• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Metaverse was like the AI nobody asked for getting pushed into apps. Nobody wanted Wii Mii like hangout rooms where you have to water a clunky headset.

    I was willing to give a shot to something like the Metaverse, but the instant I heard it was a Facebook/Meta project I had zero interest and hoped it would die. This was my same experience with Occulus. These are both technologies I want for a cyberpunk future, but Facebook cannot be the one to control them.







  • The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.

    Counterintuitively, I’m seeing “fiber to the home” deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.

    We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.


  • Again I get your point… but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.

    To extend your analogy, agentic AI isn’t the “reasonable plumber”, its the sketchy guy that says he can fix plumbing and upon arrival he admits he’s a meth addict that hasn’t slept in 3 days and is seeing “the shadow people” standing right there in the room with you.

    I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife… why would I ever want that? let alone need that

    I can see applications for agentic AI, but they can’t be handed the keys to the kingdom. You put them in an indestructible room with a hammer and a pile of rocks and say “please crush any rock I hand you to be no bigger than a walnut and no smaller than an almond”. In IT terms, the agenic AI could run under a restrictive service account so that even if they went off the rails they wouldn’t be able to damage any thing you cared about.


  • You got me curious. I also have a Frigidaire, but its circa 2012 I think. I took my largest cast iron skillet (12" Brizoll) and put it on the range dry with nothing in it. I turned on the range and here’s what it looks like under a thermal camera after 50 seconds:

    I see crescent you’re talking about, but the thermal difference between the hottest and coldest part of the pan is less than 1.2 degrees C. This was only on for less than a minute. The next time I’m cooking something I’ll perform this test again. Additionally, my range has 2 induction elements to cook on on the right hand side, and the left hand elements are electric thermal, so I can perform a non-inductive test too.







  • This is my problem with economics. You’re talking about theory and practice as if they’re the same thing.

    Way back when, I used to sell computers and computer parts at retail. I assure you this was a regular conversation topic. “When is the Voodoo 4 graphics card coming out? 4 months? Okay I won’t buy the older Voodoo 3 now because I can make do with my Nvidia TNT2 until then.”

    All consumers do not make perfectly rational choices.

    No they don’t, nor or do they need to if you’re taking a macro view.

    Hell, most don’t.

    Are you saying:

    • consumers NEVER make rational choices?
    • consumers don’t make 100% rational choices 100% of the time a choice is available?

    I disagree with the former, but I agree with you on the latter. None of that invalidates micro or macro economic theory.

    This kind of theory only explains how rich people want you to think things work. It’s not how things work in the real world.

    Many rich people get rich because this works. They also play dirty tricks to create the situations, but then again in those situations the theory works.

    I’ll be the first to say economic theory is far from perfect and the deeper you go, the more complex, and potentially less reliable, it gets, but the basics are pretty sound.