Once models get better, we could avoid paying for a cache read on edit or write calls, and have the model assume they succeeded and not interrupt the stream to get output.
We can then just parse the output and once we encounter such a silent toolcall execute it. With high probability its correct (glm in pi for me had 95% tool call success rate) and we can continue, else rewind.
As a workaround, you dont want to use the provider feature that interrupts the stream after a tool call, but instead parse the reasoning.
I tried this in pi and it kind of worked, but the model got confused about whether edits had been applied and in several runs either double checked or used the bash tool instead, negating any possible benefits.
How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc. and, 24/7 free power courtesy of our sun.
Id expect orbital observatories to be superior to ground based ones, thinking of Webb, Hubble.
I suppose the only downside is cost. So, the actual problem, is how to tax the shared resource that is our LEO.
Aside from that, wed also want to incentivize not leaving space debris in orbit. Require insurance, and perhaps rent for orbital trajectories?
But, without working international order, theres no way thats gonna happen...
Why not? They are massive only because you are limited by earth surface. In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.
Right now for the price of that one project one could have a humongous radio telescope in orbit without any interference. If only people could really look forward.
> In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.
Radioastron required cross-correlating the signal with ground-based radio teleacopes in order to do science. The collecting area, dish distributons, etc. would need to be fully replicated in space if one wanted to avoid using ground-based facilities entirely.
Nope. Ot was one of a kind thing only because you could not launch two at the time. With that a-given, ofc the ground-based "other end of the leg" was essential for it to work.
Now we can launch two. Or two dozen. This completely obviates any need for ground listeners as for resulting angular resolution.
Since ground-based radioastronomy has other uses, will stay there anyway and since crosscheck is always better, future long-base radiointerferometry will use legacy ground-based observatories.
> How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc.
One would need to put the telescopes into fairly high orbits in order to avoid the interference. I think that even images made with the Hubble space telescope have sometimes seen the impact of satellite constellations.
The earth is finite, and space, for all intents and purposes, is not, and expansion into it would thus be required to sustain any super linear growth of the economy.
Well, and rockets are cool. Perhaps people would much rather invest in something with the veneer of furthering space exploration (and the promise of infinite riches) than buy into some crypto blockchain startup.
And, its not as if other current valuations are sane.
SpaceX isn't opening space to everyone. They're are preparing for the select few to be able to escape once the earth is no longer sustainable due to their own efforts.
Actually given that the first colonists on Mars will live pretty miserable lives before dying early of radiation poisoning Musk and Co are trying to recruit other people to move there.
Musk, Thiel, Bezos etc. none of these guys have ever said they want to move there.
No they aren't. They're trying to design robots that can build the habit for them before they arrive and pamper them once they are there. Maybe they'll send a few human guinea pigs first to work out the kinks, but they ain't trying to go to Mars, or anywhere, for the good of the human race as a whole.
Musk has repeatedly talked about how he wants to go to Mars.
Some cheap and durable archival storage would be nice. Perhaps by storing data in grooves on ceramic discs. (Which is essentially what cds did). Though, preferably without high speed rotation, and reading more than one bit at a time by e.g. taking a picture of the surface through a microscope. How about 1 PB per disk?
I was wondering why we dont have something like that.
Unfortunately, it turns out that, with Blue-ray discs, we're already approaching the optics limit of what visible light (easily) gets us, and they're already cheating with multi-layer storage for the 100GB option. Thus youd need a complicated EUV or electron beam setup for smaller feature sizes.
Say i want my 1PB disk in cd format. A cd has r=6cm. Thus A~=100cm^2. A/1PB= 1.25e-18m^2= 1.25 nm^2, or about 5x5 atoms per bit :/
I guess we're better off by just scaling up flash production and stacking those elements vertically.
Edit: Turns out we need volumetric storage.
By using a material that is transparent to the laser wavelength, by intersecting two precisely focussed beams, the local intensity suffices to absorb two photons at once (stops being transparent) allowing you to select a volumetric point to interact with.
This allows a couple hundred of layers until refraction breaks our resolution.
The pulsetime is just to advance the clockwork one step, and is kept fixed, the advancement driven by the mechanism is discrete. As long as you keep track of the count, you wont accumulate drift. The adjustment is to get that stepping working, if it doesnt miss a step, youre good.
In a perfect world, yes. But mechanisms aren’t perfect and it’s entirely possible if not likely that steps will be missed as friction increases over time and things wear.
I’m not saying these things matter much in this context.
The clock will still be far more accurate than purely mechanical version. And, re-synchronizing it is as trivial as turning the knob, just as you would for the all mechanical mechanism.
I had a clock where the second hand was not properly balanced and it would miss steps fairly reliably in the second-half of the minute (when the heavier side of the hand was going up). I added some tape to the counterweight to fix it.
The "premium request" billing model where you pay per invocation and not for usage is very obviously not a sustainable approach and creates skewed incentives (e.g. for microsoft to degrade response quality), especially with the shift towards longer running agentic sessions as opposed to simple oneshot chat questions, which the system was presumably designed for. Its just a very obvious fundamental incompatibility and the system is in increasing need of replacement. Usage linked (pay per token) is probably the way to go, as is industry standard.
Paying per token also encouragages reduced quality only now you pay. If they can subtbtly degrade quality or even probability of 1shot solutions, they get you paying for more tokens. Under current economic models and incentive structures, enshitification is inevitable, since we're optimizing for it long term.
For that to work it requires a free market, llms in their current format are a neccesarily closed market. It's like mobile phones. You'll get a sleek somewhat passable product increasingly dated and dysfunctional which every year serves you less and someone else more. Given I can't decide smart phones in their current form are shit, i'll make something better (without enromous capital) meams we're failing open market conditions. Do you see the point i am trying to make?
Tell my economics textbook not me. Free markets are defined, in part, by the absence of coercive impediments to economic activity, which explicitley includes restrictions on entry.
"Low" is relative. But we've got people creating new models with millions of dollars, not billions. Granted, not thousands either. It's low enough that I don't think the barrier to entry is a problem.
right, so basically the only people who can enter the market are those part of the same club who have brought us the stripped down and dated wonders before us today.
Take the mobile phone market, there is basically no innovation going on these days. Small iterative steps and minor improvements, each new generation another sensor removed or new consumer hostile bloat added, because everyone in the club agrees on how to fuck the consumer, irrespective of what the consumer wants. It's an illusion of choice.
Tbh, i've encountered residental areas where the houses happen to have exposed roofs. I suppose that might be one of them places you could throw those panels.
Regarding the amount of rare earth required to make just one solar panel, i was surprised to find out that effectively all you need is something called 'silicon' as well as an initial investment in energy to bake the thing.
It just so happens to be
that, according to google, this 'silicon' stuff is quite abundant and can for example be found in desert sand.
Since you can stack those fusion reactors vertically, i suppose they'd come out on top in the power/sqft category.
A magnetic field is the result of moving an electric charge (in this case electrons). Applying the voltage will move the electrons. The only thing the material being a superconductor changes is that the electrons will lose less energy to resistance while traversing the sample.
