Someone smarter than me can probably answer this hypothetical: If scaled up, would this device become a heat pump? Extracting energy from the electromagnetic field via the Casimir effect would seem to transform random field fluctuations (i.e. "heat") in the environment into the movement of electrons down a conductor. If those electrons are sent away to do work elsewhere, to my mind that's a transfer of heat from one place to another. Moving 0.5W of heat isn't very interesting, but I wonder if there's a scaling up that would let you move meaningful amounts of heat around in this manner while generating electricity as a "bonus".
The market for moving heat around is pretty enormous.
It's a shame that Be failed. I think they were a victim of Microsoft's aggressive anti-competitive activities in the late-1990s, combined with Apple deciding to bring back Steve Jobs via the acquisition of NeXT (making Apple a serious competitor in the same segment that Be was targeting -- multimedia and realtime applications). Ultimately, they prevailed in winning about $24M from Microsoft, but that was after the company had shut down. I presume the winnings went to Palm. Super cool to see Haiku continuing to develop. No doubt agentic coding is making it far easy for enthusiasts to improve and maintain projects like Haiku and I look forward to seeing where this project goes. You never know...
They were never going to compete with Microsoft even if MS hadn’t screwed them (which MS definitely did). At the time, MS was invincible in the enterprise market. Be’s only path to success was with Apple. Jean-Louis Gassée was negotiating the buy-out with Apple but he wanted more than Apple was willing to pay and Jobs was the key acquihire at Next, before people started talking about “acquihire” as a concept. Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t going to acquire both Be and Next.
Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0]
There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow.
I recall that they had one OEM who wanted to install BeOS as a preinstalled option Hitachi), but then Microsoft threatened to raise Windows license prices in retaliation.
Probably much worse. First because (and I say this is a BeOS fan at the time) it was a single-user system without much security. Second, because it's likely that Apple would have sunk further without Steve Jobs.
When they had to shift to x86 there was more to it than MS being jerks. At the time, hardware companies would write the device drivers for Windows, but nothing else. If you were an alternative OS you had to provide your own. And since the commodity x86 world was such a clusterfuck of barely compatible hardware, Be had to spend a ton of effort just keeping up with that noise.
Linux had a similar problem but had the advantage of open source. Random people would cobble together support for things and stick it online.
To that last point, they do not accept any AI code to be used in the project.
I get it, many times I have seen stuff that is function all but very slow, considering Haiku can run fine on a Pentium 2, I can see why they wouldn't want that.
They knew Microsoft was monopolistic. They should have planned around it by making an x86 BeBox. (Which still would have failed because they didn't have the marketing budget.)
I know this is cold comfort, but in times like this, it can be a good idea to start your own company. Cloudflare itself was founded in the wake of the GFC (post-2008), when tech was dead as a doornail. The best time to start something is when awesome people to work with are unemployed.
They have a reputation to maintain, otherwise it will be difficult to recruit the best people in future. That being said, damn, that is a very generous package by any measure.
First packages tend to be the best. If you work for them beware, the next round won't be as good (if there is one). The economy isn't the best, but if you get an okay job offer anyway you should probably take it rather than risk you will be in the next round that is worse.
True. I wasn't surprised when I was let go when my previous company had a first round. I'd clashed with management pretty openly for a while and knew if anyone had to go, I'd painted a target on myself. The people who were let go in rounds two and three were probably caught by surprise.
Dont' get it twisted, anyone; plenty of companies have a reputation to maintain for this reason (but don't do this). This is an absurdly generous severance package.
He may be referring to the fact that the Trumps have strong business ties and interests to crypto industry, and as we've seen in the last year this administration is a strong friend of the industry. Money is being made one way or the other and if you don't think so you are completely blind.
I’m not happy with their privacy policy [1]. I’m unfamiliar with the phrase “Parties with Other Legal Rights”. Given the well-documented struggles of Anthropic and others to provide enough compute, I wonder if “Parties with Other Legal Rights” constitutes part of the advantage here.
Just run a local model or run deepseek from another provider with a policy you like. The models are open weight and widely available. Still cheaper than chatgpt and anything else through 3rd parties
this is the pitch - it's open source, run it yourself. But >99% of people will not have the hardware needed to run these models at a high enough quality to be close to SOTA. So they will run the open-source models on CCP systems for a good price.
a lack of existential threat in the form of pay-seeking and remediation from the people you stole training materials from that allows for an intrinsically different pace of operation than the Western competition
I'm convinced that one of the top use cases for OpenClaw is orchestrating cold outreach email campaigns, as if there's nothing wrong with using AI to spam people to death. Platforms that enable sending cold emails are taking a sizeable risk that the low engagement of such emails stimulates some worsening inbox deliverability for the rest of their traffic (see [1] - you can't hide just by sending through big tenanted platforms like Amazon).
[1] Every message sent from Amazon SES carries a "Feedback-Id" header that allows Google (and anyone else) to track the Amazon account responsible for the message. The fourth field is an opaque but stable identifier associated with your Amazon account; receivers can and do use this for rate limiting:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/underst...
Technically, you could create many top level Amazon accounts, but if you want to send lots of mail, you must warm up your account. So accounts can be created, but it’s useless if you need to send high volumes of messages.
Are we talking about the app at reclaim.ai ? It calls itself the "#1 AI calendar app for work." Like many of these tools, it may be AI in hype only, but I'm not sure exactly where we'd draw the line otherwise.
I've been a Codex devotee since around last August. I don't know why everyone is so bonkers about Claude Code. It's not the only belle at the ball. Codex is rock solid.
The market for moving heat around is pretty enormous.
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