I know you're joking, but changes in isotopes mildly affect reduced mass and hence enzyme kinetics. Maize and other C4 plants already preferentially enrich themselves with 13C [0-3] which occasionally buggers up metabolomic experiments. Famously, a few drugs use 2H rather than natural abundance H typically in order to exploit a kinetic isotopic effect and get a better Km in their binding pocket [4].
Personally I don't see this as joking, I think this whole space is severely underfunded and could use some publicity and moonshot contests. I mean, think of it, the planet Earth is full of beautiful and diverse nanotechnology that can literally map-reduce complex behavior over individual molecules, and we do so little to use it for practical purposes. Even most advanced manufacturing methods we use are still simple things applied in bulk, counting matter by volume instead of as objects. There's lots of unexplored potential within reach, and here we actually know it can pan out, because we see these processes happening everywhere, all the time, all at once, all around us.
I think it's worth mentioning the likes of tor, lokinet, yggdrasil, i2p, freenet and maybe other "esoteric" forms of networking like vless or v2ray. If they really do put significant barriers in the way of nerd-to-nerd communication, other metrics will only grow really.
At the moment, it's network effects that are the biggest deterrent to using these technologies -- at the moment I don't want to browse eepsites or .loki domains at the moment although I think the technology is interesting -- because the use cases are "normal" consensual porn, horrific illegal porn / CSAM, illegal drugs, and organised crime, none of which are me. If they manage to drive even 0.1% of the population towards talking about, say, cat pictures, unreal tournament matches (gamer-to-gamer communication is itself banned under these proposals without age verification!), or something that normal nerds would like, then (a) the popularity of these methods would explode; (b) the ability of law enforcement to surveil them as proxies for genuinely bad stuff would be significantly hampered; and (c) I think the net result is that more people would be exposed tangentially at least to criminality than before.
It's a shockingly short-sighted proposal. I wrote to my MP about it; her response was basically "We have a difference of opinion".
Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success.
Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0]
The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking.
I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't - or won't be seen as - tenable, at least not until/unless you've established a stellar track-record first.
A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home (looks pointedly at Stanford) to a variation of residence halls, where the salary gift can be much less in exchange for benefits due creativity: reserved whiteboards, option for neighboring private rooms (table/bed/bath/shower) and research office, a couple of quiet floors, 120/240 and ether/fiber in every room, presentation rooms with ‘lives next door’ IT support, etc.
Hell, I’d take that IT job. Keeping projectors working for a bunch of impatient creative types in exchange for getting to listen in on their presentations and earn their confidence enough to discuss their research as an interested peer while I repair their computers? Eating good food in a mess hall as I listen to quantum physics in one ear and mathematical networks in the other?! Onto the dream jobs list it goes, impossible as it might be in today’s academia.
Agree with this. Occasional coasting is great. Sometimes you need to recharge. Sometimes it's when you'll get inspiration or find time to do that experiment that feels like leisure because it's fun but ends up paying off massively.
Slack is important.
But so much so that you become a magnet for people who intend to do nothing, or somewhere where people who have fallen into doing nothing aren't noticed and dig their heels in and never leave quickly becomes a problem...
Academia has tenure which basically allows the most capable researchers to "coast" as long as they have previously proven their skills via their tenure-track work. It seems to work quite well.
Way back MBARI was looking for a role that in part included keeping the servers on their research ships going. That was my dream job. Only interview I completely failed because I wanted it so much and froze. Imagine eating Phils when it was still a hole in the wall, chilling in Moss Landing. Decades later I still daydream about that job.
Their open house is next month; if you stopped by in the morning and asked to learn more about their vessel IT and told your story, odds are they’ll have someone with that role ashore from last month’s expedition that could chat with you for an afternoon. They exist because of dedication and are likely to respect it in kind. At worst you’d get to visit MBARI with seasoning, at best live another life-sheaf vicariously through someone else’s experiences :D
Many billionaires are starting up ocean expedition places, surely they'll want IT. Off the top of my head I can think of OceanX (Ray Dalio), Inkfish (Gabe Newell), RevOcean (Kjell Inge Rokke out of Norway). They're all building or already have massive ships with sophisticated IT and research equipment.
