Roundabouts are the Segway of civil engineering. In theory, a game changing transport innovation. In practice, just a little too mismatched with everyday aesthetics to properly fit in. Dorky and annoying for pedestrians too!
Good old traffic lights have a much better feature of being able to control traffic to allow for pedestrians, give cyclists a head start, give smaller side roads a look in at busy junctions, and giving a platform for traffic monitoring.
Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.
My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
Whipple Shields are a very important part of protecting things like the ISS, but are optimized more for chance high velocity impacts with tiny bits of debris than an adversary's targeted projectile or their robotic arm grappler, or indeed non-kinetic weapons like directed energy or EMPs which is probably the capability the US intends to imply here.
”Ideally the regulators would have forced these models to actually benefit the commons if they are from the commons.”
This echoes my feelings entirely. It is galling that we do not at the very least get a bill-of-materials for the models on which we are increasingly dependent.
I hope to soon see the organization of public domain digital libraries of a size suitable for anyone to use.
Gosh, the voice singing “unlimited downloads!” but the underlying text saying “400 per day” sure hit hard. As if generative AI needed more publicity for its “we are literally just making stuff up” approach to
getting stuff done.
I don't think this could be a model issue with not following properly (I hope for the sake of ElevenLabs), otherwise this would the most botched model release we've seen so far. Their main product release with a demo and not a single person listened to/read that demo and noticed the difference?!
Something must have happened here, miscommunication between departments so the blog post authors/owners and whoever made the actual music generation missed some update in-between when they made this and the release. If it's truly that the model chose not to follow passed lyrics/hallucination, and they still released this, I'd be lost for words.
Are smart glasses not the modern, practical implementation of the metaverse. I don’t think Meta were banking on games and low-poly avatars for their next generation of revenue, it was more about building (and then — hold onto your lunch please — monetizing) new forms of social connectivity. The only difference is that your permanent social camera went from being in-game to in-reality.
1. Re: complaint (1) the court should be aware of clear video evidence that, contrary to the claimant’s statement that a “rocket sled” was delivered via parcel post, that in fact the delivery was twofold: one 33” acme jet motor and a set of acme handlebars.
2. That the claimant used these to construct their own “rocket sled” is clearly outside any realms of liability for the defendant, who has not ever warranted that these two products be safely combined into a makeshift vehicle on the grounds that it would patently unsafe to use an acme jet engine for anything other than its intended purpose.
I am not an AI super mind hell bent on consolidating my power by leveraging chaos to take control of humanity’s resources, but if I were then sending one million deepfaked ransom emails to impressionable people would be the best tool for effecting change in meatspace.
We have your daughter / dog / Amazon delivery. If you ever want to see her / him / it again, plug this USB drive into the control panel at your station / let off the parking brake roll your car into this substation / change the meatpacking thermometers to read 8C lower than calibrated / ground your vessel on this sandbank / send an envelope of white powder to these addresses / set fire to the following hospitals / …
Your example is about helping a consumer navigate a market to get the best product and I think it’s bang on.
Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.
I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.
Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…
For the most part I feel the same way, and actually think it has the potential to completely change how e-commerce/web browsing work once it plays out, to the benefit of the client/consumer.
But, I can definitely see a fair argument from the e-commerce businesses that stand to lose from that, that by removing their control over the shopping experience in favor of an opaque agent, they lose the ability to effectively communicate with their customers. Or to provide a coherent/smooth purchasing flow where important stuff like price/dates/shipping are properly surfaced to the user.
That argument would I think be hard to separate from the desire to corral customers into their marketing brochure and convert site visitors into purchasers without churn. But it is true that the LLM in the middle could consistently miss things, or have weird biases/preferences that force vendors to rebuild their sites around LLM tics instead of actual people, janky harnesses that go unnoticed by end users but cause missed sales due to stale data or blind spots, etc.
Also, demoting their sites to glorified databases with a shipping/fulfillment API will give the buyer agent’s provider a lot of power over them and break their ability to establish branding/repeat-customers. Those are the only ways they can reliably carve out margin that otherwise gets whisked away by the advertising platforms pitting them in a zero-sum competition for placement. So it’s possible it could starve out or kill e-commerce the same way Google’s changes to search (the ai box and inline info) hurt the ad-funded websites their info came from.
> I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me
You must gave no idea how susceptible agents are to marketing! I used agents in conjunction to my own research on a niche item lately and while it was helpful for showing some things I hadn’t considered it was dead wrong, frequently about a lot of stuff. But by all means, give up more control
That’s really interesting, and you’re right, I had assumed an agent could be instructed to treat all vendor copy as biased to the point of being hostile!
I also don’t think I’d ever hand the credit card over to an agent. I just want a summary of what it has found and what it intends to do before pressing “pay”.
Do you mean in terms of competence at resisting breaches? I trust Meta’s security team a lot more than anyone else’s in that respect.
They are big enough and pay well to have a competent team. Compared with momandpop.com (willing but too small) or equifax (big but unwilling) and given the kind of data they are guarding, they’re probably the best in the business.
I don’t have a good intuition for the aerodynamic environment around a helicopter blade in flight. It feels like it ought to be very blustery. Presumably there’s a huge amount of pressure on the underside and a drop in pressure on the top side, maybe even below atmospheric pressure?
The blades are a foot wide and 30’ long, so five of them carrying 25,000lbs is about 1psi of pressure. 3x that for a laden Stallion. I guess I expected it to be a lot more because, from the perspective of the rotor blade, it is in a very windy regime.
The other major open question for me is with the cracks. The system implies there is a non instantaneous progression from unbroken, to having a small crack on the surface, to having a crack large enough for nitrogen to escape, to having a crack so large that the rotor blade fails. I’d love to know what sort of timeframes sit between each of these phases.
Good old traffic lights have a much better feature of being able to control traffic to allow for pedestrians, give cyclists a head start, give smaller side roads a look in at busy junctions, and giving a platform for traffic monitoring.
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