losing ground to Facebook even in Brazil. Facebook overtook orkut.com in Brazil in December 2011, and orkut.com remained online until September 2014, three years after Google+ was launched.
For those curious about technical details:
A. When I became involved in the project, it was because the live service was serving mostly 400 errors and keeling over dead. At the time it was running on Windows and MS-SQL and .NET, the only project of it's kind inside Linux-focused Google. Most of my background is service scalability archicture, so I was asked to get involved to "fix it", I took the team of 5 mostly junior engineers and led the architecture changes to get it serving pages quickly and stop the errors. As I recall, my code-red to fixed the key performance issues took only about a week, after which the massive increase to page performance led to a massive increase in poplarity, causing orkut to shockingly eclipse Google websearch in page views per day not long after.
B. We initially kept the service on .NET technology, both as an experiement within Google, and because I strongly feel the dotnet CLR design (largely due to parametric instantiation and their open-standard model) is the best virtual machine and runtime of it's kind. However, running Windows machines within Google was "not at all straightforward", and it was problematic running on closed source dotnet of the era because we ran into several Microsoft dotnet runtime bugs at scale and had no ability to fix them. We transitioned to using the Mono dotnet runtime on Linux, which was ironically more reliable (and fixable!) and significantly less performant that the Microsoft dotnet runtime for our needs. Eventually the service was transitioned to a Java front-end and C++ backends.
C. Orkut.com images was the first example of Bigtable serving production traffic.
D. We transitioned presentation layer from ASP.NET to Clearsilver templating, developed at my startup Neotonic.com by Brandon Long, and used inside Google for Gmail and other projects. This was for performance, reliability, and to enable the cross platform and cross-language transitions from C# to Java and C++. (Clearsilver was heavily inspired by CS/HDF templating, designed at onelist.com by Scott Shambarger and Ethan Khan) Clearsilver was an unfair weapon in the server-side rendered mostly-static HTML era.
orkut.com is dead, long live orkut.com!
They killed it after a while to replace with "something better". That was Google+.
I still think that it was one of the most impressive fumbles of a social media "monopoly".
When I was a student I made (very!) modest contributions to clean water projects, microfinance organizations, and the reports I now read as a mature adult are so gratifying.
I also try to keep a "charity" type project in my queue - volunteering my tech skills to help fix/build things for NGOs so fun to look back on.
"It’s so expensive to dispose of waste legally that many people attempt to do it illegally."
This is one of those things where we just have to collectively bite the bullet and make it easy and cheap to dispose of things properly. Otherwise you get people dumping toxic waste in storm drains, throwing old tires and appliances in ravines, mixing dangerous contaminants into regular trash, or just putting their trash in other people's bins.
Where I am it costs $20 to properly dispose of an old can of paint. It costs about the same to dispose of any electronic item that has a screen. Even regular household garbage has to be put in special bags that cost about $2/each. All of this is a counterincentive to people disposing of their waste properly. And every few years the local waste manangement bureaucracy raises the rates.
Just build it into the base taxes that everyone pays. Make it "free" and easy for people to do the right thing.
This is also why they're so good at creating three.js or Blender work when the output is so easily constrained to "Look exactly like that". I recently posted https://www.ambionix.com/blog/introducing-the-czp-1/ on here, and the audio engine in that was developed in that way.
It is true that it would be astounding to find if anyone has seen a LLM produce any useful generalization of anything resulting in a simplification. They seem to have a direct tendency to do the opposite. The brutal reality is humans have also undervalued this capability for a long time (I think the Poincare/Hilbert debate is relevant) to the point we are also taught that generalizations are, generally, bad and wrong.
So there's this little mid 80's cow-punk band from NYC called Cowboy Mouth. They had a song called "Hurricane" that got some college radio play. They had one album, Cowboys and Indians, which I just love. Sold something like 10,000 copies, and vanished soon after that. There's basically 12 known songs by the band, a maddeningly small catalog.
