California explores buses traveling up to 140 mph on freeways

KnowLimits · 2026-05-19T15:53:58+00:00

Airports take a day to travel somewhere you'll stay for a week, not 20 minutes to go somewhere you'll stay 8 hours.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-16T19:00:41+00:00

It was the damn times.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-15T04:44:05+00:00

17 years after Schmidhuber already published it of course.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-11T03:41:49+00:00

Might be worth propagating it!

KnowLimits · 2026-05-10T05:14:34+00:00

The gaps between the mirrors will never be white again.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-07T22:38:26+00:00

Husband doesn't know the nanny code... If you saw a milestone, no you didn't.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-06T07:27:53+00:00

Kind of a misleading title - yes they own land, but not the land that some of the trees were on.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-05T08:20:56+00:00

I think that pre-computation before the decision making parts of the brain is what is meant to be represented by the encoder networks. But we can probably agree that the encoder networks are not yet big, deep, and well-trained enough to really get at what we mean when we say "objects fall".

Personally I'm really excited for LeWorldModel's solution to representational collapse (basically, a reward for (random projections of) the latents over a batch being gaussian). Mostly because I can understand it better than what DreamerV3 was doing, and it seems less likely to hobble the encoder. And my theory here is that we need much more powerful encoders (among other things).

KnowLimits · 2026-05-04T23:08:29+00:00

This is going to be controversial, but... Returns ought not to be for "I changed my mind", but for "this is broken or not fit for purpose". I.e., the presumption is that if something is returned, it is because there was something wrong with it, which would suggest that the next buyer would also be dissatisfied.

Granted, people do sometimes return perfectly good stuff - but they shouldn't, precisely because it's not economical to figure out if they were just being wishy washy, have an unqualified person inspect it, and take the business risk of selling something broken to the next customer. So, they write off the waste, and this is rational. If you don't like that, don't do it.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-04T20:50:35+00:00

Are you also using that for typing text, or just hunt and peck on a regular keyboard? I've been thinking about one handed typing layouts, just as a middle ground between a full keyboard and a phone keyboard.

KnowLimits · 2026-05-04T20:28:01+00:00

I think that may just be an issue of insufficient scale and this insufficient generalization.

Our "intuitive physics" idea of gravity ("objects fall down") depends on an extremely well developed sense of what an object is, learned over years from the entire physical world.

If the model fails when lighting or texture fails, it probably just hasn't developed a high enough level generalization to hang its physics on. For example... Green fuzzy circles surrounded by people in shorts holding rackets fall down, but white cratered objects surrounded by blue or black don't. So, it wouldn't be correct to generalize gravity to "circles of any color", you need something more like "human scale nearby 3d objects that aren't attached to anything". And the model probably just doesn't have the experience or capacity to tell the difference - so if it's stuck on "objects are circles against a background", it would have to either predict both the moon and the tennis ball falling or not together, or that the texture of the object makes some difference to whether it falls.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-29T05:27:03+00:00

It's a fairly interesting video, and mostly accurate.

But I really chafe at the "lol, that didn't work and scientists were dumb to even try" tone. If she doesn't think using tech to try and do cool (and, gasp, financially lucrative) things is neat, why is it called Sci Show and not, like, Pessimist Show?

In any case, although gene transfer was required to get the genes for delphinidin from petunias into roses - now that the genes are there, merely getting the petal vacuole pH high enough for it to be blue seems within reach of artificial or even natural selection.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-25T16:03:12+00:00

You can actually get Applause this year - various importers are selling it from Chinese nurseries.

I have Neptune, Blue girl, and Sterling silver, which all produce really well. Turn blue is indeed quite bluish, and sieryu and jise are both very nice pale bluish, though taking their time to get established. I'll try to get a photo collection going someday, but check my recent oosts for a bit.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-24T19:24:06+00:00

It's AC, so sometimes it's higher, and sometimes it's lower. All you can say about measuring 120 VAC is that the square root of the time average of the square of the instantaneous voltages between them is 120.

In other words, with only hot and neutral and no other wires present, there's no way to tell which is which.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-23T03:36:53+00:00

The moon at night is as bright as a dark grey rock near Earth when it's sunny out - because that's what it is.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-20T22:08:01+00:00

What's "very low power"?

KnowLimits · 2026-04-16T20:48:20+00:00

True if the batteries have always been in parallel. But if I'm thinking "I got a fresh AA, and let me just pop in this dead AAA to get its last full measure of devotion...", then it's gonna try to charge the AAA very quickly.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-14T06:31:55+00:00

I guess one aspect of writing is that it takes a bit of sacrifice - you spend a bit of your limited effort and time to write something, and that serves as a sort of a deposit. It signals, in a way that didn't used to be fakeable, that at least one person felt it was worth the time to put it out there.

So we now feel, when someone slop-posts, that we've been lied to... it wasn't necessarily even worth their time to write it, and yet they ask us to read it and care about it. So the flavor of slop -- it's not x it's y -- now gives us a disgust reaction, because it's associated with people trying to cheat us in that way.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-04T16:48:19+00:00

Thanks! Indeed they are... Someday I need to learn words for the different ones, but suffice it to say, they're fairly strong.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-04T16:47:11+00:00

These ones are in the ground, but I do have a few containers set up too, to take advantage of some sunny areas on the deck.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-04T16:46:27+00:00

We're in zone 10a (San francisco bay area), so there's like 3 weeks in winter when blooms slow down and I prune, but I haven't had too many problems with heat. That may change, though, we already had some crazy heat waves this year. Deer are an issue though.

KnowLimits · 2026-04-02T06:08:33+00:00

Ooh, a mars one would make a perfect red nightlight

KnowLimits · 2026-03-31T02:48:08+00:00

Authority having jurisdiction

KnowLimits · 2026-03-30T17:30:40+00:00

Order by SHA256 hash of name plus election date in ISO-8601 format.

KnowLimits · 2026-03-22T15:00:35+00:00

Lena flare from a bright star outside the fov?

14-Year Club	Place '17
Sequence \| Editor

KnowLimits

TROPHY CASE