We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and some people work 5x faster, but at thing they are good at. If you aren't the guy that lays 10x tiles perfectly flat and straight per minute then just bring the materials, set out a couple tiles and wait around. You will literally see this play out on most construction projects as it looks like 10 people are standing around while 1 person works, but that's because everyone tends to recognize that it's better to do what you are best at or just don't do anything. And the foreman will tell you that too, when all the dirt has to be moved, the shovel guys are just as important as the guy that can separate two nickels with an excavator.
I agree we shouldn't, but until we're at a post scarcity point, we kinda have to at least keep it somewhat in check.
But if you're standing around because there isn't anything positive you can contribute at a given moment, that isn't "slacking off" to me. That isn't the problem.
The problem is if you create situations that effectively encouraged people to seek them out because slacking off won't get noticed.
If an IT department doesn't appear to be slacking off it is doing a poor job. It's much better to pay someone who prevents fires and sits around appearing to not be doing much, than a team constantly running around putting out fires that are costing a tone via lost productivity but look really busy.
I imagine scientific inspiration/insight comes in flashes. The ability to be honest in the job/what is going on/realistic is going to get much better results long term with better mental health, and trust making better internal dynamics.
That's the basic tenet of bureaucracy. A formalized way of doing something when nothing actually needs to be done but in a way that you can notice and respond to things that actually do need doing.
In the end we have to face that systems have failed to replace competent managers. If there isn't a chain of accountability starting at the top that can manage people without extensive justification in metrics and is properly incentivised to keep the organisation healthy, whatever we are left with will be gamed to the detriment of everyone.
And the Xerox Alto had a budget for 10 years. Unthinkable in today's "What did you publish?? Publish or it didn't happen. No R01 for you! (2 year funding)" culture.
I’m not in academia so I might not know what I’m talking about at all, but: “Number if papers published” smells an awful lot like bs industry metrics like number of lines of code written, number of features shipped, number of bugs fixed and so on, that the industry wrongly rewards.
I don’t know what you’d replace “number of papers” with, but it probably should not be so easily quantifiable and gameable.
The actual article was intended as a joke: https://vixra.org/abs/2405.0051 yet fraudulent publishers continue to treat it as a serious article.
It would be nice if publishing a fake paper every now and then could serve like a sinkhole for scammers, but I would be too optimistic or naive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_sinkhole
> A writer who is able to break free from the belief that his being is at his core, a writer, can break writer's block. He may also discover how to be a better waiter during his night shift.
And academia will become even more toxic as opportunities shrink along with declining student enrollment. A lot of the third-tier colleges will close entirely.
I feel great about my degree from my third tier college. I learned a lot I didn't expect to, got into a top tier grad school afterwards, and came away with no debt. Maybe me and the millions of other third tier college students are too dumb to know what's good for us, though.
> Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.
I'm not tenured and I doubt I will ever be and I'm not even interested in it. I have a support role in academia, get to teach, and am pretty well compensated (though I make 2-3x less than I could in the private sector. But its enough.)
It's the money side that applies pressure there. It's great that you're able to make enough money but a lot of people who aspire to the quiet academic life are stuck in the lower tiers making a pittance.
This is because there are far more people wanting a quiet academic life than there are jobs providing a quiet academic life with a livable wage.
And this is likely to become even more out of balance as college enrollment declines and there are smaller and smaller cohorts of freshmen as fertility continues to decline.
There are pittances and then there are pittances. I make a bit more than a typical adjunct or whatever because I have very specialized skills, but its ok not to make a lot of money.
I mean this is a place where the founder just wrote a blog post about being a billionaire. I'll never be a billionaire, thats for sure.
But I genuinely believe that pursuing that goal is vanity, bad for people mentally and "spiritually" and bad for the world.
To get tenure in STEM, you need to publish 1 to 3 papers a year. If you only publish once per year, you'd be on the low end, so you always have to think about your next paper. You always have to try to work on something that would be publishable within the next 6 months to a year, but preferably within 6 months.
All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics.
Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's because it's a more local and hands on group of people, not because those people happen not to work for the government. Governments are awkward because they are deep bureaucracies, and deep bureaucracies divorce the decision makers from the impact of their decisions. Weaker feedback leads to worse decision making. Not because there is a magic property of government that makes it uniquely bad. Large corporations, universities, and other deep non-governmental bureaucracies have similar pathologies.
That's something of an exaggeration, they are empowered to do violence and collect taxes and other things that are more problematic when abused, but still, privatization isn't a silver bullet.
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.
I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.
Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.
