Well, the water analogy actually holds up quite well if you consider the charge field moving, not the electrons themselves. This guy has a lot of great videos using water channels to explain electricity. It is fascinating how under a high speed scope, you can see the electrical Charge “flow” like water down each branch of a circuit.
Even rubber dams stretched across pipes work exactly like capacitors. Firstly, they block DC: water cannot flow. But back and forth movement is conveyed (AC passes). Less capacitance in series, more in parallel. Two such dams in series do not have more capacitance because to get one to stretch, the other must stretch; they partially cancel. And since there are two, more pressure is needed to get the same stretch. (Same as more voltage needed to cram in the same charge: less capacitance).
Inductance doesn't have an analog. To some extent, the inertia of the fluid cam model some of it, I suppose. Like what is "water hammer" in plumbing? The circuit is too suddenly broken, but the water wants to keep moving. There's gotta be a resulting momentary pressure rise there in the closed-off line, similar to voltage rising in an interrupted inductor. If the valve were some weak piece of crap relative to the mass of the water, the water would break it: like arcing.
Or just a long pipe where the inertia of the water resists change in motion.
This is what causes the "water hammer" effect which is a problem for plumbers, but a great thing for all kinds of fun experiments, e.g. creating predictable cavitation [0].
This was the stunning one to me. Just blew my mind literally observing it run up a dead end wire and slosh and rebound like water.
Previously I was used to thinking of dead ends as simply functionally inert. That without a circuit, nothing at all happens in the dead end wire other than the potential for something to happen.
Sure I know something more than nothing actually happens since there is an elevated charge there. But still just the mental model shorthand is that no circuit = no nuthin.
But it's not. It's actually like a pipe with a little bit of air to allow for some compression, and even the dead end has a small flow that travels to the end and builds up against it, then rebounds back and eventially levels out at some homogenious but now higher pressure.
You don't screw up something this major, it doesn't happen by accident nor by incompetence.
They had plans to bomb something south of that airport, they had to postpone those plans now that the info is public enough that whatever their target was is definitely aware of those plans.
This is exactly what happened and not to be immodest but it was my first guess before it was confirmed. The closure was a miscommunication between the FAA and Pentagon set off by a balloon. This was pure incompetence and arrogance. This HN thread is almost unbelievable how many wild guesses were made.
They have confirmed it was for testing a counter-drone weapon. They did not say why they set it to expire in 10 days, that part seems like it was probably a mistake.
They gave you a plausible-enough reason and you took their word for it. That's completely fine, you are well within your rights to decide for yourself whether you believe them or not.
I don't, and since neither of us can know for sure given the info we've been given, it's useless for us to argue about our opinions.
I am curious, what explanation would justify a full closure of the airspace over a major us city for 10 days, in your opinion? That is the real screwup here. Whatever justification they are giving is entirely beside the point. Closing the airspace, even to emergency medevac flights, is negligence.
Miss me with your jUsT cUrIoUs, I have no need to make up hypothetical scenarios under which this would be justifiable. The burden of proof is not on me.
If there was ever a time when the old Soviet Union could have won the Cold War... Fortunately for us, the window of top-down incompetence came far too late.
Quite literally, the previous post on this blog is from 2024 talking about what a revolution the Rabbit R1 is. We all know how that turned out. This is why I give every new trendy developer tool a few months to see if it’s really a good thing or just hype.
Maybe that's why these users go crazy over openclaw, they may need or yearn for such a tool. I don't but that doesn't mean there isn't a market for it though.
There isn’t a market. OP wrote that Rabbit R1 post after seeing the release video (according to a comment on this link, their blog post says otherwise) and immediately called it a ”milestone in the evolution of our digital organ”. Their judgement is obviously nonexistent.
Something tells me they never even downloaded OpenClaw before writing this blog post. It’s probably an aspirational vision board type post their life coach told them to write because they kept talking about OepnClaw during their sessions, and the life coach got tired of their BS.
The model generates camera and Lidar data. As if it was a Waymo car that drove through the simulated scenario with its cameras running. This synthetic training data can then be used to train the driving models.
Wonder how it'll do. The trees change shape (presumably the Lidar patterns do too). I get the premise/why but it seems odd to me (armchair) to use fake data. Real trees don't change shape (in real time) although it can be windy.
It probably doesn't matter though, "this general blob over there"
My view on Waymo and autonomous taxis in general is they will eventually make public transit obsolete. Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient. It will take time to get there though.
