gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 10 hours ago

I have an analog Casio G-Shock that's the perfect beater watch - radio controlled, solar charging, I can discern the hands in the dark without glasses, and almost indestructible. It wasn't terribly expensive either.

I think Casio is threading the needle quite well with new technology. I'm sure they're exploring pure smart watches, but the core ideal is "no maintenance" - you don't have to change the battery or set the time[1]. This naturally leads to tough, energy-concious engineering, and as they make millions of watches, they have economies of scale.

The newer models have BT low energy so you can use the admittedly fiddly controls with an app. But you don't need to. It's just a complement.


[1] obviously this only applies to the more expensive models, and if your local time source supports DST

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 11 hours ago (14 children)

Big Yud posts another "banger"[1], and for once the target audience isn't impressed:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3q8uu2k6AfaLAupvL/the-tale-of-the-top-tier-intellect#comments

I skimmed it. It's terrible. It's a long-winded parable about some middling chess player who's convinced he's actually good, and a Socratic strawman in the form of a young woman who needles him.

Contains such Austean gems as this

If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington -- measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation -- it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.

In the end, both strawmen are killed by AI-controlled mosquito drones, leaving everyone else feeling relieved .

Commenters seem miffed that Yud isn't cleaning up his act and writing more coherently so as to warn the world of Big Bad AI, but apparently he just can't help himself.


[1] if by banger you mean a long, tedious turd. 42 minute read!

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (9 children)

It's been a while since I used Reddit. Is the thesis that subscribers to ChatGPT will be rounded up and killed? By whom? For what stated reason? It sounds like a weird inversion of victimhood, considering the number of GenAI user (even if they're just casual users) and the massive money and hype around GenAI by companies and way too many govs.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Thoughts / notes on Nostr? A local on a tech site is pushing it semi-hard, and I just remember it being mentioned in the same breath as Bluesky back in the day. It ticks a lot of techfash boxes - decentralized, "uncensorable", has Bitcoin's stupid Lightning protocol built in.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Nah it's real. As mentioned, they launched a limited metal ring model that was immensely popular. This is just them riding the wave.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

there was a dude on LW who convinced himself that because Oort cloud comets move so slowly relative to the sun, it was really easy for them to start falling into it. Problem is you have the other term in the equation for angular momentum , a huge fucking average orbit.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (3 children)

don't forget you need a hell of a lot of delta-v to get an orbit that intersects with the sun...

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (10 children)

The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers

edit to add: the comments are all over the cooling issue

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Nuclear wonk Chery Rofer talks a bit about the plutonium fire sale to Saltman in this piece, after some faff about Putin trolling Trump into resuming nuclear testing:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/things-that-go-bump-in-the-night

 

current difficulties

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
 

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

  1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
 

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

 

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

 

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

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