That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's really controversial.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
The points your making make sense. I am thinking of it like this: Say there is an elegant argument. It checks out at first. Then you do the unit analysis, and find out the units don't match! But you still don't find the flaw in the original argument; maybe because it's suble in some way. That's where I am: Very smart people have been writing things in the vein of your post here for millenia, and it always seems convincing in the light of contemporary knowledge! Then is proven to be incorrect by major advancements.
Perhaps this will help: Indeed high energy physics is a very high budget project! But there are many areas of the natural sciences which are not high energy physics. This area has been a big deal over the past few decades, and I wonder if it's an over-commitment at the expense of other areas.
You can do many molecular bio lab techniques with a budget of $10k in equipment and reagents, for example. (If used/entry level) I believe there are also many areas in science, chem, and bio which can be done on a theoretical level, or with computers, etc.
Another angle: We are in the earliest steps of neuroscience. Many biology tools and techniques are borrowing something serendipitous we found in nature (CRISPR, TAQ polymerase etc, leveraging living cells' equipment to produce proteins etc). We have no concept of a general chemistry simulator. Molecular dynamics simulations can only work on very small systems for very small timescales, and are based on many approximations, and assumptions which provincialize them. We are very likely missing a big picture of the lower levels of GR/QM. It is very hard for me to agree with "Yep we're good; nothing left to discover here without really expensive equipment!".
Yeah, I agree. It works as an argument for why science can't rely on wealthy benefactors, not for understanding what is possible with a given budget at a given point in time. And biology and chemistry are good counterexamples where capabilities are getting smaller and cheaper.
I would point out that that's on the back of a huge amount of research funded by grants and performed in national labs, but it doesn't impact your argument.
> I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have
Higgs didn't use the LHC to write the paper which won him the Nobel prize.
Additionally, I think it's worth considering that the availability of the money that built the LHC alleviates the drive to find different solutions.
As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention." I frequently think of the great pyramids and people being baffled on how they would build something of that scale without modern equipment. It's hard to get your mind to come up with novel ideas when it already knows that you'd use cranes, trucks, etc. to do it today.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
When younger I've had job in grocery stores and saw petty politics.
There's nothing particular to being subsidized or not: politics is something humans do, and the pettiness is simply a reflection of the people involved.
Have you worked in a corporation? How sane was that corporation? Did it seem to even value its own survival? (Not corporations in general. In general they seem great. Just curious about the ones you actually did time in.)
"Whenever something gets subsidized, it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics."
I think it's just limited resources + the single most natural way for humans to compete for limited resources. This isn't actually an inevitable outcome - just the most likely one.
The "self-funding" regime requires people who are both rich enough to afford to fund science and sharp and driven enough to advance science to exist. That's a high bar. And while there is some correlation between intelligence and wealth, the tails come apart hard. People driven to pursuit wealth above all may not be driven to pursue scientific discovery.
We have plenty of billionaires, and preciously few of them actively pursue pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Even by funding the endeavors - let alone by being in the trenches themselves.
It has crossed my mind that being a scientist is for people who are already financial independent. Same as being an artist. For the rest of us, we need focus on careers where we can make a living. Of course, we can still do science and art as hobbies, but it is rather risky pretending to make a living from it.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
Your US-blend of anti-state brainwashing is showing. There is nothing inherently different in the for-profit status of an organization that prevents the occurrence of "exploitive petty politics". You see those from any organization from homeowners organization to full blown FANGs. I mean, have you ever paid attention to the crap being pushed by the likes of Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter?
I genuinely can't use Fable.
I'm a medical physicist. I use the word nuclear a lot. Opus is fine (well, 99% of the time - I've certainly hit the CBRN filters a few times and even been invited to email anthropic about the false positives).
Fable has literally refused to work on any of my problems (even those about fluid dynamics!) and just tells me that I'm violating anthropic's AUP. I've reached out to their support and don't expect to hear anything sensible back. One thing I do look forward to though is OpenAI offering an equivalent model but with less safeguards...
Honestly for a "side project" Opus has been fantastic for me writing a hybrid simulation framework that prior to large scale code generation would have been a matter of years (and writing a grant, assembling a team, etc – in order to do it "properly"). I've had a bit of help with a grad student and I hacking together on a project that is basically "please merge the following GPL codebases and different areas of physics into one coherent environment". I've given Opus validated codes in disparate languages (julia, python, C) and asked for aspects of various algorithms as an extension module to a large chunk of C and C++ code that is a monte carlo simulator that has been around since 2004.
