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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • It’s a real issue. A strong use case for LLM search engines is providing summaries which combine lots of facts that would take some time to compile through searching the old fashioned way. But if it’s only 90% accurate and 10% hallucinated bullshit, it becomes very difficult to pick out the bullshit from the truth.

    The other day I asked Copilot to provide an overview of a particular industrial sector in my area. It produced something that was 90% concise, accurate, readable and informative briefing, and 10% complete nonsense. It hallucinated an industrial estate that didn’t exist, a whole government programme that doesn’t exist, it talked about a scheme that went defunct 20 years ago as if it were still current, etc. If it weren’t for the fact that I was already very familiar with the subject, I might not have caught it. Anyone actually relying on that for useful work is in serious danger of making a complete tit of themselves.




  • there’s also GNSS which is mostly used in Europe and Scandinavia

    GNSS is the generic term that covers all satellite navigation systems (GPS included).

    Galileo is the EU/ESA system you’re thinking of.

    GLONASS (Russian) and BeiDou (Chinese) are the other two major constellations with global coverage. The only other full system I know of is NavIC, which is Indian and has only regional coverage.

    Most devices actually connect to all of them. I’ve just checked my phone, and it’s connected to all of GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou. People just say “GPS” because it’s catchier than “GNSS”.



  • Concept cars are, by definition, not actually finished. Nobody will be able to buy the car that was being shown at the car show. The car that will be on sale in 2-3 years will be a thematically similar but fundamentally different creature.

    Things like the onboard computer software/hardware/data sharing model won’t be defined yet. VW’s first party servicing costs or the price of replacement brake pads are not defined yet. It’ll be a job for a future car journalist to report on all those things once it’s actually defined.




  • Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.

    Code “forges” are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.

    Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.

    GitHub is a proprietary forge, and GitHub.com is the company’s fully hosted service. They’re now owned by Microsoft.

    Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.

    Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.

    A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).

    At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.

    GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don’t have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.


  • Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go?

    Yes, significantly so. Hydrogen fuel cells have a much shorter lifespan and higher manufacturing/replacement cost than lithium ion batteries. The compressed gas tanks are also very expensive and have a limited lifespan (albeit a relatively long one, compared to the fuel cells).

    And as hydrogen scales up, it’ll get cheaper. It’s currently a bit more expensive than gas (about 3-4x), but that’s with hydrogen transported from some plant somewhere. If it’s locally generated from solar, it’ll probably be quite a bit cheaper.

    Market rate hydrogen is currently about as cheap as it’s possible to get, because it is almost exclusively from fossil fuel sources which are gradually winding down.

    Locally produced electrolysis hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency rates; about 2/3rds of the power used to produce the hydrogen is lost in the process. Assuming you don’t have an enormous overabundance of power being generated, it’s more efficient to store the power locally in batteries (which don’t have to be lithium ion if it’s for static storage; other chemistries become competitive if they don’t need to move around) than it is to store it as hydrogen. And if you’re generating a huge overabundance of power such that throwing 2/3rds of it away seems sensible, in most cases the question would be why you don’t make a grid connection and feed in anyway (extreme remote locations notwithstanding).




  • where [it] comes from

    You imply it comes from:

    The “thin blue line” symbol has been used by the “Blue Lives Matter” movement, which emerged in 2014

    But you link to a Wikipedia article that says:

    New York police commissioner Richard Enright used the phrase in 1922. In the 1950s, Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker often used the term in speeches, and he also lent the phrase to the department-produced television show The Thin Blue Line. Parker used the term “thin blue line” to further reinforce the role of the LAPD. As Parker explained, the thin blue line, representing the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order and social and civil anarchy.

    The Oxford English Dictionary records its use in 1962 by The Sunday Times referring to police presence at an anti-nuclear demonstration. The phrase is also documented in a 1965 pamphlet by the Massachusetts government, referring to its state police force, and in even earlier police reports of the NYPD. By the early 1970s, the term had spread to police departments across the United States. Author and police officer Joseph Wambaugh helped to further popularize the phrase with his police novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

    The term was used for the title of Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line about the murder of the Dallas Police officer Robert W. Wood.

    I have no idea about this guy’s politics, but it’s a pretty well known phrase with a lot of different contexts.


  • Only UK is known to have only moderate decline, but they probably think it’s independence for UK to buy Tesla, because fuck Europe for some reason???

    UK Tesla sales are starting from a much lower base. Sales in the UK were essentially half of what they were in Germany before the recent decline.

    BYD is now the largest EV brand by sales in the UK, ahead of Tesla. Whereas in Germany Tesla is still the leading manufacturer, even after the drop.

    Also, the UK EV market in general grew last year, whereas sales of EVs across all brands declined in Germany over the same period


  • I reckon it’s simpler than that. Zuckerberg has never really invented anything novel; Facebook was a straight clone of a whole bunch of competing social media sites (which just so happened to win the numbers war), and WhatsApp and Instagram were both acquisitions.

    I think the Metaverse was Zuckerberg trying to prove to himself and others that he and he personally could come up with the “next big thing”. The fact that he came up with something which absolutely no-one wanted (and most people barely understood) is a testament to why he never came up with anything ground breaking before, too.


  • Ads and monetization have ruined the internet compared to what it was. Early Internet was completely without ads, and things were run by people who were actually interested in the content presented, not in profits.

    How early are we talking here? If you mean pre-Web, in the Usenet era it was standard practice to pay a subscription to join a Usenet server. If you mean the early Web, ads were already everywhere by the mid-90s.



  • I hosted a meeting with about a dozen attendees recently, and one attendee silently joined with an AI note taking bot and immediately went AFK.

    It was in about 5 minutes before we clocked it and then kicked it out. It automatically circulated its notes. Amusingly, 95% of them were “is that a chat bot?” “Steve, are you actually on this meeting?” “I’m going to kick Steve out in a minute if nobody can get him to answer”, etc. But even with that level of asinine, low impact chat, it still managed to garble them to the point of barely legible.

    Also: what a dick move.


  • That’s a really interesting read (and worth much more attention than the pithy one-liners of people who just want to read the title).

    On reflection, I think my take away is that Bluesky will always by necessity of its design be hosted and controlled by a single centralised company. But what their architectural model does allow is the possibility of a wholesale migration from one centralised provider to another. That is, it would be possible for a suitably resourced and motivated company to host its own mirror Relay and other components and have essentially a fully functional Bluesky clone. In the event that Bluesky ever “does a Twitter” and go into terminal decline, in theory this might mean that a successor/competitor could emerge and take on the network without loss of existing content.

    I’m not sure that’ll ever actually happen, but it’s an interesting thought.


  • Strangely, I used to work for a bank in their “bereavement services” department; that is, the department that dealt with dead people’s accounts.

    If anyone notified us of a death of an account holder, and provided any proof (death certificate, coroner’s report, police letter), the first thing we’d do is freeze the account. All payments out stopped, all cards cancelled, all withdrawals blocked. This was a legal requirement, because once somebody dies their money becomes the legal property of their “estate”, and it’s unlawful for anyone to remove money from the estate without following proper process.

    There’s no need to stop each payment individually. In fact, the bank really doesn’t want you logging in to their online bank using the deceased’s credentials and messing around with things for the same reason; unless you’re following proper procedures, it’s not yours to mess with.

    Possibly it’s different in different jurisdictions, of course.