starblue

The AI bubble has reached its ‘fried chicken’ phase This is nuts. When’s the crash?

The AI bubble has reached its ‘fried chicken’ phase ft.trib.al/VGyrH8K

I wanted to offer some thoughts on the Gates climate memo that has been circulating this week. While I can't directly speak for others, I can say that my own response is one of dismay & deep frustration (and that this view is shared by many climate/Earth scientists). [1/n]

YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown Transformers, the tech behind LLMs | Deep Learning Chapter 5

Seems it had enough Nature links in the training data to learn the structure, but it didn't learn the exact links, and instead fills in the digits randomly. A simple explanation how these LLMs work is www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZo...

"Das ist eine Revolution: China überrollt die Welt mit Erneuerbaren" In Deutschland verkommt "Energiewende" zum Kampfbegriff. Für Tim Meyer ein Fehler. Im Gespräch mit ntv.de bezeichnet er die Erneuerbaren als nichts anderes als eine industrielle Revolution. Leider hat...

»Das ist eine Revolution: China überrollt die Welt mit Erneuerbaren«

»Teile der Union wissen aber nicht, wie sie moderne Energiepolitik machen sollen, ohne zu "grün" zu klingen. Also verkünden sie aus Trotz lieber das Gegenteil«

www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/D...

You map from a domain of 4 values into a range of 5 possible values. Requiring that the map is ascending is equivalent to counting different orderings of the values only once. So these are essentially combinations with repetition, and their count is (n+k-1 over k) = (8 over 4) = 70.

Stort strömavbrott i centrala Stockholm Strömmen är tillbaka på Södermalm och i Gamla stan efter kvällens stora strömavbrott. Som mest var över 20 000 kunder drabbade.

"Strömavbrottet sammanföll med en planerad uppdatering av Ellevios tjänst för att kommunicera om avbrott" www.svt.se/nyheter/loka...

Apparently they are still in use, sort of. The latest printing was done from 1963 to 1968: web.archive.org/web/20090506...

Tripitaka Koreana - Wikipedia

when I visited korea last year I went to haeinsa temple to see the tripitaka koreana, a set of 80k+ wooden printing blocks for buddhist scriptures, made in the 13th century en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripita...

mRNA Vaccines and Immuno-oncology: Good News

Startlingly good effects of LNP-mRNA vaccines when given to cancer patients receiving immune checkpoint therapy. More vaccine research please. More mRNA!

What is more, at the Nordic Tipping Week I‘m currently attending we learned that climate models that agree best with observations are the ones where #AMOC declines most by 2100 (as yet unpublished work).

A Rössler attractor rendered with Manim. Two initial states with a distance of 0.0025 diverge over time. #mathsky

Nexperia warns customers over chips made in China: FD

Nexperia warns customers over chips made in China: FD www.dutchnews.nl?p=258863

Let’s not forget Itec in the Nexperia affair - Bits&Chips The storm surrounding Nexperia has mostly been told as a story about chips and geopolitics. But in the shadow of that debate sits a smaller, quieter player: its subsidiary Itec. At this firm resides m...

Very interesting article discussing what might lurk behind the Nexperia controversy.

bits-chips.com/article/lets...

Today I learnt that the significant portion on the internet that relies on AWS also happens to be the significant portion of the internet I seemingly avoid.

Shrapnel fell onto CHP vehicle during U.S. military live-fire exercise over I-5, agency says The U.S. military demonstration that shot live-fire artillery rounds over Interstate 5 on Saturday dropped metal shrapnel on a California Highway Patrol vehicle, resulting in damage, agency officials ...

“The U.S. military demonstration that shot live-fire artillery rounds over Interstate 5 on Saturday dropped metal shrapnel on a California Highway Patrol vehicle…”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-19/u-s-military-live-fire-demonstration-dropped-shrapnel-on-chp-vehicle

The floating French Tara Polar Research Station in Reykjavik harbor.

Record leap in CO2 fuels fears of accelerating global heating CO2 in air hit new high last year, with scientists concerned natural land and ocean carbon sinks are weakening

I can just about cope with the idea that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has hit a new record -- it's what one would expect even if we were rapidly decarbonizing. But that the *rate of increase* has hit a new record is unbelievably depressing.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The AI Ouroboros Nvidia and other companies are paying startups to buy their products.

this is one of the best articulations of the AI bear case I've read

most of the AI companies are also massively wealthy and profitable hypercorps, but OpenAI specifically is a bomb planted at the heart of the American stock market helpfully labeled "this is a bomb"
prospect.org/power/2025-1...

Quick image created with Google Gemini on AI profitability model

Kun AI:ta pyytää visualisoimaan tätä epäpyhää kokonaisuutta, sohaisee se kyllä asian ydintä, mutta hermostuksissaan sitten typottaa urakalla. En siis edes promptannut näitä Compute Credittejä tai tätä toista kiertotaloutta 😅

Now this is awesome! #hamr #hanradio

Who might be Britain’s next prime minister? What the political betting market says

Seems to have changed a bit lately. www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Flying cars are the perfect example of a point solution: trying to solve a systemic problem (traffic) with an individual product (fly over the traffic).

But traffic is not a technology problem; it's a social problem. Remote work, congestion fees, and dense transit-connected housing solve it better.

Today is the 89th anniversary of The Battle of Cable Street when the people of the East End of London halted the march of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts through Stepney.

I think for me the most compelling answer for "why fund basic research?" (and the one most relevant to the people doing the work) is that humans are curious and finding stuff out makes us happy and fulfilled. Science is a thing humans like. Life would be more dull and sad if we didn't do it.

end/🧵

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

The base frequency is 14107.5kHz, and a search for that finds www.theskywaves.net/pactor.html . Maybe the call of a PACTOR modem?

Eher deutet dieser Aktionismus auf Panik, man will mE den W unter Druck setzen, die Unterstützung der UA zu reduzieren, bevor die UA Angriffe auf die RU Infrastruktur und die zunehmenden Wirtschaftsprobleme zur Katastrophe führen

Die Lage in RU dürfte schlechter sein als von außen sichtbar
4/4

Despite congressional threat, National Academies releases new climate report Things have changed since 2009: We’re more certain about the problems.

National Academies of Science panel finds that: The EPA was right in 2009 (when it found that climate change driven by society’s emissions of greenhouse gases are endangering human health & lives), and that everything we've learned since has only made it more right.

arstechnica.com/science/2025...

I initially missed the offset one, because the numbers on dice don't start at zero (and then I also missed the solution with the all-ones die). Starting to count at one always complicates things.

One die with two each of 0, 1 and 2, and one with three each of 1 and 4.
Two of 1, 2, 3 and three of 0, 3.
Two of 0, 2, 4 and three of 1, 2.
Two of 1, 3, 5 and three of 0, 1.
And the trivial solution with one regular and one empty die.