A bit more context if you care: it's a meso-scale, physiological simulation environment of "particles" that carry nuclear spin, can move in 3D space, and (should they interact with each other or their environment) undergo chemical kinetics. The idea is to simulate molecules within e.g. organs or blood vessels within a person in an MRI scanner, with the motion of the particles dominated by the Navier Stokes equations, but here solved in a Lagrangian (rather than Eulerian) framework by smoothed particle hydrodynamics.
The fact that particles carry nuclear spin means that we can solve the (semiclassical) Bloch equations and by using a python plugin module import exactly the physical MRI scanner would do (in pulseq format) and be able to predict what signal the machine would record – e.g. there's a whole world of cardiac or neurological flow imaging work done in the context of nasty diseases like stroke or myocardial infarction – which has a bunch of physical artefacts behind it. I'm trying to make a simulation framework that can take in realistic patient geometries and act as a 'data generating process' because if we do it right the various physical artefacts that the machine records are reproduced, surprisingly accurately. Of course you also know the ground truth of where the particles are. I'm specifically interested in a weird technique (which I did my PhD in and you can read an article all about here: [0]) called dynamic nuclear polarisation, where specific spin states of molecules such as [1-13C]pyruvate are injected essentially out of thermodynamic equilibrium and act as short-lived tracers of metabolism – again highly altered in disease. The signal we record is a strong function of the physics of what you told the machine to do, the spatial constraints and environment of the patient's body, and the chemical kinetics of the patients' biochemistry (the latter two are usually what we're interested in).
Getting them to do chemistry as well as act as a "simple" tracer is more involved, because in the Lagrangian framework the number of particles is ≈ the spatial resolution of your simulation. That's fine if you're simulating water, but if you're simulating something that reacts concentration is not scale invariant (if you want to keep the interpretability of the rate constants). I've worked out an analytic set of scaling rules around this and fortunately for my application environments and length scales "it just works", completely by luck.
I've used Claude to port various SPH algorithms and boundary condition handling ideas (which are absolutely critical and highly not obvious – we have leaky walls in some places, and e.g. LCR / circuit theory models of the microcirculation to plug in) and it's been a godsend. But I'm running into its limitations constantly. It both confidently makes shit up, claims it is mathematically justified and when the resulting simulation explodes says "I apologise; I lied above" (!) or "I apologise; I am wrong" and I periodically have to yell at it to try to do something more productive.
The real hope is that this simulation environment would be both generally useful for basically anyone doing flow MRI, and help our basic scientific understanding of what we're measuring (the technique is in many hospitals!) but also be able to produce meaningful synthetic training data for image reconstruction algorithms later on. It'll end up permissively licensed (all of the "starting" codebases have compatible OSS licenses, and we're releasing our contributions similarly).
I really hoped that Fable would be better at this sort of work. Occasionally, relating to my work DNP [1], I have need to talk about proper nuclear physics and I have seen Opus's chat interface write a wall of text (e.g. talking about photonuclear reactions and cross section differences in millibarn) and then just delete it all. Support have told me that yes, I've hit the nuclear filter and, well, tough shit, basically.
I wrote a version of the above to them yesterday, and just got the most boilerplate response that I've yet to test:
Thanks for reaching out to Anthropic Support.
We're sorry to hear of the issue that you're running into with accessing Fable 5. I'm happy to say the issue has now been resolved and you should be able to access the model within Claude.
I'll close this case out for now, but please feel free to reach back out to us here if you have any follow up questions or concerns or if you're still in need of assistance. We'll be happy to help.
I saw 'medical physicist' and wondered what you do. Thank you for 'a bit more context', I care! Very interesting stuff. Did you attend medical school + a physics program?
>"it just works", completely by luck
What does your validation function look like for this? Whenever stuff "just works" for me I get a little nervous until I determine why.
> I saw 'medical physicist' and wondered what you do. Thank you for 'a bit more context', I care! Very interesting stuff. Did you attend medical school + a physics program?
