Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

It wasn’t the buffer itself that drew power. It was the need to physically spin the disc faster in order to read the data to build up a buffer. So it would draw more power even if you left it physically stable. And then, if it would actually skip in reading, it would need to seek back to where it was to build up the buffer again.

I’m not sure that would work. Admins need to manage their instance users, yes, but they also need to look out for the posts and comments in the communities hosted on their instance, and be one level of appeal above the mods of those communities. Including the ability to actually delete content hosted in those communities, or cached media on their own servers, in response to legal obligations.

Yes, it’s the exact same practice.

The main difference, though, is that Amazon as a company doesn’t rely on this “just walk out” business in a capacity that is relevant to the overall financial situation of the company. So Amazon churns along, while that one insignificant business unit gets quietly shut down.

For this company in this post, though, they don’t have a trillion dollar business subsidizing the losses from this AI scheme.

They’re actually only about 48% accurate, meaning that they’re more often wrong than right and you are 2% more likely to guess the right answer.

Wait what are the Bayesian priors? Are we assuming that the baseline is 50% true and 50% false? And what is its error rate in false positives versus false negatives? Because all these matter for determining after the fact how much probability to assign the test being right or wrong.

Put another way, imagine a stupid device that just says “true” literally every time. If I hook that device up to a person who never lies, then that machine is 100% accurate! If I hook that same device to a person who only lies 5% of the time, it’s still 95% accurate.

So what do you mean by 48% accurate? That’s not enough information to do anything with.

Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. “Ajax” was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.

Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.

Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.

Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn’t define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service’s design was kinda beside the point.

Teslas will (allegedly) start on a small, low-complexity street grid in Austin. exact size TBA. Presumably, they’re mapping the shit out of it and throwing compute power at analyzing their existing data for that postage stamp.

Lol where are the Tesla fanboys insisting that geofencing isn’t useful for developing self driving tech?

Wouldn’t a louder room raise the noise floor, too, so that any quieter signal couldn’t be extracted from the noisy background?

If we were to put a microphone and recording device in that room, could any amount of audio processing be able to extract the sound of the small server out from the background noise of all the bigger servers? Because if not, then that’s not just a auditory processing problem, but a genuine example of destruction of information.

That’s never really been true. It’s a cat and mouse game.

If Google actually used its 2015 or 2005 algorithms as written, but on a 2025 index of webpages, that ranking system would be dogshit because the spammers have already figured out how to crowd out the actual quality pages with their own manipulated results.

Tricking the 2015 engine using 2025 SEO techniques is easy. The problem is that Google hasn’t actually been on the winning side of properly ranking quality for maybe 5-10 years, and quietly outsourced the search ranking systems to the ranking systems of the big user sites: Pinterest, Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, even Twitter to some degree. If there’s a responsive result and it ranks highly on those user voted sites, then it’s probably a good result. And they got away with switching to that methodology just long enough for each of those services to drown in their own SEO spam techniques, so that those services are all much worse than they were in 2015. And now indexing search based on those sites is no longer a good search result.

There’s no turning backwards. We need to adopt new rankings for the new reality, not try to turn back to when we were able to get good results.

My gigabit connection is good enough for my NAS, as the read speeds on the hard drive itself tend to be limited to about a gigabit/s anyway. But I could see some kind of SSD NAS benefiting from a faster LAN connection.

Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.

All the other answers here are wrong. It was the Boeing 737-Max.

They fit bigger, more fuel efficient engines on it that changed the flight characteristics, compared to previous 737s. And so rather than have pilots recertify on this as a new model (lots of flight hours, can’t switch back), they designed software to basically make the aircraft seem to behave like the old model.

And so a bug in the cheaper version of the software, combined with a faulty sensor, would cause the software to take over and try to override the pilots and dive downward instead of pulling up. Two crashes happened within 5 months, to aircraft that were pretty much brand new.

It was grounded for a while as Boeing fixed the software and hardware issues, and, more importantly, updated all the training and reference materials for pilots so that they were aware of this basically secret setting that could kill everyone.

But also, you’re right. Here’s an article from 1994 describing Visicalc as a “Killer App” from the late 1970’s, that prompted people to buy personal computers.

“Killer rap” was pretty popular in the 90’s too.

It’s because Al Gore invented the internet, so they are known as Al Gore Rhythms.

Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.

Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:

Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.

Um excuse me the preferred term is “AI agent” if you want outside investment

Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.

Instead, I actively avoided conversations with my peers, particularly because I had nothing in common with them.

Looking at your own social interactions with others, do you now consider yourself to be socially well adjusted? Was the “debating child in a coffee shop” method actually useful at developing the social skills that are useful in adulthood?

I have some doubts.

It’s worth pointing out that browser support is a tiny, but important, part of overall ecosystem support.

TIFF is the dominant standard for certain hardware and processes for digitizing physical documents, or publishing/printing digital files as physical prints. But most browsers don’t bother supporting displaying TIFF, because that’s not a good format for web use.

Note also that non-backwards-compatible TIFF extensions are usually what cameras capture as “raw” image data and what image development software stores as “digital negatives.”

JPEG XL is trying to replace TIFF at the interface between the physical analog world and the digital files we use to represent that image data. I’m watching this space in particular, because the original web generation formats of JPEG, PNG, and GIF (and newer web-oriented formats like webp and avif) aren’t trying to do anything with physical sensors, scans, prints, etc.

Meanwhile, JPEG XL is trying to replace JPEG on the web, with photographic images compressed with much more efficient and much higher quality compression. And it’s trying to replace PNG for lossless compression.

It’s trying to do it all, so watching to see where things get adopted and supported will be interesting. Apple appears to be going all in on JXL, from browser support to file manager previews to actual hardware sensors storing raw image data in JXL. Adobe supports it, too, so we might start to see full JXL workflows from image capture to postprocessing to digital/web publishing to full blown paper/print publishing.