thinking about entropy

critical role, rbwy, vorkosigan, spop, and a lot of uncategorizable reblogs. Old enough.

[dormitionanddominion]

[innerchildabortionclinic]

[bells-lettres]

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

Translation by me. :))

[charl0ttan]

something i actually just realized on call w some friends recently is how crazey it is that your online friends are as many as thousands of feet above or below u right now. like if you teleported to their location without changing your height above sea level, well your fucked in some way basically

[charl0ttan]

How high above sea level are you right now?

0-250 feet

251-500 feet

501-750 feet

751-1000 feet

1001-2000 feet

2001-3000 feet

3001-4000 feet

4001-5000 feet

5001-6000 feet

6001-7000 feet

7001-8000 feet

8001+ feet

Remaining time: 2 hours 29 minutes

[ontari]

Chapter 20 - Harrow the Ninth

i just…couldn’t help myself

[filmnoirsbian]

I love getting unaccompanied minors (kids flying alone) who so clearly just. Don't want to be here lol. Sometimes I get to know a little of their story, like their parents are divorced, or a family member died and they're heading to the funeral, but usually they just don't want to talk about it and that's fine. But I always treat the flight like it's a challenge to make them smile. I offer them snacks and soda but that's never enough, that's whatever, they could get those from an airport vending machine. Chump change. So then I tell the worst jokes. Just the most embarrassing, kindergarten teacher, annoying dad jokes you can think of. And those always get a groan, or a "Seriously??" And that's my in! Now I can say "Why, what's your idea of a good joke? No, come on hotshot, make your best joke, let's see it." And they hem and they haw but of course they eventually tell me their very best joke because kids are little competitive comedy goldmines. And it's always super funny, so I laugh, and that's where they slip up. Because you know what you almost always do when your joke successfully makes someone laugh? You smile. And I'm like. Gotcha. Rookie move. Now you're going to end up having a good time in spite of yourself. I win.

[filmnoirsbian]

Did this with an 11yo u.m. today and he said "What did the ghost say to the other ghost?" And I said "What?" "Nothing. Ghosts aren't real."

[filmnoirsbian]

I'm literally a flight attendant, offering snacks and drinks is my job

[this-is-a-name-dont-worry]

gshsjb

[argumate]

4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.

5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.

some interesting thoughts (!) from "head of strategic futures" openai

[argumate]

Sam Altman's AI Metered Utility: Pay-Per-Token Billing Like Electricity | explainx.ai Blog

Sam Altman envisions AI as a metered utility like electricity, with pay-per-token billing. Critics see dystopian gatekeeping, supporters see

nothing Altman says can be trusted of course because he's a pathological liar (according to everyone who has ever interacted with him?) but this whole thing is incoherent: massive investment is required to create a utility that is too cheap to meter and doesn't earn any return; meanwhile open weight models will lead to a dystopian communist hellscape and must be stopped because they may deter the investment needed to create this unprofitable behemoth.

[blckgirlacid]

I need my weird alone time or I will explode

[rhapsodyxvi]

using ai for modding games in particular is kind of a weird situation, because claude will crack something and provide a simple explanation for how to do it, in such a way that i go "wow! with this information, i could make the lives of anyone else who wants to attempt this so much easier!", and i contemplate doing this because i enjoy helping people

the problem then becomes that there's a very high chance that anyone i try to introduce this solution to will, instead of using that information, take one look at me and immediately start thinking of acceptable slurs to call me

[rhapsodyxvi]

i went "aw man, it's gonna be really hard to make a unique weapon for spierce because i'm not good at editing models" and claude went "oh you don't have to! here, i can give you a neat and tidy list of all the sword textures in the game, and all you have to do is choose the one you like and then recolor it to look like forneus! then i can use that to make a new weapon for you to assign to spierce with these balanced stats ^_^"

and i'm like. oh okay that's cool. this would be neat to show to anyone ever. unfortunately i would get my ass beat but thank you for helping me

[zaprowsdower27]

Cuba has been buying drones from Russia and Iran (ref). Some sources include "Shahed-136, Mohajer-6, Ababil-series systems" among those they are suspected to have

Wikipedia says that Sahed-136 drones have an operational range of 2500 km, Mohajer-6 drones have an operational range of between 200 and 500 km. Also, that the latest Ababil-series drone (Ababil-5) has a range of 40km, but that's less relevant to my point here.

