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I'd like to be able to do something similar, but the old batteries in these things seem like a point of catastrophic failure. How is that dealt with?

Remove the batteries. Datacenters have redundant power and UPS.

If it's an offsite backup, you would deal with it like you would any DR site-- either plan for yet another backup, or presume that it's unlikely that both the primary and replica would go down simultaneously and accept the risk.

Feels to me like the toolchain for using LLMs in various tasks is still in flux (i interpret all of this as "stuff in different places like .md or skills or elsewhere that is appended to the context window" (i hope that is correct)). Shouldnt this overall process be standardized/automated? That is, use some self-reflection to figure out patterns that are then dumped into the optimal place, like a .md file or a skill?

The entire tooling ecosystem is in flux.

Looking forward, the future is ad-hoc disposable software that once would take a large team a dozen sprints to release.

Eventually it'll be use case -> spec -> validation -> result.

The tv show Stargate showed different controls that scientifically calculated and operated starships so all the operator had to do was point the controls in the direction of the destination. The ai/computer/hardware knows how to get to the result and that result is human driven.

I have evidence of this at work and in my own life with the key component being the tooling integration.


too early for standardization. resist the urge. Let a bunch of ideas flow, then watch the Darwinian process of the best setup will be found. Then standardize.

I'd love to believe this, but very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy.


It's a complicated picture. Some Americans did not like the advice to "turn down the thermostat, and wear a sweater", and the next president removed the solar panels from the White House. It may be amusing to learn the country some of those panels ended up at, and the propaganda value in having such. Other Americans have improved water conservation ("Cadillac Desert" is a short and relevant read here) and those horrid land whales now leak far less oil; it used to be every parking spot had huge stains of oil beneath them. And the leaded gasoline, yum! Still other Americans howl about the toilets that use less water, and hoard inefficient light bulbs that do not last too long. So there are folks moving both towards and against reneable energy and conservation. Granted maybe there has not been as much movement as should have happened between now and when "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) got published, but that's not saying nothing has happened. Trends may help rule out some of the noise, or one might try to model things like the "Limits to Growth" study did, though other folks really did not like that report, and so these things go on and around.


I think a lot of people simply want to be contrarian to their perceived opponents: People in the other political clan like X so I have to hate X. No matter how much X might help them or how much better it is, they have to oppose it.


Economics will always win in the end. At the rate that costs are dropping for solar, it should just be a matter of time.

Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.


> Economics will always win in the end.

This may have been true in the past but the economics of today is "whether this is good for 1% of the population" and not in general, yes? If I can buy cheap solar panels from China (or say for the sake of argument someone "friendlier" like Germany) but that gets slapped with tariffs or other means the "administration" (bought by the 1% crowd) has at their disposal to prevent this from happening. If we lived in a free market this would be true for sure but we don't (by we I mean USA :) )


The remaining oil companies will profit tremendously from the high oil prices. I am sure they will have no problem allocating some of those extra profits to sabotage attempts to consider any alternative energy sources.


> Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.

And energy storage, and peaking, and matching demand to supply at the grid level. None of which are included in the usual "costs" of solar.


> very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy

A longer view of history shows a clear pattern: "After a gasoline price shock, households respond in the short run mostly by reducing travel, although estimates from the literature suggest the response in the short run is quite low (e.g., Hughes, Knittel, and Sperling 2006). Over long horizons, households adjust their vehicle technology and reduce further their consumption of gasoline.

...

The market share of full-size pickups, utility vehicles, and vans fell more than 15 percentage points between its peak in 2004 and early 2009. Small cars and the new cross-utility vehicle segment picked up most of this market share" [1].

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086%2F657541#...


Can be argued that there is intuitive satisfaction/pleasure/utility that spectators gain from watching sports competitions. The payoff is a lot more obvious/instant. Whereas with a lot of tech these days, what needle are we really moving? Are people truly happier scrolling for two hours, compared with watching an edge-of-seat soccer game?


The idea appears to be to simulate the edge-of-seat sensation and, ideally, to charge for the privilege of the experience.


I recall way back in the day when Stephen Fry used to host QI, they did a bit about a lasagne battery. Sean Lock was on the panel if i remember and spun it out into a ipod-style "lasagne-pod"


i think the applications to spy-craft could be quite interesting here. Something for the next mission impossible movie maybe?


It's also interesting to consider that they may be reinventing prior classified research.


Trivial to eliminate through window treatments and training to mitigate should-surfing risks.

It’s probably more valuable as a surveillance and monitoring tool than an espionage one, but they would no doubt be the first customers (if not already).


I thought this was about scots/scottish dialects.


I find this interesting but the nomenclature escapes me: How is T(z) = z + zT + zT^2 + ... ? I find the jump from the functional programming description of the tree to this recurrence relation not intuitive


I'm afraid the author is writing for an audience that's familiar with generating functions. It's using a common trick in analytic combinatorics, the notation is actually "shorthand".

Very informally, let T(z) be the generating function where the coefficient of the z^n term is the number of trees we are searching with exactly n nodes.

We know from the functional description that such a tree can be:

  - a leaf;
  - a node with 1 child;
  - a node with 2 children;
  - a node with 3 children.
A leaf is a tree with one node and that's it, so it "contributes" as a single tree of size 1.

How many trees of size n are there that fall in the second case? Exactly as many as the total trees of size (n-1), hence this case "contributes" as zT(z).

How many trees of size n fall in the third case? That's a bit harder to see, because now you have (n-1) nodes in total, split between the two branches. So you can have 1 in the left branch and n-2 in the right branch, 2 left n-3 right and so on. With a bit of basic combinatorics you can notice that this is exactly the convolution product of the series with itself, in analytical terms T^2(z). Hence the third case "contributes" for zT^2(z).

The fourth case is similar.

At this point we have constructed the inverse of the generating function we are looking for, i.e. z as a function of T(z) rather than the reverse, but luckily there's a standard trick for this: Lagrange inversion.


I had the same question as OP, passing knowledge of generating functions was not enough to see the link between the description and formula.

Your explanation was exactly what I needed, thanks.


Generating functions are definitely strange and unintuitive, but they can be really helpful for combinatorics.

The introduction to generating functions in this well known text on the subject (at the beginning of Chapter 1) might be more helpful than the Wikipedia article linked in the original post:

https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/gfology2.pdf

From that text:

> Although giving a simple formula for the members of the sequence may be out of the question, we might be able to give a simple formula for the sum of a power series, whose coefficients are the sequence that we’re looking for.


He doesn't explain any of the notation, like how the brackets [z] work. Also the generating function he supplies is is wrong.


This. There seems to be one of these announcements every so often, and i havent seen any of them used at scale, or making any kind of dent in the status quo.


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