avianlyric

The $79 addon is also needed to use all of Formlabs existing engineering grade resins, which are more expensive than the Alpha resins. The engineering grade Tough 1500 is already validated on the Studio 1, and requires the $79 tank, plus is a major selling point of this printer.

There no reason for FormLabs to limit supply of the $79 tanks, it would also limit their ability to sell their more expensive resins to Studio 1 customers, and also removes a clear pathway to get people to upgrade to their more expensive machines, capable of working with their even more complex, and expensive, engineering resins.

In the UK, the bank is liable for any transactions on your account that you didn't approve. Doesn't matter that they thought you approved it because someone knew your pin, or compromised your device.

Unless the bank has reason to believe that you're either trying to defraud the bank, or where unduly careless with your banking credentials (and you have to be really careless to meet that bar in the eyes of the regulator and the courts), then they're expected to refund you.

I've seen banks refund £100ks to customers that were defrauded over many months via romance scams. There are cases ruling by the Financial Ombudsman forcing banks to refund customers to handed over their cards and PINs to carers that then stole money.

The general attitude of the law in the UK, the regulators, and the courts, is basically it's the banks responsibility to provide appropriate security, in a form that their customers can easily use and understand. If banks want to make it easy for customers to move and spend money, then the risks associated with that convenience accrue with the bank, not their customers.

Obviously banks work very hard to worm their way out of their responsibilities here. But if you use the consumer protection tools that exist in the UK, which are very easy to access, and which your bank is required to inform you of, then it's surprisingly easy to force a bank to refund you for any fraud you suffer.

Substantially smaller than building and running gas peaker plants

> resistors that reduced incoming electricity

Resistors used like that are notorious for being both large, and getting hot when used. Both things that are tricky to cram into a small handheld device.

You also have to wonder what the point of doing all this faffing is. Mobile phone batteries are optimised for energy density above almost anything else, which comes with tradeoffs, include much more rapid natural degradation overtime that can’t be reduced or limited by gentle charging cycles. A phones battery is basically guaranteed to be unhealthy after 4-5 years regardless of what you do or don’t do.

Just because two batteries have the same basic chemistry (Lithium-ion of example), doesn’t mean their behaviour is the same. There’s a lot of possible customisation and tweaking within that single chemistry envelope.

There’s probably a significant element of consumer batteries being so good, so easy to setup, and so cheap to buy. That it actually ends up being more economical to take this approach, than build dedicated utility scale battery storage.

With consumer units, you can reasonably expect that they’ll operate with zero maintenance and zero direct supervision for a decade plus. If the cost of those units is low enough, that reduced operational burden starts looking very attractive, especially if you want to scale up your battery capacity across your network very quickly.

If you’ve validated the Jev scores, then it means you’ve built and run the evals. The exact thing the author is arguing needs to be done if you’re using Jev.

So they’re not dunking on that, they’re dunking on the idea that you can just trust Jev confidence scores without actually doing any validation.

> That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with building good ai engineering systems in areas where it works magically.

Without the evals, how do you know it works magically? I think that’s the entire point of the authors article, people are using AI tools, and trusting the AI own evaluation of its performance, without making any attempt to validate if the AIs confidence actually correlates to anything meaningful.

From what I’ve seen, the result tends to be very exciting demos, followed by incredibly mediocre results when deployed into a real environment. The lack of critical evaluation then provides a double whammy, because it takes longer than it should to realise the system isn’t actually working correctly, and then the team lacks the skills and understanding needed to improve the system they’ve built. You just kinda have to hope that the next model release is going to magically result in better performance for your particular scenario, which won’t be able to measure due to the lack of evals.

Yes, and understanding the effects of a medication is different to understanding how the medication has that effect.

The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.

> For truly difficult problems, it’s entirely possible that humans are simply incapable of comprehending why a solution is true. But ultimately the practical value of applying that solution to the real world is going to eclipse our need to understand it.

This is hardly new or novel, you’ve just described huge chunks of existing engineering disciplines. There is still no complete model that explains why airplane wings work, there are lots of very useful models, but all of them have fundamental flaws where their behaviour completely breaks down in certain very possible scenarios. Notably scenarios where airplane wings don’t spontaneously either stop working or explode.

We also built the entire commercial airliner system decades before we even had computers capable of doing the aerodynamic analysis of airplanes, but none of that prevented us from creating huge engineering disciplines around the empirical data we did have, and slowly chip away at the underlying theories as maths and computing improved over time.

So we’ve always lived in a world where we extract value from systems we fundamentally don’t understand. But that’s never stopped us from working to understand them anyway, and deriving even further value from that improved understanding.

Not entirely sure what European A/C regulations you’re referring to. Europe doesn’t have A/C because historically it’s not been needed, and when you have cities that are hundreds of years old, often filled with buildings that are designed to passively keep cool, it’s a right pain in the arse to retrofit everything.

As a result Europe doesn’t culturally expect A/C every where, and has been slow to adopt it. But obviously climate change is forcing many to reconsider those cultural norms.

Yeah, I don’t think you have any understanding of how the crown interacts with the rest of the UK government.

There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.

> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.

You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.

> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.

No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.

> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.

You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.

“Getting the police involved” is a lot less exciting in the UK compared to the US. Our police don’t have a nasty habit of getting scared in the dark and shooting anything that moves. Mostly because most officers in the UK don’t carry firearms, and the UK often struggles to recruit officers into firearms units because officers just don’t want to mess with guns.

As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.

Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.

What use does an AI and robots have for all those resources?

Most of our economy is powered by human consumption, humans making things to sell to other humans, that then either transform it further and sell it to other humans, or consume it directly. I don’t think an AI needs to buy millions of iPhones a year, or consume millions of metric tons of grain each year, or buy luxury cars so they can show them off to their AI friends.

At best an AI might use all those resources to build out further compute and expand its own capabilities. But at that point nobody should be worrying about competing in the labour market, they should be worried about AI making our planet unliveable for carbon based life.

The approach assumes that most people don’t have the ability to directly attack the image sensor itself. It’s a little buried in the article, but creating reference images involves having the actual image sensor sign the raw data it captures using a key unique to that sensor. The rest of the device can’t tamper with data anymore.

I don’t think there any many people out there with the right equipment to carefully ablate the top of a sensor off, so they can directly inject their own data into the start of signing process. It’s not impossible, but it’s also not the kind of thing most people and organisations are going to be capable of doing.

> The creation of a secure digital negative begins with a secure boot of the camera sensor into a specialized reference capture mode. The mode instructs the sensor to cryptographically sign pixel data immediately after capture, and prevents the sensor firmware from modifying the data.