Anyhow... Trying to find info on this band is beyond difficult.. Because there just happens to be another band called Cowboy Mouth out of New Orleans which have been active for 30 years and are much much bigger. Adding insult to injury, this other Cowboy Mouth had a hit song called "Hurricane Party"... So there is practically no way to search for the NYC band or the song Hurricane without bumping up against this other band.
Anyhow, in a stroke of luck I stumbled upon an old demo cassette tape by the NYC Cowboy Mouth. I was excited as the tape cover lists two songs that aren't on their album. I recently ripped the tape. The story gets stranger because none of the songs on the tape match the song names on the cover label. Ends up the tape has three previously unknown tracks (of high quality, sounds like they were recorded in the same sessions as the album). Its an amazing find, adding 3 songs to a 12 song catalog! But it's driving me crazy as I don't even know the names and have no way of finding out. And there are those other two unknown tracks listed on the label which I'm dying to find out about and hopefully hear one day.
Anyhow, I say the timing of this article is funny, because I just put the demo tape tracks up on YouTube a month ago, in hopes that someone might recognize them and shed some light on them. Or just to get the tracks into the hands of fans that are still out there.
Here's the tracks in case anyone remembers Cowboy Mouth and is interested in hearing them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7J9sU3qg4
Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 51) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.
Wilkins took lower quality photos before Franklin was even in the lab, and showed them to Watson at a conference.
Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.
But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 51 when ordered by higher ups, which Gosling had taken, we don't talk about Gosling because PhD students don't get credit right?).
Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because I guess she thought Wilkins was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.
Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera, and some help from a couple of other researchers) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figured it out?
Helical DNA was the strongest candidate by 51, in part because earlier and cruder X-ray diffraction images had existed for some time (10+ years) and were suggestive of this structure. All of the scientists in question, and many others, collaborated on that possibility at that time, and long before 'Photo 51'. It was not a surprise, but rather the focus of their work.
Franklin was making the famous improved images with the explicit intent of revealing or disproving the helical structure. She and her lab produced the most definitive evidence for helical B-DNA (Photo 51) in early 52, but during 52 the conclusion was still a matter of debate (and humor) amongst them - in particular Franklin was not convinced that A-DNA was helical. From Wiki:
> In July 1952, as a practical joke on Wilkins (who frequently expressed his view that both forms of DNA were helical), Franklin and Gosling produced a funeral notice regretting the 'death' of helical A-DNA
This left the molecular structure and number of strands as open questions. Triple helix models had been attempted by Pauling, Watson and Crick at that time. Watson and Crick though were first to develop the successful double helix model with antiparallel base pairs in early 1953. It is likely that Franklin had also come to the conclusion that DNA was a double helix by this time (based on her draft notes + circumstantial evidence) but she did not do so in total isolation, nor did she complete the final molecular part of the puzzle (though she had worked on it).
TL;DR DNA structure was not a eureka moment spurred by a single breakthrough thought or piece of evidence; many scientists collaborated on eliminating various likely possibilities for years until the correct model was found.
> It is easy to feel great sympathy with Franklin. The fact remains that she never made the inductive leap... before she learned about the model proposed by Watson and Crick, she and Gosling began to draft a paper to state their conclusions so far about the B structure. That draft also survived among Franklin’s papers. It was vigorous, clear, and limited. Klug and I went over it one afternoon in his office. “You see, she was lacking one final step,” Klug said. “Well, two steps. What she missed was the presence of the dyad—the symmetry of the molecule. Which Francis had seen immediately from her information about the space group. And even though her notes earlier showed that she knew about Chargaff’s ratios, she never got to the base pairing.”
Seems like Judson accepts Klug's version of the story: she understood that the structure was helical, but not that it was doubled or base-pair. There's also a final essay at the end of the book "In defence of Rosalind Franklin" which basically reiterates this:
"She had not perceived that the backbones run in opposite directions. She had not started modelling the B form as a double helix and so had yet even to encounter the problem of fitting the bases inside."
