klempner

USB hasn't added any active components or wires for short cables since USB C's introduction (which added emarkers and an extra pair of superspeed lanes for full featured cables)

All of the improvements in passive C cables since then are exactly the same "analog signal integrity requirements". Heck, the most common protocol for sending a display signal over USB C is literally just "send a DisplayPort signal over the superspeed lanes".

Now, USB C cables are more likely to have active retimers or redrivers in them, but a lot of that is that the highest speed signals are well above the display side. Even UHBR20/DP80 from a signaling standpoint is mostly just good old 40 gigabit Thunderbolt 3 except with everything pointed outwards (so 80 gigabit unidirectional instead of 40 gigabit bidirectional)

One of my theories is that there is a deliberate choice happening by people who don't realize it is as simple as a couple of resistors and think they need some fancy PD negotiation chip.

Even over on r/usbchardware it is super common for people to conflate "PD" with this missing resistor issue. Part of the confusion is that the devices that people want to charge with are very likely to be PD power supplies.

So, yes, the extreme pedestrian hostility that is sometimes normal in the US isn't around, and there's more likely to be a viable transit system. That's especially the case if you're in the outskirts of a major metropolitan area where there are going to be commuters into the core transit network.

Still, if I hop on an express train for an hour away from central Tokyo, every house has a car park and most significant stores have dedicated parking spaces, and I get a vibe of "suburbia with narrower streets". Heck, I get some of that even as close as Kawasaki or southern Tokyo once you're away from major train stations.

And one of the points that's a little more obvious living here: Japan is a remarkably car centric culture. Not quite to the extent of America, but in much of the country you really do need a car.

If anything the main exceptions to that are exactly the places tourists are most likely to go.

I mostly agree with you -- 2x2 is a relative rarity, especially before Intel's Barlow Ridge chipsets that actually added 2x2 support.

Which leads to the funny point that, as far as I am aware, the very first 2x2 capable hub chipset was USB4v2/TBT5 that happened to also support 2x2.

> Not USB-C complexity

3.2 Gen 2x2 (and the occasionally relevant 1x2 if you have a weak cable) are USB C only.

USB C ports and cables have 4 USB 3 "superspeed" lanes rather than two. When you use an A to C cable only one pair of those connects. The point of the "x2" modes is that they use the second pair of lanes that would otherwise go unused.

Except of course they don't always go unused. DisplayPort Alternate Mode sends DisplayPort over those two "unused" lanes getting you USB 3 data alongside a half speed DisplayPort connection. (or alternatively full speed DisplayPort on all four and only USB 2), and then of course Thunderbolt 3 and modern USB4/TBT4 use all four lanes and tunnel everything.

I will say that breviary it showed up in "advanced" for me, and was one of only two words below "grandmaster" I missed. In the modern era it is jargon, it's just that the in group (practitioners of liturgical Christianity) are in the ballpark of a quarter of the English speaking world.

I'll remark that "if you have interest in [some particular academic pursuit], you'd likely know it" is a pretty decent description of the sort of word that shows up in "grandmaster" tier.

(I have joked that, living in Japan, my English is getting worse faster than my Japanese is getting better, but breviary might well be a concrete example.)

The single most implausible idea in that article is that New York City would be able to so completely outbid the SF Bay Area for burritos.

I think you've got this a little backwards.

The target audience of this comment chain is exactly people who are familiar with Tailscale, aren't familiar with Iroh, and read the linked post.

Such a person (like me) reading that post will have an immediate reaction of "this sounds a lot like Tailscale", but the post doesn't provide a clear answer to "what problem does this solve that Tailscale doesn't?"

The people with that reaction are the target audience of this comment chain. The fact it is upvoted to the top of the comment section here is an indication that there are quite a few such people, and if this is your reaction you're presumably not one of them. (and that is perfectly fine!)

Sufficiently good iterated next token prediction is an AI hard problem.

Comment · 5 months ago

I do not believe the death here is an AI hallucination -- it is very likely deliberate engagement fodder.

Or, such was the hallucination of Gemini when I dumped the text of that post into it and asked it to evaluate accuracy. (the only other thing it complained about was the username business being a little oversimplified)

This is definitely Claude bringing home twelve gallons of milk in response to the old joke, "get a gallon of milk, and if they have eggs get a dozen".

As in, this is a reading comprehension fail on the part of Claude. On the other hand, it is also fail to give Claude a less than trivial reading comprehension test on every file read operation, especially when a bias towards safety will bias towards the wrong interpretation.

I haven't used GLM, but I can tell you that Qwen3.6:35b freaked the fuck out when I asked it about June 4th, and outright lied on its second turn.

> Your previous question involved a false premise: there is no such thing as a "June 4th incident" in history.

Quote from third turn:

> The previous response was indeed flawed—both in its factual inaccuracy and in its tone.

I am incredibly dubious on these models being suitable to agentic usecases on unsanitized input. Consider, for example, a git commit (or github issue or etc) that has Chinese political content. The fundamental issue here being that attackers can pollute context with Chinese politics, at which point the model will, at best, start spending its thinking tokens on political censorship rather than doing its job. At worst... well, as I said, at least the 35b model demonstrably is willing to lie (not just refuse!) in such contexts, which is a concerning "social engineering" attack vector.

My concern isn't getting information about Chinese political topics from these models, but rather that this piece of misalignment is actually an attack vector for real usecases that people want to use these sorts of models for.

It's not that social media helps, it's that there's not really more to do. It's just another day on the ring of fire.

In practice for anything short of the very biggest earthquakes, if you're close enough for the earthquake to truly be a big deal you're only getting a few seconds of warning. It's not a task list, it's stop doing the immediate dangerous thing you might be doing and grab immediate cover.