They don’t support sending messages over a serial / USB / network connection to say “battery is almost dead, shut down cleanly while you can” right? As far as I can tell, that’s the one key feature that a UPS has that a portable battery doesn’t.

I took a look the other day and was amazed at how little UPSes have improved in the last few decades vs. everything else battery-related.

At this point, I’d expect a consumer-grade UPS to have something like a Raspberry PI attached, and run a web server. I’d expect it to not just have a serial port for signaling, but to be able to run custom BASH scripts to send messages out to any attached device warning it about being on battery and keeping it up to date on the battery status.

Some form of “AI” will always be around. It has been around nearly as long as we’ve had computers. We’ve even had AI chatbots since 1966.

But, the dot com bubble is a bad comparison. If you look at a graph of Internet users over time you can barely even see the dot com crash. The Internet was a massively useful phenomenon and more and more people kept using it. The dot com crash was basically an overestimation of how quickly people were going to adopt it combined with a massive drop in the value of Internet-based ads.

What’s much more likely with AI is another AI Winter where a few things stick around, but mostly AI goes back on the back burner for a few more decades.

No, read the executive order:

the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

If either parent was a citizen, the children are citizens. Trump was a citizen so his kids are citizens under his new interpretation.

It’s so incredibly stupid.

I don’t think it’s an “obsession with cars” or that people are “ignoring” electrified rail.

The problem is that there are things that are in your direct control, like buying a car and using the roads which exist. Then, there are things outside your direct control, like trying to get your government to install electrified rail. Even if you have a really responsive government that isn’t captured by special interests, getting rail built and up and running can take a decade. And, if you need to get from A to B, you can’t wait for a decade. Even if you’re really pro-rail during that decade you still need to travel, so you’re likely to be forced into getting a car. Once you have a car, then rail might become less of a priority because you are now a car user. Maybe eventually you’ll still want to use the rail system, but for now you have a car, so your priorities are still going to include car priorities.

This all changes if you live somewhere where there’s already great rail service. In that case, you might already have rail available when you move somewhere and all you need to do is encourage your local government to keep funding rail and not subsidizing cars. At that point, the car driver demographic is small and easy to ignore.

The problem is in switching from one system to the other. You need a government that is going to weather the complaints from drivers for years while the rail infrastructure is being put in place until you get to a point where drivers can start selling their cars and switching to rail. That’s really hard to do though, because going from poor rail infrastructure to good rail infrastructure can take a decade, and politicians often have terms lasting only 4 years or so. That means that they have to take on the expense and pain of starting a rail project and then facing an election long before the system is up and running. It’s actually surprising how many politicians are willing to do that, given that it’s so hard on their political careers. It’s unsurprising that most of them don’t want to do it because it means getting re-elected is much more difficult than if they just stick with the status quo.

Meanwhile, the special interests like car companies, car dealerships, gas stations, etc. are all going to be lobbying against any rail projects. In North America it’s even harder because car companies are local, whereas the companies that make trains are mostly European. So, the car-related lobby can talk all about the impact on local jobs, whereas the rail lobby has to deal with the jobs mostly being in Europe. Even without that, it’s hard to change things because of the issue of diffuse costs and concentrated interests. Hundreds of thousands of commuters might benefit from a rail system, but it’s probably not their #1 priority, it’s something they care about, but at best it’s #4 or #5. Meanwhile for car companies, etc. it’s a top priority. While you might not want to go to every city council meeting where this is being discussed. It’s almost certain that the auto lobby will ensure their voice is heard because it’s at the top of their list.

In the end, it’s a lot more complex than just people being obsessed with cars, or ignoring light rail.

Her plane may not have been off-the-shelf, but I’m sure she was heavily involved in any modification to it. She was a pilot, that was her concern.

She probably didn’t consider herself a radio operator, and didn’t realize how critical it was to fully understand the radio gear.

My guess is that at that point in time, being a radio operator would be like someone who knew something like 3d printing in great detail today. It was a niche skill that involved a lot of obscure knowledge. If someone doesn’t know something like 3d printing, someone can set it all up for them and then say “ok, when you’re ready, hit this button, when you’re done, do this” and they can use it. I assume that’s what happened with the radio setup. Someone with expertise set it up, and it might have worked, but she didn’t know enough to troubleshoot it when it went wrong.

Gemini is the twins, Janus is the Roman two-faced god.

If Claude Code was (as Anthropic claims) 100% written by Claude, then it’s not copyrightable. It’s not open sourced, it’s public domain.