That's a whole separate long answer. I'm not a qualified doctor (and nor would I claim to be), but after a masters' degree in particle physics I moved into an explicitly interdisciplinary training programme that led to a doctorate and at other places in the country I did it in, a separate MPhil. During that initial year I spent a fair amount of time in the dissection room, learning anatomy, as well as most of the first three years (the foundational, preclinical part) of a medical degree combined into one (which contained lots of molecular biology, frankly). My final doctorate was between the departments of condensed matter physics (nominally my awarding institution), biochemistry, radiation oncology, and "the department of physiology anatomy and genetics", which is basically preclinical medicine. The people I work with are 50/50 recovering engineers or physicists, and qualified clinical medics who are trying to learn things like perturbation theory in their time off…
>"it just works", completely by luck What does your validation function look like for this? Whenever stuff "just works" for me I get a little nervous until I determine why.
Ah. I do know why: the relevant Damköhler numbers [0] are either very small (chemistry is much quicker than flow) or large (flow is much quicker than chemistry). So the approximations I am building in are justified and an awkward middle region is excluded; we also are only interested in small concentrations in a carrier fluid (e.g. blood, lymph) where the presence or absence of the species in question does not change its rheology.
I am lucky because we have evolved this way. If our circulatory system and its approach to metabolism was more similar to e.g. a reacting polymer foam ("can of expanding foam") which completely consumes its reactants as it goes, this implicit Lagrangian approach would likely not work.
Funny, I've been interested in mathematical rheology modeling (especially hemorheology). Do you know places journals or books to read to get in touch with the field ? (Note: I'm just a dev, few numerical analysis skills)
I have a philosophy pre-print about "empirical ontologies" I use for testing new models reasoning abilities, and it also degrades, there is no way around it and it always refuses.
It's not that the model is complete trash, it's that anthropics new approach to forcing epistemic crisis will make any model behind it complete trash.
They’ve mentioned that they will have the ability to access less guarded models with a verification program in the future. I suspect these guard rails will have options to move past them shortly here in the future.
I had Fable apply some edits to my monarch butterfly paper and kept getting bumped to Opus. Im not exactly sure why, but I suspect it happened when it ran my analysis scripts to double check my numbers.
I'm a medical physicist. I use the word nuclear a lot. Opus is fine (well, 99% of the time - I've certainly hit the CBRN filters a few times and even been invited to email anthropic about the false positives).
Fable has literally refused to work on any of my problems (even those about fluid dynamics!) and just tells me that I'm violating anthropic's AUP.
This problem is compounded by the fact that you can be banned (really by any provider) based on an algorithm, and the methods for restoring your account seem like they do not function as well as might be desired. So be careful with your queries, basically, or you might get locked out.
"Of the parents and carers of children aged 21 and under who responded to Question 12 on the full-length version of the consultation, 89% supported “a legal requirement for social media services to have a minimum age of access”."
However, what the government (and the media) are _NOT_ reporting is that the consultation also paid an independent firm to undertake a nationally representative survey of adults in the general population. The above document acknowledges this itself, by stating:
Caveats and limitations
Users should note the following when interpreting these results:
Self-selecting sample
The consultation was open to anyone who chose to respond. The results reflect the views of parents and carers who were motivated to take part, and are not representative of parents and carers nationally. As with any open public consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristics.
Question routing
These questions were only presented to respondents who wanted to respond to Chapter 2: Interventions for safer, more positive experiences. All questions in this section were optional. Finally, Question 13 was only presented to respondents who answered “Yes” to Question 12 (i.e. those who supported a legal requirement for a minimum age of access in principle). The 96% figure therefore relates to the level of agreement with a minimum age of at least 16 among those parents and carers who opted to respond to this Chapter and already supported some form of minimum age requirement. It does not represent the views of all consultation respondents, nor all parents and carers who responded.
Full consultation only
The figures relate only to the full-length version of the consultation, not the streamlined parents’ and children’s consultations.
Status of results
These figures should be treated as provisional. A comprehensive analysis of all consultation responses will be published separately.consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristic
So, it's 90% of 9499 parents who specifically went out of their way to respond to a consultation widely heralded as being predetermined and about blocking access to social media. For context, in the 2021 census (massively disrupted by covid) there were 11.5 million schoolchildren and full-time students whose parents were the target of the survey.
The representative study isn't published yet. The provisional headline 90% number is.
I'm someone with an academic background who is always interested in new collaborations and interesting problems to explore.
Location: Mostly in Oxford, UK
Remote: Yes
Willing: no
Technologies: Prize-winning physicist and physical scientist. Deeply familiar with maths and physics and statistical inference, in a biomedical context. I've worked on everything from pythons to potatoes (and from assembly code to, well, python).
