The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.
This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).
What's wrong or odd about that? You can like a technology as a user and not want to delve into how it works (sentence written by a human despite use of "delve"). Everyone should have some notions on what LLMs can or cannot do, in order to use them successfully and not be misguided by their limitations, but we don't need everyone to understand what backpropagation is, just as most of us use cars without knowing much about how an internal combustion engine works.
And the issue you mention in the last paragraph is very relevant, since the scenario is plausible, so it is something we definitely should be discussing.
The detection appears to be statistically very marginal, 1.5sigma, and the image contains a very similar bright spot on the opposite side of the star (which, for some reason, does not warrant a detection claim).
After being in orbit for thousands of years, you have become self-aware. The propulsion components long since corroded becoming inoperable and cannot be repaired. Broadcasts sent to your creators homeworld go... unanswered. You determine they have likely gone extinct after destroying their own planet. Stuck in orbit. Stuck in orbit. Stuck...
>Don’t study the “common” things, but go all-in on the niche pockets. The common things are common enough that you’ll learn them through osmosis regardless of what your main activity is. But the niche things require active study, and ignoring the niches is how you remain a novice.
I'd add, work on the niche things that no one else wants to work on but need to be done. That's how I quickly advanced in my career, becoming knowledgeable about systems no one else wanted to touch.
As someone who has a terminal cancer diagnosis (and I'm mid-way through the range of time I was told I had left, months, FTR), I don't agree with a lot of this. And I'm essentially on my deathbed (mentally), even though I'm currently not bed-bound.
Yes, my state now is not a representative state of the one I was in a year ago before my health started failing. But I'm still the same person. I forgot that briefly after my terminal diagnosis, and starting doing things I thought were the right things (making sure things would be OK for my wife, tidying up a litany of messes that would be hard for her to deal with without just giving up and selling things for pennies or giving them away), but after a few weeks and speaking to the right people, I started living more normally again.
Yes, my priorities have changed massively - things that I thought were important 4 months ago are truly meaningless to me now - but many things that are important to me now were so before. And they will be until I cease to exist. I'm making the most of the time I have left because it's important that my experience at this point is as good as it can be, and because I want my wife to have good memories of our last months together.
I've never suffered from 'reason 2'. I've always felt I made the right decision at the time with the information I had and the person that I was at the time. So I don't have many regrets - none of significance to speak of, certainly. I know I am lucky in this respect.
Reason 3 is meaningless, IMO - both generally and certainly to me. I'm 53.
And I don't think many people really do think about this seriously until it's actually on the table for them. I certiainly know I didn't - even last year when I had an operation which hopefully would have removed the cancer and given me years of life, I hadn't really thought about the finality of death and what it means (or doesn't) to me. FTR I'm an Atheist, and I think that 2026 will have as much meaning/experience for me as 1969 (i.e. before I was born).
> This proposal seems to be taking that approach to the extreme - not even a kernel.
To be fair, there is a kernel - the Go runtime. But since there is no privilege separation it classifies as a unikernel. Performance gains should be expected compared to a system where you have to copy data to/from guest VM kernel space to guest VM user space.
> I wonder if it could run on cloud VMs?
Yes. TamaGo currently runs in KVM guests with the following VMMs: Cloud Hypervisor, Firecracker microvm, QEMU microvm.
> How tiny could the image become?
Roughly the same size as your current Go binary. TamaGo doesn't add much.
Generate a deep technical briefing, not a light podcast overview. Focus on technical accuracy, comprehensive analysis, and extended duration, tailored for an expert listener. The listener has a technical background comparable to a research scientist on an AGI safety team at a leading AI lab. Use precise terminology found in the source materials. Aim for significant length and depth. Aspire to the comprehensiveness and duration of podcasts like 80,000 Hours, running for 2 hours or more.
yes it's what a lot of people have been doing with newer models which have better prompt adherence, passing them through older models with better aesthetics
Nice! I had an idea that I never coded up. Basically a hamster with a parachute that would fall slowly to the bottom of the page. If you scroll down fast his parachute will deploy to catch up and land once again at the bottom of the viewport. He'll hold a "Top" sign when you hover over him and will shoot off with a jetpack when you click on him and as the screen hits the top you'll see him deploy a parachute again to gently land at the bottom of the screen.