But eventually I think we will get there. Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles that are very efficient drivers (we could totally remove stoplights, for example. Only pedestrian crossing signs would be needed. Robo-vehicles could plug into a city-wide network that optimizes the routing of every vehicle.) At that point, public transit becomes subsidized robotaxi rides. Why take a subway when a car can take you door to door with an optimized route?
So in terms of why it isn’t a waste of time, it’s a step along the path towards this vision. We can’t flip a switch and make this tech exist, it will happen in gradual steps.
Automated taxis would still be stuck in traffic. Automation gets couple times in capacity, but the induced demand and extra cars looking for rides and parking will mean traffic.
Automation makes public transit better. There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than today's buses. Automation also means that buses get a virtual bus lane. Taxis solve the last mile problem, by taking taxi to the station, riding train with thousands of people, and then taking more transit.
Also, we might discover the advantage of human powered transit. Ebikes are more efficient than cars and give health benefits. They will be much safer than automated cars. Could use the extra capacity for bike and bus lanes.
> There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than today's buses.
In my sleepy metro area that has at least mid-tier respectable public transit (by US standards only), otherwise known as Portland, I think a lot of the routes would be better served by minibuses than full size. I wonder how the economics work out on that. Maybe dominated by labor? Tri-met drivers have a reputation of being paid handsomely as they gain seniority.
I'm also in Portland. In the US, bus costs are dominated by labor. It makes sense to use full size buses if paying for driver. For main routes, more automated buses would be best option. But there are cross town routes that should be served with minibuses. Especially ones feeding MAX stops.
> Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles
I basically agree with your premise that public transit as it exists today will be rendered obsolete, but I think this point here is where your prediction hits a wall. I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. Waymo is amazing, but still just at the beginning of the long tail.
Did it? I did a cursory search and it seems like many places still permit horse-drawn carriages, just not on limited access highways. Sometimes with fairly onerous licensing and operational requirements (speed limits, poo management, etc), but still allowed.
A few years ago I would have (and did) considered the notion that manually programming was about to turn into a quaint relic and computers would be writing 90%+ of code preposterous. Once an alternative becomes obviously superior things can change very fast.
- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 100% of roads in the lifetime of anyone alive today.
or
- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 10% of roads...
...or is there some other percentage to qualify this? I guess I wouldn't expect there to be a decree that makes it happen all at once for a country. Especially a large country like the U.S.. More like, some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only, and then some other cities also do years later. And then maybe it expands to something larger than just the core after 5 or 10 years. And so on...
That is a fair point, since it is fairly safe to make "this absolute claim will never happen." And the person I replied to did say 'exclusively', which implies 100% elimination of human drivers. But still, I appreciate your nuance.
And in the spirit of that nuance, I will revise my statement slightly. I think it is entirely possible we will eliminate drivers on 10% of roads. We have rules that are analogous to that already with limited access highways. Though I would rate this still as unlikely, since such roads only make up just over 1% of all the roads in the US as it is. Not sure what the % is for other countries, probably less.
> some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only
Agree 100%, this kind of thing I do expect to see happen. We already have exclusions for cars altogether in favor of pedestrians, so the precedent is set.
> Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient.
Fundamentally impossible. You're moving some 2 tons of mass in a 2x5m box on polluting rubber tires to move a single 100kg human.
I can always take whatever efficiency gain you've thought up and simply make the vehicle bigger, decreasing the cost and space used per passenger, and maybe even put it on rails, making it less polluting, and more energy efficient.
You can't engineer your way out of the laws of physics.
In high density regions, vehicles on surface roads can’t meet the passenger demand required. Even if you banned human drivers, the other human users introduce too much variability and delay (passengers loading and unloading, errant objects, cyclists and pedestrians, etc). Roll a dumpster in the street, and have a couple of jaywalkers, and the entire system crawls to a stop.
Controlled access is required to get even medium-high throughput. But these systems already exist, they are called personal rapid transit systems.
I would strongly recommend this podcast episode with Andrej Karpathy. I will poorly summarize it by saying his main point is that AI will spread like any other technology. It’s not going to be a sudden flash and everything is done by AI. It will be a slow rollout where each year it automates more and more manual work, until one day we realize it’s everywhere and has become indispensable.
It sounds like what you are seeing lines up with his predictions. Each model generation is able to take on a little more of the responsibilities of a software engineer, but it’s not as if we suddenly don’t need the engineer anymore.
Though I think it's a very steep sigmoid that we're still far on the bottom half of.