Google Scholar is probably a better judge of my outputs than a strict CV; https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=LhYjunkAAA...
Email: in profile.
NVIDIA ended support for their 10xx series [1]. To be clear, AMD also moved support for their equivalent 5xxx series to legacy drivers [2], but "supports their cards for many years" doesn't hold value if both companies stopped their respective GPUs at basically the same time.
Also remember that one of those 2 companies has opensource drivers for Linux for their old GPUs, while the other doesn't (newer NVIDIA GPUs have an opensource driver but this isn't the case for the 10xx series). Users of legacy NVIDIA cards needs on Linux needs to use their old driver branches, with results that are less than optimal to say the least.
Your "true observation" doesn't contribute to the context of this particular topic thread which "has nothing to do with [your] comment", as you are "well aware". You should review the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My local library has some dead tree format books with a 500 year support window. Or dead animal or dead reed format books with more like a 2000-year support window.
Unless they are very popular books, they will be weeded (thrown out or or sold) in a matter of a few years though. People imagine that libraries are infinite storehouses of material, but except for places like the Library of Congress they really aren't. There is limited storage space, and in order to get new books they need to discard the old ones that were rarely checked out. Even the example of old books on parchment aren't immune to this trend -- the books we have from Ancient Greece or Rome are just the really popular ones that were copied over and over again, and the vast majority of works from those times are lost.
Your local library keeps papyrus scrolls on open stacks? I mean, sure, yes, there are libraries that haves such things (the university I work for does), but generally they will be kept in special boxes and you need to ask nicely to get to see them. And don't get me started about the crapitude of your average new book these days. Personally, I prefer print books too, but lasting forever is not really why.
Err, no. Something “existing” is not the same as something being supported. Is the original printer still providing free translations to modern languages? Fixing typos and other mistakes? Adding chapters on a regular basis?
It’s kinda ludicrous to call the fact that a thing didn’t spontaneously disappear “support”.
And that fact is also true for all of the books on all of the discontinued Kindles.
Given, the kindle won't last 500 years, but the support window is in some senses longer than for those 500-year-old books, which never received a single security update.
This looks flippin' amazing, but also like the definition of project scope creep. I imagine it will be brilliant, unaffordable, surprisingly cheap, terrible and awesome (in both senses of the word) all at the same time. 3GPP really needs a light shining through it.
I sincerely hope I work out a way of getting someone else to buy the thing for me. And the push towards all in-tree source is fantastic. Genuinely impressed.
Some projects are meant to scope creep. Like this one. If the project manager of the swiss army knife had defended it from scope creep it would have 1 knife.
IIRC the original scope was the 8 most common tasks that literal Swiss soldiers did. that was their scope.
sewing and maintianing clothes was one of them, for example, so thats why it has a punch. They'd need to be able to open cans, as that was the most common long term ration, and they'd need to be able to maintain their rifles which had screws, thus screwdrivers.
a version with a wine bottle opener was made for officers and became common
The comment you’re replying to already explains why they have a corkscrew… I’m used to people not reading the article they’re commenting on, but this is the first time I see someone not reading the comment they’re replying to.
Their last product announcement was the BUSY bar, a desktop timer with a display to show that you're busy. Pre-orders launched at $250 but they dropped the price to $219. Has not shipped yet: https://busy.app/
The Flipper One specs are significantly more expensive to manufacture than the Flipper Zero or Busy Bar. I don't think this will be a surprisingly cheap product.
I do think it's cool that they're building the product they want to build and letting cost be a secondary factor.
Wow this crazy -- "Built-in Pomodoro timer" means they are literally replacing a $5 plastic tomato-shaped mechanical timing device with something that costs $220 and features WiFi and app integration. What could be more antithetical to the original pomodoro ethos, I don't know. It's like an episode of Silicon Valley.
I love that Belo was so involved in this epic failure. They are one of those large media companies I love to hate on. It probably helps to be a Dallas native to have that sentiment though
Part of the success of QR codes is the ubiquity of the device to scan those codes. CueCat needed a wired device which is not something as easy to use as a wireless mobile device.
Plus, CueCat used some dumb proprietary encrypted tag format that needed to go to their servers to look up the code as they thought the marketers would want to pay for their codes.
