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Now it's a franchise too!

Once it gets big enough in your location you buy it for that sweet sweet intel.


I don't even think that's the issue.

The issue to my mind is a lack of data at the meeting of QFT/GR.

Afterall few humans historically have been capable of the initial true leap between ontologies. But humans are pretty smart so we can't say that is a requirement for AGI.


When it comes to revolutionary/unsolved subjects, there will never be enough data. That's why its revolutionary/unsolved.

Maybe.

“The laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.”

- Paul Dirac

“It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realisation in external nature. What is intelligible is also beautiful. We may well ask: how does it happen that beauty in the exact sciences becomes recognizable even before it is understood in detail and before it can be rationally demonstrated? In what does this power of illumination consist?”

- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

“I often follow Plato’s strategy, proposing objects of mathematical beauty as models for Nature.”

“It was beauty and symmetry that guided Maxwell and his followers.”

- Frank Wilczek

“Beauty, is bound up with symmetry.”

- Herman Weyl

"Still twice in the history of exact natural science has this shining-up of the great interconnection become the decisive signal for significant progress. I am thinking here of two events in the physics of our century: the rise of the theory of relativity and that of the quantum theory. In both cases, after yearlong unsuccessful striving for understanding, a bewildering abundance of details was almost suddenly ordered. This took place when an interconnection emerged which, thought largely unvisualizable, was finally simple in its substance. It convinced through its compactness and abstract beauty – it convinced all those who can understand and speak such an abstract language."

- Werner Heisenberg

Maybe (just maybe) these things (whatever you want to call them) will (somehow) gain access to some "compact", beautiful, "largely unvisualizable" "interconnection" which will be the self-evident solution. And if they do, many will be sure to label it a statistical accident from a stochastic parrot. And they'll right, for some definitions of "statistical", "accident", "stochastic", and "parrot".


I think a very long time because part of our limit is experiment.

We need enough experimental results to explain to solve these theoretical mismatches and we don't and at present can't explore that frontier.

Once we have more results at that frontier we'd build a theory out from there that has two nearly independent limits for QFT and GR.

What we'd be asking if the AI is something that we can't expect a human to solve even with a lifetime of effort today.

It'll take something in par with Newton realising that the heavens and apples are under the same rules to do it. But at least Newton got to hold the apple and only had to imagine he could a star.


> I think a very long time because part of our limit is experiment.

Yes, maybe. But if you are smarter, you can think up better experiments that you can actually do. Or re-use data from earlier experiments in novel and clever ways.


this. could already be useful to narrow down the search space

What prevents us from giving this system access to other real systems that live in physical labs? I don't see much difference between parameterizing and executing a particle accelerator run and invoking some SQL against a provider. It's just JSON on the wire at some level.

Nothing, we can give it all the data we have and have it lead experiments.

But we can not yet experiment at the GR/QFT frontier.

To do so with a particle accelerator it would need to be the size of the milky way.


Agreed. We have lots of theories like string theory, but until we can make an experiment to prove one way or another it remains a theory.

The question is, if you trained an LLM on everything up until 1904, could it come up with E=MC² or not?

In 1900 Henri Poincaré wrote that radiation (light) has an effective mass given by E/c^2.

So it really isn't far fetched. What intrigues me more is if it was capable of it would our Victorian conservative minded scientists have RLHF it out of that kind of thing?


Even if the AI could suggest experiments to try, and tell us "check that out and get back to me with the results", that would be valuable.

The problem for me is that the reason this is needed is that kids are permanently online, completely unprepared for the wild west that is the internet and increasingly effectively raised by the internet.

All this is to facilitate that lifestyle without any concerns that far more damage is likely to happen by allowing it to happen than insisting on adequate parenting


There is a third path, Firefox focus.

Accept everything, the end the session.

That said even with throwaway relay emails I don't sign up to much


I use regular Firefox with the option to delete all data on quit. And I quit maybe once per day or so, as soon as I feel there are too many tabs open. Serves the same purpose.

Would be very disappointing if that's true, but I've not known Google not to find ways to disappoint.

It's true, neither AWS nor GCP support spending limits. Only alerting.

It is worth noting that both products have had "student" tiers or similar, that had fixed credit limits with a cliff.

Therefore, they've implemented hard-limits. So not offering hard-limits is a business decision, NOT a technical one. They're essentially hiding functionality they have.

Make of that as you will. Anyone justifying it, should be me with skepticism.


I have never heard of nor seen AWS student accounts.

There is a free tier but that varies per service and anyway will not limit anything. It works as if it just gives you some credit to offset the costs.


AWS Educate "Starter" Accounts were exactly that[0]. It didn't ask for, nor need a Credit Card, and there was functionally no way to exceed.

[0] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/cloud-computing/aws-educate-st...

They also offered (may still offer) the same thing with AWS Academy.


Soft limits would be ideal (x/day with maximum peak of x/minute), but hey, that's literally negative value to them (work to code, CPU time to implement, less income out of "mistakes")

That's because you pay for stuff like storage. If you had a spending limit, they'd have to delete your data to stop your spend.