For math it just did its first "almost independent" Erdos problem. In a couple months it'll probably do another, then maybe one each month for a while, then one morning we'll wake up and find whoom it solved 20 overnight and is spitting them out by the hour.
For software it's been "curiosity ... curiosity ... curiosity ... occasionally useful assistant ... slightly more capable assistant" up to now, and it'll probably continue like that for a while. The inflection point will be when OpenAI/Anthropic/Google releases an e2e platform meant to be driven primarily by the product team, with engineering just being co-drivers. It probably starts out buggy and needing a lot of hand-holding (and grumbling) from engineering, but slowly but surely becomes more independently capable. Then at some point, product will become more confident in that platform than their own engineering team, and begin pushing out features based on that alone. Once that process starts (probably first at OpenAI/Anthropic/Google themselves, but spreading like wildfire across the industry), then it's just a matter of time until leadership declares that all feature development goes through that platform, and retains only as many engineers as is required to support the platform itself.
Hard to say. In business we'll still have to make hard decisions about unique situations, coordinate and align across teams and customers, deal with real world constraints and complex problems that aren't suitable to feed to an LLM and let it decide. In particular, deciding whether or not to trust an LLM with a task will itself always be a human decision. I think there will always be a place for analytical thinking in business even if LLMs do most of the actual engineering. If nothing else, the speed at which they work will require an increase in human analytical effort, to maximize their efficacy while maintaining safety and control.
In the academic world, and math in particular, I'm not sure. In a way, you could say it doesn't change anything because proofs already "exist" long before we discover them, so AI just streamlines that discovery. Many mathematicians say that asking the right questions is more important than finding the answers. In which case, maybe math turns into something more akin to philosophy or even creative writing, and equivalently follows the direction that we set for AI in those fields. Which is, perhaps less than one would think: while AI can write a novel and it could even be pretty good, part of the value of a novel is the implicit bond between the author and the audience. "Meaning" has less value coming from a machine. And so maybe math continues that way, computers solving the problems but humans determining the meaning.
Or maybe it all turns to shit and the sheer ubiquity of "masterpieces" of STEM/art everything renders all human endeavor pointless. Then the only thing that's left worth doing is for the greedy, the narcissists, and the power hungry to take the world back to the middle ages where knowledge and search for meaning take a back seat to tribalism and war mongering until the datacenters power needs destroy the planet.
I'm hoping for something more like the former, but, it's anybody's guess.
Does it? How exactly is the common Joe going to benefit from this world where the robots are doing the job he was doing before, as well as everyone else's job (aka, no more jobs for anyone)? Where exactly is the money going to come from to make sure Joe can still buy food? Why on earth would the people in power (aka the psychotic CxOs) care to expend any resources for Joe, once they control the robots that can do everything Joe could? What mechanisms exist for everyone here to prosper, rather than a select few who already own more wealth and power than the majority of the planet combined?
I think believing in this post-scarcity utopian fairy tale is a lot less imaginative and grounded than the opposite scenario, one where the common man gets crushed ruthlessly.
We don't even have to step into any kind of fantasy world to see this is the path we're heading down, in our current timeline as we speak, CEOs are foaming at the mouth to replace as many people as they can with AI. This entire massive AI/LLM bubble we find ourselves in is predicated on the idea that companies can finally get rid of their biggest cost centers, their human workers and their pesky desires like breaks and vacations and worker's rights. And yet, there's still somehow people out there that will readily lap up the bullshit notion that this tech is going to somehow be used as a force of good? That I find completely baffling.
Many people seem to have this ideal that UBI is inevitable and will solve a bunch of these sort of problems.
But I don't see how UBI can avoid the same complexities as our tax systems, where it will be used to try to influence behaviors, growing cruft along the way just like taxes.
To me it's completely baffling how people imagine that with human labor largely going obsolete, we will just stick with capitalism and all workers go hungry in some dystopian fantasy.
Many cynics seem to believe rich people are demons with zero consideration for their fellow humans.
Rich and powerful persons are still people just like you, and they have an interest in keeping the general population happy. Not to mention that we have democratic mechanisms that give power to the masses.
We will obviously transition to a system where most of us can live a comfortable life without working a full time job, and it's going to be great.
> Many cynics seem to believe rich people are demons with zero consideration for their fellow humans.
Do they have considerations for their fellow humans? I certainly haven't observed that they give a shit about anyone or anything that isn't their bottom line. What exactly has Zuckerberg contributed to this world and to his fellow man, other than a mass data harvesting operation that has enabled real life genocides?
