philipkglass
Joined 10 years ago
Karma
14,742
Submissions
2,972
Member since
Sep 19
Fire wants to be stolen
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 day ago
15 years? Intel hasn't manufactured RAM since 1985: https://timeline.intel.com/1985/farewell-to-dram
Comment · 1 day ago
The most important secret of the atomic bomb was that it could be built at all. That's the same way I feel about Anthropic's products (increasingly, tech demos rather than products, if you go off the happy path.) They've demonstrated what is possible. Now I'm hoping for a fistful of rivals to build functional equivalents.
I'm still an Anthropic customer but in the long run I'm going to be using services that align with my interests. I want a provider that won't nerf or refuse requests around software security, building LLM training pipelines, the natural sciences, and reverse engineering. Anthropic is useful as a transitional bootloader for developing and demonstrating LLM technology broadly but each new safety "enhancement" makes it look more dispensable.
Comment · 11 days ago
I'm commenting on how non-US laws may affect businesses, descriptively speaking, without prescriptively stating what I think that the law ought to be.
I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.)
However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.
Comment · 11 days ago
According to Discord's careers page, they're currently hiring people in the US, UK, Singapore, Portugal, and the Netherlands:
They have a registered office in Schiphol:
https://discord.com/company-information
Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other companies it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
Comment · 11 days ago
Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector...
Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.
Comment · 14 days ago
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Comment · 16 days ago
They have. I got a warning on my Android phone recently because I was traveling overnight on a train and somebody in a neighboring room had an AirTag.
Comment · 19 days ago
I don't think that there are laws against LLM distillation in the United States. It's only a terms of service violation. For all of the complaints about model distillation that OpenAI and Anthropic make, you don't see them saying that it's against the law:
https://openai.com/index/disrupting-a-coordinated-model-dist...
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
They would probably like it to be against the law ("Distillation attacks at this scale require a coordinated response across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers") but I hope that legislators decline to grant their wish.
Comment · 21 days ago
The efficiency is higher because the device is bigger. To oversimplify a bit, the surface area through which energy is radiated away grows slower than the volume containing the fuel. So heavier fuel "pellets" in bombs (ones in the kilogram to ton range) have a much easier time burning efficiently than the tiny milligram scale fuel pellets at NIF. Tiny fuel pellets cool down too fast. Likewise, multi-megaton fusion bombs are more efficient than the "little" sub-megaton bombs that the US favors (for reasons of compactness/deliverability) in its nuclear weapons stockpile.
Comment · 21 days ago
You asked "Don't the people who own the models and the companies who want to want to use the models to do all the cognitive tasks want to make money? Are they going to give their products and services away for free?"
No, they're not going to give their products and services away for free, but I don't think they're going to make fat profit margins. The very tools they're building are helping competitive alternatives to spring up quickly. That's little comfort if you worry about job losses, but the technology is not under the thumb of Altman/Thiel/Zuck (or any other small number of people).
Comment · 21 days ago
The ChatGPT beta launched in 2022 with GPT 3.5 and 4 years later we have strong models from a bevy of organizations. It's as if Google launched in 1998 and by 2002 there were a dozen search engines competitive with or better than the original Google.
One of the common tasks LLMs are being trained to do is write software, which includes writing software for developing LLMs. That's reducing the cost to build alternative models and to run the ones that have already been trained and released. Many of these models aren't from America at all, so American billionaires don't get to decide how they're used. The competition is fiercer, and the potential for American monopolies or oligopolies is lower, than with technological waves of the recent past (e.g. mobile phone operating systems, search engines, social networking sites).
Comment · 26 days ago
This sounded so ridiculous that I had to check. The book is Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. This unflattering contemporary review, retrieved from the Wayback Machine, has an excerpt:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110713153629/https://www.washi...
The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue work in eugenics. . . . in secret, in the Soviet Union.
Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. . . .
Comment · 26 days ago
Is it 90 GB? The total shown on the Internet Archive page here is 49.6 GB:
https://archive.org/details/tippett-archive/
I downloaded the whole thing immediately because I too fear the copyright vultures. But if it's really 90 GB, I'm missing where to get the other 40 GB.
Comment · 28 days ago
Japan has a large inventory of plutonium recycled from used power reactor fuel:
https://www.aec.go.jp/bunya/04/plutonium/20260805_e.pdf
As of the end of 2025, the total amount of Japan’s separated plutonium managed both within and outside Japan was approximately 44.4 tons, of which approximately 9.9 tons were held domestically and approximately 34.5 tons were held abroad.
Despite the nomenclature, weapons grade plutonium is not necessary to make nuclear weapons. Reactor grade plutonium has more problems with predetonation ("fizzle") and decay heat management, but both obstacles can be bypassed by design changes. In particular, "boosting" with a mixture of deuterium and tritium overcomes predetonation problems and can ensure repeatable high yields even with plutonium containing a high fraction of Pu-240.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon#Gas_boo...
The fusion reaction rate typically becomes significant at 20 to 30 megakelvins. This temperature is reached at very low efficiencies, when less than 1% of the fissile material has fissioned (corresponding to a yield in the range of hundreds of tons of TNT). Since implosion weapons can be designed that will achieve yields in this range even if neutrons are present at the moment of criticality, fusion boosting allows the manufacture of efficient weapons that are immune to predetonation. Elimination of this hazard is a very important advantage in using boosting.
This design hardens weapons against neutrons from nuclear interceptors and against neutrons generated within the core itself, e.g. spontaneous fission from "dirty" reactor plutonium.
Gas boosted bombs are more mechanically complex than the bombs of the 1940s, but the US started building them in the 1950s. Japan could easily manage the complexity today. Japan has also operated its Tritium Process Laboratory since the late 1980s, with capacity to handle 16 grams of tritium at a time. That's not much, but an individual boosted warhead may need only 3 grams of tritium.