Or do what every other industry does, and trigger a conversation. Or even don't let you store more, or restrict access. Why the need to delete?

'By the way old chap, you have gone over your storage limit. Do you want to buy more or delete some stuff?'


>By the way old chap, you have gone over your storage limit. Do you want to buy more or delete some stuff?

Why does my AWS counselor sound British. Am I in eu-west-2?


Why shouldn't it, its just a machine? Wouldn't the world be better if these messages varied a bit!

That's what alarms that you set up are for.

I've heard that Google keeps Google Drive data around for up to two years if your subscription expired and your account is over quota. They could certainly do the same with other cloud storage.

If I reduce my gdrive subscription they don’t simply delete what I have over the new (lower) limit. There is a grace period and it’s standard practice. Why should it be any different in this case?

If only there was a way to pause all the other stuff and only let storage to keep costing you ...

There is, and it would cause an outage while still not achieving the supposed goal of not going over budget. You don't want to be killing your customer's production over potential misconfigurations/forgotten budgets. Especially when you'd continue to bill them for the storage and other static things like IPs.

It's so much easier for them to have support wave accidental overuses.


If only we had the technology to exempt storage from spending limits.

As if that would solve anything? Depending on use, storage could be the largest line item (storage across databases, VMs, object storage).

Neat!

I'd be very tempted to add some notification support.

Following from FastLED maybe the python side could use FastAPI?

Or just respond to audio playback


Yes and why cooling to freezing might help! Slowing the clock presumably?

It's probably to keep the payload in SRAM for longer.

If it's the attack I believe it to be, basically it:

1. Acts as a debugger (core blocks touching flash) and writes a 2-part payload to SRAM.

2. Detaches the debugger, straps the boot pins to boot from SRAM (payload 1)

3. Resets the board via reset pin (keeping SRAM)

4. SRAM payload 1 runs (core blocks touching flash), configuring the FPB to 'overlay' the reset vector on flash with a pointer to payload 2

5. Flicks off the power just long enough for the hardware to reset, but not long enough for the SRAM to clear (this is where I think being cold helps).

6. Device boots 'unlocked' into 'flash', but the FPB hijacked the vector table and so the CPU immediately jumps to payload 2.

7. Payload 2 can now do whatever with flash (e.g. dump it out over UART or SPI)


Freezing RAM keeps its contents intact for remarkable amounts of time. For DRAM it's long enough to unplug the DIMM from the target device and move it across to the analysis device for recovery of the data on it. It's one of those things that's hard to believe until you actually do it, that you can have the RAM totally disconnected and unpowered while it retains its contents.

Very neat!

Speaking of cooling STM chips, I noticed a while ago, much to my annoyance, that the STM32C0 chips started to do really strange things below -20C even though they're rated to -40C. Luckily the pin compatible STM32G0 chips worked correctly down to -40C, so I could finish the project and ship the product.

It seems like the news is also coming out that Claude was used in planning the Venezuela and Iran operations[0].

Whatever you thoughts on legality or justification, both have been staggering effective in initial goals.

Interms of intel and complex operation planning.

Despite Trump ragging on Anthropic just hours before it was still considered necessary for the operation.

Quite telling. I don't think Pentagon will be satisfied with just Grok and ChatGPT. Which means OpenAI might really be done for in terms of having no moat beyond least ethics (Grok does that anyways).

[0] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-strikes-2026/card/u-s-...


OpenAI will likely end up swallowed by Microsoft anyway.

I love the idea of Erlang (and by association Elixir), OTP, BEAM...

In practice? Urgh.

The live is all so cerebral and theoretical and I'm certain the right people know how to implement it for the right tasks in the right way and it screams along.

But as yet no one has been able to give me an incling of how it would work well for me.

I read learn you some Erlang for great good quite a while back and loved the idea. But it just never comes together for me in practice. Perhaps I'm simply in the wrong domain for it.

What I really needed was a mentor and existing project to contribute to at work. But it's impossible to get hold of either in the areas I'm in.


You could do the introduction to Mix and OTP that the Elixir team provides, https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/introduction-to-mix.html .

Erlang is weird, it helps if you have some Lisp and Prolog background, but for a while it might get in the way of learning how OTP works.


I personally really really enjoy writing Elixir. It is a really intuitive way to write programs. Phoenix is a great web framework, and I think all of it is quite approachable. We just had a go programmer start at our org recently and they were contributing to one of our Phoenix bases SaaS apps within weeks

It's the converse that's an issue. If your org doesn't use any Erlang.

You're not going to be able to add it.

I don't find that to be true of many other ecosystems.

We could and do have a few Rust tools and webapps.

There is a few older Python/Flask internal applications.

If I went to an org with established tools from the ecosystem then that is not a problem!


I would try to build some small utilities etc, nothing big, maybe something in your personal workflow, or that throw away script your team needs.

You can still enjoy the language


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