What has Bezos done for the average Amazon warehouse worker, other than stick them in grueling conditions where they even have their toilet breaks timed, just to squeeze out every single inch of life out of his workers he can? What have the people working for Big Oil done that is beneficial to humanity, other than suppressing climate change research and funding lobbying groups to hide the fact that they knew about climate change since the 70s? What have the tobacco execs done for humanity, other than bribing doctors to falsify medical research indicating that tobacco isn't harmful? I could go on and on about all the evils brought on to the world by psychotic executives and their sycophantic legions sucking the teet hoping for a handout, but we'd be here all day.
Sure, there's a few philanthropists out there bobbing around in the ocean of soulless psychopaths that are doing some good things, but they're very much the exception.
> Not to mention that we have democratic mechanisms that give power to the masses.
Even (especially?) just looking solely from a US POV, these democratic mechanisms are quickly and actively being eroded by these "considerate" billionaires like Thiel (who is quite openly & proudly naming his companies using literally evil things from Tolkien's works). They're talking about taking over Greenland to distract from them all being ousted as pedophiles for fuck's sake, what "democractic mechanisms"?
> We will obviously transition to a system where most of us can live a comfortable life without working a full time job, and it's going to be great.
I again don't see how this is "obvious", and you haven't outlined anything about how this utopia is supposed to work other than extremely vague statements. How is this utopian state more obvious than the one we are currently freefalling into, a dystopian police state where your every breath is being tracked in some database that is then shared with anyone with 3 pennies to pay to access the data?
Even in the utopia scenario, that experiment has been taken to its natural conclusion on rats back in the 70s and the results were...interesting, to say the least. (google "Universe 25"). I feel like in many ways, a devolution to feudalism and tribal warfare would be preferable.
The problem is it can be subjective. Some people really like the “smooth motion” effect, especially if they never got used to watching 24fps films back in the day. Others, like me, think seeing stuff at higher refresh rates just looks off. It may be a generational thing. Same goes for “vivid color” mode and those crazy high contrast colors. People just like it more.
On the other hand, things that are objective like color calibration, can be hard to “push down” to each TV because they might vary from set to set. Apple TV has a cool feature where you can calibrate the output using your phone camera, it’s really nifty. Lots of people comment on how good the picture on my TV looks, it’s just because it’s calibrated. It makes a big difference.
Anyways, while I am on my soap box, one reason I don’t have a Netflix account any more is because you need the highest tier to get 4k/hdr content. Other services like Apple TV and Prime give everyone 4k. I feel like that should be the standard now. It’s funny to see this thread of suggestions for people to get better picture, when many viewers probably can’t even get 4k/hdr.
I feel like I’ve figured out a good workflow with AI coding tools now. I use it in “Planning mode” to describe the feature or whatever I am working on and break it down into phases. I iterate on the planning doc until it matches what I want to build.
Then, I ask it to execute each phase from the doc one at a time. I review all the code it writes or sometimes just write it myself. When it is done it updates the plan with what was accomplished and what needs to be done next.
This has worked for me because:
- it forces the planning part to happen before coding. A lot of Claude’s “wtf” moments can be caught in this phase before it write a ton of gobbledygook code that I then have to clean up
- the code is written in small chunks, usually one or two functions at a time. It’s small enough that I can review all the code and understand before I click accept. There’s no blindly accepting junk code.
- the only context is the planning doc. Claude captures everything it needs there, and it’s able to pick right up from a new chat and keep working.
- it helps my distraction-prone brain make plans and keep track of what I was doing. Even without Claude writing any code, this alone is a huge productivity boost for me. It’s like have a magic notebook that keeps track of where I was in my projects so I can pick them up again easily.
A nice practice that I try to follow it to always spell out what any Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) the first time they are used. Then from that point onwards the simple TLA can be used.
In this case, BPF (shorthand for eBPF), stands for Extended Berkley Packet Filter. It’s a relatively new feature in the kernel that allows attaching small programs at certain “hook points” in the kernel (for example, when some syscall is called). These programs can pass information into userspace (like who is calling the syscall), and make decisions (whether to allow the call to proceed).
We do try to spell things out and/or link them in LWN articles to make the context available, but some things we just have to assume.
Additionally, spelling out "Berkeley Packet Filter" is not going to help any readers here; BPF is far removed from the days when its sole job was filtering packets, and that name will not tell readers anything about why BPF is important in the Linux kernel.
https://youtu.be/2AXv49dDQJw?si=5lPy_Mz4kJFdi80t