To put things in context, this is what they used for communication between a tank and its commanders in WWI:

When the Titanic sunk in 1912, they had a telegraph on board, but no voice radio.

In the 1920s radio took off as a one-way broadcaster to receiver technology, but it still was only rarely used as two-way communications. That only really started for communications between ships in WWII.

So, although she didn’t know how to use the radio in her plane, it was mostly because radio communication was a brand new thing. I’m sure what they put in her plane wasn’t some off-the-shelf radio that had standard switches, antennas and parts. It was probably cobbled together from various parts and only the truly tech-oriented people understood it.

There’s only one little jedi, and it’s on board.

It will slightly improve the chances. But, is that enough?

Imagine you had an intern working with you on a project. They didn’t know anything about SQL injection, cross site scripting, etc. You probably wouldn’t give them a task where that was a concern. If you did, you’d watch them like a hawk. Because they’re an intern, the amount of code they’d produce would probably be pretty low, and it would be pretty low-quality overall, so it would be easy to spot mistakes that would lead to these kinds of vulnerabilities.

An LLM has the understanding of the problem space that an intern does, but produces vast amounts of code extremely quickly. That code is designed to “blend in”, i.e. it’s specifically trained to look like good code, whether it is or not. Because of “vibe coding”, people trust it to do all kinds of things, including implement bits where there’s a danger of XSS or SQL injection. And the way Claude Code ensures it doesn’t generate those vulnerabilities is… someone says “hey, don’t do that, ok?”

Having that statement in there is better than not having it. But, it’s just a reminder that these things aren’t appropriate for writing production code. They don’t actually understand what XSS or SQL injection are, and they can’t learn. They don’t know why it’s important. They don’t have a technique for checking if their code actually has those vulnerabilities, other than passing it to themselves recursively and asking that other version of themselves to generate some text that might flag if those vulnerabilities were spotted. But, AIs are famously sycophantic so even recursively using itself, it will generate text to “please” itself and probably write something like “your code is great and I can’t spot any vulnerabilities at all! Congratulations! [Emoji] [Emoji] [Emoji]”

To me what’s wild about it is that it’s completely filled with houses, and the houses seem to all respect the orientation of the nearest street.

You’d think that they’d say “Ok, well in this section we have these two roads coming at a narrow angle, let’s just make this a park”, or something to make the places where the two grids join a little less ugly.

The system prompt discovered in the leak explicitly warns the model: “You are operating UNDERCOVER… Your commit messages… MUST NOT contain ANY Anthropic-internal information. Do not blow your cover.”

This is so incredibly stupid.

You’ve tried security.

You’ve tried security through obscurity.

Now try security through giving instructions to an LLM via a system prompt to not blow its cover.

My guess is that 90% of the growth in browser bloat is to support bloated websites.

These days websites can be games, drawing applications, video players, etc. As a result, browsers have basically become operating systems. In addition, the browsers try to support even the most horribly written websites, but that means more bloat in the browser. Meanwhile faster computers mean that people developing websites are just doing more and more javascript, more and more animation, more and more mouse tracking, etc.

If you have an old device with an old browser, a lot of modern websites are completely unusable. I have an old iPad that’s too old to update, and it’s not actually possible to use browse Github anymore. It just ends up with javascript elements on the page that never finish loading. And Github isn’t some site thrown together by someone vibe-coding their first website or something.

There’s a point in that process where you stop caring if you permanently damage things.

I had a bike where the stem of the seat was somehow permanently welded into the tube. Nothing I did worked. I took it to a bike shop and they said there was nothing they could do without damaging the bike. At some point I just gave up and was willing to sacrifice the bike’s frame just to get those two metal parts apart.

I remember that post, and that only makes it stranger. What is the BBC doing that requires that many monitors?

That’s great. I hope he’s basically able to pick and choose his roles these days, and not work if there’s nothing he’s interested in.

If he was smart about investing it, he probably earned enough to retire and live at a middle-class level for the rest of his life. But, he’s probably not loaded. He wasn’t ever one of the main stars of a show, he was always a side character. Plus, lifestyle inflation is a big problem for actors. Say he was making $400k per year on Hawaii Five-O, he probably wasn’t living a modest $80k/year lifestyle and putting away 80% of his earnings.

I would bet he’s still out looking for work so he can live in a house in LA with a pool up in the hills, not in a 1 bedroom apartment in the city.

The irony is that this spending is mostly needed because the US is causing NATO to collapse.

this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble

The end of the AI bubble has been beginning for years. The end of the beginning of the end of the bubble might take a few more years.