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “structure of DNA”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
It seems like there are several different parts to the discovery of the "structure of DNA" and different people contributed.
1. DNA is helical
2. DNA is a double helix
3. The ACGT copying mechanism
Part 1 was Franklin and Wilkins. Part 3 was Watson and Crick. Part 2 is the part under debate, to what degree was the double helix clear from just Franklin's imaging?
But really, how much does it matter? It seems like the four of them each contributed a lot. The Nobel prize only went to the other three, in large part because Franklin died before it was given out.
It kind of reminds me of when tech giants open source a project as a means of putting a positive spin on abandonware. “Here’s the source! Any problems are yours to fix now. You’re welcome”
> apparently they tried the model on about 8,000 problems. So, right now it “merely” solves ~5% of the longstanding open mathematical problems that it’s asked about, the problems that whole communities have spent years on, after a single 3-hour attempt on them.
Back-of-the-envelope cost calculation:
3 hours of GPT-Pro compute per attempt / 5% success rate → 60 hours of compute per solved open math problem
At GPT-6 Astra API long-context pricing ($75/M output tokens), assuming 50 reasoning tokens/s, that's roughly $810 per solution:
60 h × 3,600 s × 50 tokens/s × $75 / 1,000,000 = $810
Of course, actual token usage is unknown. But even if off by 10x, $8100 is cheap for solving a longstanding mathematical problem.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “OpenAI model”
Sadly, this is also what day-to-day work looks like for a lot of software engineers in industry right now. I spend my time reading and verifying thousands of lines of messy AI-written code. Compared to actually producing something, it's thankless, barely-credited, and unfun work.
Chow, T. Y. (2008). A beginner’s guide to forcing (arXiv:0712.1320). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.0712.1320
> “All mathematicians are familiar with the concept of an open research problem. I propose the less familiar concept of an open exposition problem. Solving an open exposition problem means explaining a mathematical subject in a way that renders it totally perspicuous. Every step should be motivated and clear; ideally, students should feel that they could have arrived at the results themselves. The proofs should be “natural” in Donald Newman’s sense [13]:
> This term . . . is introduced to mean not having any ad hoc constructions or brilliancies. A “natural” proof, then, is one which proves itself, one available to the “common mathematician in the streets.””
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “understanding the aliens”
Highly recommend reading it. Very prescient for something written 26 years ago.
https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2000-chiang.pd...
Stars can function as "breeder reactors", where the natural flow of neutrons produced as intermediate / side effect of the various fusion reactions going on in a later-stage-life star get absorbed by nuclei and then (by beta decay) produce beyond-iron elements. This is called the "s-Process" (slow), and responsible for a large range of elements into the Lanthanides or so. And stellar winds, or the planetary nebula stage at the end, will return some of this to the interstellar medium.
It's correct that the heaviest "naturally present" elements require the so-called "r-Process", heavy overabundance of neutrons / extremely high neutron flow as in supernovae, or direct fusion of beyond-iron nuclei as in neutron star collisions.
There is rather active research happening here, both astronomical (trying to detect various nuclei from x ray spectroscopy of cataclysmic events) and theoretical (because r-Process cannot be simulated in labs since the neutron fluxes needed are not within our reach).
That said, it remains true that many "transition groups" elements are bred via s-Process in relatively-ordinary stars.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “evilscientist311”
In late 2023, a Reddit user known as "evilscientist311" conducted a comprehensive analysis of Cleo's activity patterns and interactions with other Stack Exchange accounts.
However, I and others were on the scent at least as far back as April, 2023. See for example: https://x.com/TheDavidSJ/status/1650957407902658571
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “man-rated”
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “There was no choice but to be pioneers”
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “software engineer”
In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “worked”
For better picture of what made Britain successful during this era look to folks like Isa Brunel... son of a French Revolutionary immigrant who was poor enough for debtors prison, but skilled enough in engineering and math to build some of the largest ships in the world.
I feel like people who are later to the AI game just like to "oneshot" and sink a bunch of usage into generating garbage