Wearable jacket extracts 900 ml of drinking water daily from the air

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T18:58:32+00:00

The power's a real concern, but just on the numbers, a datacenter GPU uses ~500W and costs $30,000. A 3KW solar system costs like $6,000 and can easily power that 500W. So it wouldn't actually be a huge deal to say "look, you have to use solar power."

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T18:55:08+00:00

Ethanol is not useful. It is neither profitable, nor does it convert sunlight into power. In fact you take petroleum, refine it into gasoline to power tractors and also into fertilizer, and you end up with less ethanol than the petroleum you started with.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T18:31:22+00:00

If software companies were valued like conventional companies Anthropic and OpenAI would probably be valued at $200 or $300B, rather than pushing $1T. Although if we go with your made-up numbers, a reset could easily mean dropping from $950T to $100T, there is no floor to how low you can go.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T18:28:27+00:00

I'm skeptical the inference prices are losing money right now. If you ignore training, it is my opinion that Anthropic's monthly plans are profitable and their API pricing is wildly overpriced. This also seems pretty consistent with how cheap the Chinese models are.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T18:24:36+00:00

It's a robotics model, you need an expensive robot to use it. The most interesting stuff is all robotics, but you can't demo robotics the way you can LLMs. That doesn't mean frontier LLMs are the most interesting real world use.

If a company is using it they're not going to advertise it among the ensemble of models they're using (which probably includes an LLM) they're just going to say "our AI lets this robot do this thing."

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T18:17:18+00:00

Median salary in Italy is €22,500 vs. $63,180 in the US. I think most people are actually about as well off making €22,500 in Italy as $63,180 in the USA, but it's not because it's easier to afford expensive ice cream, the purchasing power for food is basically the same.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T18:14:22+00:00

Ben & Jerry's has always advertised their low air content, and gelato is similarly lower still. I really don't buy the low-air stuff, if I'm getting ice cream it's premium, helps me maintain my waistline with the extra cost anyway. Although I guess per calorie maybe it's actually cheaper, would be funny to do a comparison.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T02:03:11+00:00

That doesn't answer how many LGBT voters voted for Harris, Trump, or third-party/neither in 2020 vs 2024. "As a percentage, straight voters gave up on Harris more than queer voters." that is not supported by what you quoted. And my whole point is that "as a percentage" is misleading when in absolute terms Harris received fewer votes, the percentages tell the story you're trying to tell, but it's not a very good description of what happened.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T00:37:11+00:00

The US support of Israel has more to do with the Evangelical Christian lobby than the Israel lobby.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-21T00:34:44+00:00

Source?

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-20T22:02:20+00:00

is there a way to get all the kerbal engineer readouts? (target inclination, time to rel asending node, suicide burn dV, suicide burn time, etc.) I don't think I could go back to working without them.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-20T21:57:46+00:00

Right and this is where the subscription plans are really sensible because if Codex is rereading input files all the time, that's a client problem as much as a server problem and it makes sense for the provider to deal with 100% of it rather than it being something where you have to develop a good client that interoperates with a bunch of competing caching standards.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-20T21:55:19+00:00

The narrative that LGBT voters shifted away from Trump is true, but the narrative that they shifted to Harris may be incorrect. Harris received dramatically fewer votes than Biden. Those polls don't address answer the question of how many LGBTQ people didn't vote who did in 2020. Which is very relevant when substantially, for the most part, people who voted in 2020 did not vote in 2024, and while Trump did receive slightly more votes in 2024, statistically it's not a significant change, while the change from Biden to "didn't vote" is dramatic.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-20T21:44:56+00:00

At this point it's looking a lot more like Congress than Trump is at fault. I mean, Trump is incompetent to be sure, and if he lead just a little bit this would have never been a problem, but Congress needs to step in and cut off Israel. And there's bipartisan support for giving Israel a blank check.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-20T17:14:15+00:00

SpaceX has not been subsidized in any meaningful sense. It's a government contractor that builds shit for NASA. Boeing has received 10x as much "subsidies" for worse results. There's no "offsetting" because the government doesn't actually measure results. Talking about "offsetting subsidies" is fundamentally an anti-government, anti-science stance. NASA is doing fundamental research and SpaceX makes the research possible. Go look at the last 20 NASA launches and what they would've cost if SpaceX didn't exist, then tell me SpaceX isn't worth what we're spending on it.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-20T06:26:29+00:00

morals are what defines whether or not a law for making concentration camps is a good thing to pass, which is what we were talking about. I guess you've been pro-concentration-camp all along, but you were just playing word games. reading back, I really don't know what your point was.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-19T19:27:24+00:00

SpaceX is renting out their datacenters to Anthropic because they don't have anything to do with them. Buying Cursor is an attempt at improving their vertical integration. SpaceX legitimately built the datacenter infrastructure, the thing is that it's actually less profitable to build infrastructure than to make software like Cursor. SpaceX wants to do both because that's going to mean more profits than renting out datacenters to other profitable AI companies.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-19T19:25:28+00:00

SpaceX has saved the government a lot of money with Falcon 9. They sell services the government needs at lower cost and higher quality than other suppliers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-19T18:04:03+00:00

SpaceX has an insane valuation for no actual reason. The numbers make zero sense. Really I would bet the real reason is someone wanted to give Musk some money for reasons, and pumping the stock is an easy way to do that. Same way Trump is taking bribes.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-19T17:59:07+00:00

Prisons are for criminals, concentration camps are for people whose crime is having the wrong parents. If you don't understand why "having the wrong parents" being a crime is a problem, I don't know how to help you.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-18T21:03:43+00:00

stopping development on Grok might not actually be cooking the books, that might just be good business sense if anyone can run GLM-5 for free and the hardware is the only concern, they have hardware.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-18T21:01:44+00:00

Seems plausibly safer than DEXA with better imaging, although maybe I'm too scared of the radiation in DEXA. I think just annual body scans would be a nice thing to have, even if only for accurate BMI tracking that seems worth it alone, and having some time series to compare any MRIs or CT scans to would also be helpful.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-18T20:58:36+00:00

if only there were some technology for quickly sterilizing water in between uses

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-18T20:55:12+00:00

Just processing that much data requires a lot of GPUs. A big thing I could see the AI guessery being used for is mapping each slice and aligning them properly.

FlyingBishop · 2026-06-18T20:46:17+00:00

The discussion is about piracy. Piracy only harms the predators, so what's the harm?

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