"high-voltage custom power supply that converts 120V/240V AC line voltage to 330V DC power for the motor and 3.3V/5V/12V DC for the communications board"
When I read that, my brain flipped thinking surely that has to be a typo. Then, "he motor is seemingly custom to account for the exceptionally high rated power (stalls at 5A at 330V DC, which is hard to believe, possibly even a misprint on the motor casing)"
So if it's a misprint on the motor, they designed a power supply for something totally unnecessary. Otherwise, if it's not a misprint, that's one helluva motor
> but also like the definition of project scope creep.
To me it seems like the opposite, it has more connectivity and I/O than the Zero, but also scaled down, while using better materials, like they decided to outsource the project scope creep to the community, which makes sense to me.
Man, they put 2 processors in the thing and are building their own OS. They even say they are not sure how to get it accomplished.
Scope creep to hell and back. Could just let the device get turned off like literally any other device on earth, and not have to build a whole new fucking OS to get it running.
They even - for some reason - want to waste time "training their own AI model because general ones don't cut it" (which no one is likey to use). Could just build a normal RAG + context stuffing pipeline in an afternoon but nah, let's devote a few months to this completely unnecessary non-feature.
100 bucks say this doesn't see the light of day before 2030 (if it ever does!)
> Could just let the device get turned off like literally any other device on earth, and not have to build a whole new fucking OS to get it running.
This is actually quite common in embedded devices and even elsewhere. Every Apple device does this, for example (the Secure Enclave is a completely separate OS running on a separate computer).
If you think about it, most laptops have been doing something like this for decades as well for things like brightness control etc., not with a different CPU but definitely an OS-like thing (i.e. the BIOS, using SMIs etc.)
The idea of the "single OS, single CPU computer" has been a myth for a while now.
Yeah, CPU + MCU isnt exactly a foreign or strange idea. And they're hardly developing "their own OS", just configuring a default linux distro with various integrations particularly around display, IO and custom applets to interface with existing linux terminal programs and libraries.
They do appear to be trying to build something a bit more bespoke than that, where they want something like Fedora Silverblue or what systemd seems to want to present, in terms of contained overlays for snapshotting when you make changes and then going "oh no" without requiring a full reinstall.
God knows if they'll end up scaling back their goals, but the vision isn't "just" a few custom integrations.
I think we've developed software with "ROI" in mind for so long, that by now most people forgot how it was to use devices and interfaces that were made with passion and by taking your time, experimenting and finding the right way, rather than just rushing through stuff and optimizing everything for money.
I remember Flipper Zero had a ton of doubters early on too, myself included. I think I'm now willing to give them more slack to actually experiment and create something even more ambitious, as they successfully executed it the first time most doubted them.
I've worked in startups long enough to see many founders build without considering ROI.
It's not rare at all.
The reason you don't see those projects is because they don't make it very far. Big projects take a lot of effort and people and most people expect compensation for their effort. You can't compensate them without ROI.
As an open-source project they have some benefit of getting contributors to do some of the work. The hardware still needs ROI to exist. Making those custom parts requires up-front capital, which is going to need ROI to pay back.
Could you clarify what you mean by saying it may be both unaffordable and surprisingly cheap? (Expensive but less than expensive than it could be? Expensive but of poor build quality?)
Also why would you want/need someone else to purchase it for you? Because of your country's import laws, or reasons related to privacy/anonymity?
probably means - more expensive than any of us would spend on a "toy", but far cheaper than what an expert might on an industry standard version of this.
Exactly. A decent digital communication, spectrum or vector network analyser from the likes of Keysight (AKA HP or Agilent) or R&S is crazy money – many thousands.
Compared to any piece of "proper" test and measurement equipment even if Flipper 1 is $1k it's a steal, for example. Heck, the last thing I put on a grant application was a 220 GHz AWG that was something like $1.5m. Admittedly quite different from a single m2 plugin socket but a 1 GHz spectrum analyser starts at $2.4k and everything fancier is "price on application" [0].
I realise this is not the same piece of kit as Flipper One, but with the right daughter boards, hackability, and <s>graduate student</s> labour I imagine you could do a lot (I am interested in RF at <1 GHz for NMR reasons as well as electronic Larmor frequencies at ~100 GHz frequencies). Their SDR daughter boards are designed for communication but there's a whole world of academic nerds who do weird things and would love a genuinely open, hackable broadband SDR (they exist, with limitations! I have a lime SDR somewhere…)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionation_of_carbon_isotop... [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7577891/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1734681/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C4_plants [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterated_drug#Examples
reply