The Trump administration has been threatening Cuba, with several key administration figures such as Marco Rubio being particularly motivated for such for personal reasons. This is likely increasingly tempting for them as they likely want a Quick Victorious War to distract from the disaster that was thinking Iran would be a Quick Victorious War

Iran has shown that the US is suffering badly, at least under Trump and Kegbreath, from Last War Syndrome, not being at all prepared for drone warfare and needing multi-million dollar interceptor missiles to deal with swarms of $40k drones, and are down to a quarter of required interceptor stocks as a result, with replacements still being well off in the future (linked article suggests late this year for live fire tests of new cheaper inteceptors).

The distance from Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida (where Trump spends a large percent of his time, although I'm not finding any articles newer than this time last year for such) to the nearest spot on the Cuban Mainland is less than 450 km

CONCLUSION:

*insert image of a train going full speed ahead towards a bridge that is no longer there*

I have zero control over the train. I have zero control over the (lack of) bridge. All I can do is watch. I can't even call it hope or fear or enjoyment at this point so much as "there isn't anything there to look at yet if ever, yet I cannot look away".

[oneheadtoanother]

[poppy5991]

Can’t get over the fact that every time they encounter a person in the otherside, Sorawo is like “this is my place with Toriko, why are you here? 😒” and meanwhile, said person is trapped in a realm of supernatural horrors

[scarlettaagni]

so i think the solution is to give dachshunds a third pair of legs right in the middle

[tyrellis]

I hope he dies fr

[hope-for-the-planet]

New Solar Tech Makes Desalinating Seawater Cheaper Than Producing Bottled Water

Engineering teams around the world have been attempting to develop new methods of seawater desalination.

Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.

The goal is now to scale the technology for use in coastal areas and islands experiencing water insecurity.

[wizardshark]

For the last two decades we've been told constantly that fresh water use is THE next crisis. That water wars are going to be completely inevitable.

This is very, very important.

[spiderfuckersworld]

We will need to do something with the brine. It.should be given to me. I will drink it.

[urists]

Found the paper (abstract, the rest behind a paywall) and I am... suspicious...

Reads to me like atmospheric-pressure evaporation, and since they are reporting pure evaporation rate, I'm assuming there's no regen/recycling, etc.

Average maximum solar irradiance is ~1000 W/m^2, from which they are apparently generating 38 kg/(m^2-h) of water vapor. According to my best buddy engineering toolbox, water takes 2256.4kJ/kg to boil. We can plug that in to see.

So they're asserting 38.14 kg/(m^2-h), while the theoretical maximum is 1.5 kg/(m^2-h). Either I'm missing something (always possible!) or this is possibly wrong.

[urists]

I DID find the supplemental. Which includes this nice note:

So: not 20L a day from 0.75m^2, 20L a day from ~8m^2, including 2kW of solar. Can plug that in:

That's actually possible for just straight evaporation, not even including regen etc. Shifty reporting but at least physically possible.

[hope-for-the-planet]

New Solar Tech Makes Desalinating Seawater Cheaper Than Producing Bottled Water

Engineering teams around the world have been attempting to develop new methods of seawater desalination.

Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.

The goal is now to scale the technology for use in coastal areas and islands experiencing water insecurity.

[wizardshark]

For the last two decades we've been told constantly that fresh water use is THE next crisis. That water wars are going to be completely inevitable.

This is very, very important.

[spiderfuckersworld]

We will need to do something with the brine. It.should be given to me. I will drink it.

[urists]

Found the paper (abstract, the rest behind a paywall) and I am... suspicious...

Reads to me like atmospheric-pressure evaporation, and since they are reporting pure evaporation rate, I'm assuming there's no regen/recycling, etc.

Average maximum solar irradiance is ~1000 W/m^2, from which they are apparently generating 38 kg/(m^2-h) of water vapor. According to my best buddy engineering toolbox, water takes 2256.4kJ/kg to boil. We can plug that in to see.

So they're asserting 38.14 kg/(m^2-h), while the theoretical maximum is 1.5 kg/(m^2-h). Either I'm missing something (always possible!) or this is possibly wrong.

[prokopetz]

It's funny how in the last couple of years several major social media platforms have quietly removed "this user appears to be a bot" from the list of valid reasons to report a post on their abuse forms. I wonder what might have have motivated that particular change.

[urists]

TIL that the Qing Dynasty at one point made it illegal to teach (possibly just westerner, I'm not sure) foreigners any Chinese language