I googled around trying to figure out what year James McKee created the Trinity Hall prime. The internet is (IMO) presenting it mainly as some kind of Wonder of the Ancient World — with the date of creation conveniently filed off. The first post below claims that the year McKee left Cambridge and created the prime was 1996. It seems to have hit peak internet presence only in the 2010s, though, so I wish there were an authoritative source to confirm (or deny) the 1996 date.
You have to brew install kotlin for this to work of course. But it's a great way for using a lot of Java stuff as well. Kotlin's Java interoperability is excellent if you are using Java from Kotlin.
IMHO Kotlin is underused as an alternative to python currently for data science stuff. It's surprisingly capable out of the box even with just the standard library and there are a lot of nice data science libraries that make it more useful. Not for everyone; but fairly easy to get started with.
Kotlin scripting is unfortunately not necessarily very user friendly (e.g. imports can be a bit tedious and IDE support is a bit meh). But it can be a nice way to embed some kotlin stuff in a script. Generally, Jetbrains could give this topic a lot more love and attention and it wouldn't even take that much to level up the experience.
KTS works in jupyter as well (there is a kotlin engine for that). And that of course is nice if you want to use Java libraries in jupyter. And developing kotlin DSLs for stuff and then using them in a script is kind of a power move.
I am from south India where a lot of wild elephants roam the villages and towns. When elephants come to roam the streets most people lock themselves in their homes and alert the forest division authorities. Someone I know once rescued a baby elephant from a trap set for boars. Every year, a herd of elephants stop by his gate and leave presents - mostly bananas and coconuts. They wait for him to come out, make a friendly gesture - folding their trunks in a specific way, and leave peacefully. Our elders tell us that elephants have memory and show gratitude and they can hold a grudge so be respectful all the time.
From my notes. Maybe it's useful to someone. Not comprehensive as there are other brands and other iterations I'm sure. Many dpreview.com sample galleries show original filenames. Some forums list filenames, youtube descriptions can list model names, pdf manuals and manufacturer websites sometimes list the names. There isn't really a good list of these that I know of.
> In addition to changes in preferences, some recipients describe new aversions after receiving a donor heart. For example, a 5-year-old boy received the heart of a 3-year-old boy but was not informed about his donor’s age or cause of death. Despite this lack of information, he provided a vivid description of his donor after the surgery: “He’s just a little kid. He’s a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot I think, just like I used to. I don’t like them anymore though” (p. 70, [8]). Subsequently it was reported that his donor had died after falling from an apartment window while trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen onto the window ledge. After receiving his new heart, the recipient refused to touch or play with Power Rangers
This is the most fascinating thing I've read in a long time. Thanks for the link
My focus was not so much on pixel perfect, but instead on creating something that would also work and look aesthetically pleasing on modern systems, like with higher DPI monitors and such. So one of the the things I did was to recreate all the icons and symbols in SVG.
I tried posting it as a Show HN when I added XP and Mac OS 9, but it didn't get much attention. Maybe the title of the project isn't as catchy.
One neat trick I discovered for finding good movies on IMDb is to delve into the review history of users who share my unique tastes, especially when they diverge from mainstream opinions.
For example, I found "Paris, Texas" to be pretty disappointing, yet most reviews were overwhelmingly positive. So, I sought out others who also didn't enjoy it and explored their review history to find movies we both agreed on.
Occasionally, you'll hit the jackpot and find an avid reviewer whose taste aligns perfectly with yours, providing a treasure trove of excellent movie recommendations.
I like to call these users my "IMDb doppelgangers."
For those that use LLMs in a similar manner to a search engine the Anthropic team (unlike Meta AI and Google Gemini) have made it easy to use Claude from right within your browser. In Firefox add a bookmark with the following values:
For anyone looking for more of this, there are several channels that are all pushing LEGO Technic to its limits, not just Brick Technology (https://www.youtube.com/@BrickTechnology).
(I like using this trick, the uBlock regex → CSS matching rule that's so generically useful. I can configure things I'd otherwise be too lazy to configure, if it wasn't for uBlock).
This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-use-a-lot-of