skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom in ~tech
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Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom
9 votes -
Comment on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.
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But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company said its fleet those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.
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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
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Comment on Colorado approves balcony solar, requires utilities to accept meter collars in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
Colorado is the latest state to approve plug-in solar (also known as balcony solar) after Gov. Jared Polis signed HB26-1007 into law.
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Legalizes plug-in solar with safety guardrails. The new law legalizes plug-in solar generation devices — typically one to four solar panels plus an inverter, designed for simple self-installation by homeowners or renters in a yard or on a balcony. It requires that devices meet rigorous product safety standards, closing a gap that previously allowed unsafe products to be sold in Colorado. It prohibits utilities and HOAs from unreasonably blocking the installation or use of these devices.
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Cuts costly interconnection barriers with meter collars. The law requires the Public Utilities Commission to update interconnection rules by December 31, 2026, to explicitly allow customer ownership and use of meter collar adapters — simple devices installed between an electric meter socket and a utility billing meter that provide immediate interconnection of customer-owned energy devices. Meter collars reduce or eliminate the need for expensive electrical panel upgrades, saving families between $2,000 and $5,000 per installation and avoiding panel upgrades that can cost up to $10,000. Colorado’s investor-owned utilities — including Xcel and Black Hills — are already using meter collar technology. This law makes access universal and statewide.
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Expands access across all utility types. The law extends these protections to municipally owned utilities and electric cooperatives, ensuring that families across Colorado — not just those served by investor-owned utilities — can benefit.
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Colorado approves balcony solar, requires utilities to accept meter collars
9 votes -
Comment on AI is killing the cheap smartphone in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
In 2026, the International Data Corporation, which tracks the smartphone market, predicted that worldwide smartphone shipments would fall 13 percent, their largest single-year decline ever. The crash would be most intense in Africa and the Middle East, where smartphone shipments would fall by more than 20 percent, and would be concentrated in the cheapest end of the smartphone industry. This shock represented not a temporary blip but indeed “a structural reset of the entire market”: a huge share of the world’s population is getting priced out of smartphone ownership.
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The catch with HBM, beyond the difficulty of producing it, is that it is enormously wafer-intensive. It is not just that you are stacking a lot of dies together. Because of all the peripheral circuits and all the vertical channels, a single gigabyte of HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity that a gigabyte of DDR or LPDDR does. Every gigabyte of HBM produced is, in effect, three gigabytes of commodity memory not produced.
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The rational response, for the memory makers, was obvious: pump out more HBM. And so they reallocated a massive amount of capacity. In 2023, HBM accounted for 2 percent of the memory makers’ wafers; in 2024, 5 percent; in 2025, 10 percent; and by the end of 2026, the share is expected to hit 20 percent, with an additional 3 percent allocated toward high-density DDR for AI servers. And so in the space of three years HBM went from a peripheral product category to the very core of the memory industry. SK Hynix, which had been first to reach volume production of the leading-edge HBM node, saw its HBM revenue increase fourfold in 2024 alone; by the end of that year, HBM accounted for more than 40 percent of the company’s DRAM revenue, up from roughly 5 percent two years earlier.
But even this reallocation hasn’t been enough. Demand continues to outrun supply, and the memory shortage remains one of the defining features of the AI buildout. (It has, in turn, produced all sorts of workarounds, like quantization or DeepSeek’s multi-head latent attention.) So heated has the race for memory become that at the end of 2025, executives from hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google were reportedly “practically taking up permanent residence in Korea” lobbying Samsung and SK Hynix for allocation. More than 30 percent of hyperscaler capital expenditure is now going to DRAM alone.
This has been fantastic news for the memory makers. In 2025, they earned a collective $70 billion in profit; in 2026 they’re expected to earn more than double that amount. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are now among the most profitable companies in the world.
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And that repricing has had a stark effect in poor countries. In India, the sub-$100 smartphone market collapsed 59 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026: surging memory prices resulted in a “forced premiumization” of the Indian smartphone market. But in the poorest markets, such premiumization isn’t a possibility. In 2025, 81 percent of smartphone shipments in Africa were in the sub-$200 category: as smartphone prices surge, many African consumers will simply be priced out of phone ownership entirely.
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Even Apple, the king of the electronics world, is starting to feel the bite of memory costs. Apple traditionally enjoyed significant bargaining power with the Korean memory makers, negotiating long-term agreements to smooth prices out for years at a time; but now the memory makers are the ones with the leverage. When Apple’s latest long-term agreement expired in January 2026, the memory makers refused anything lasting longer than a quarter at a time. In February, in order to secure supply at all, Apple agreed to pay Samsung a 100 percent premium on the LPDDR5X memory destined for the iPhone.
And so the pricing pressure on Apple has grown massively over the last six months. Over the course of 2025, the 12GB LPDDR5X chips that power the iPhone 17 Pro had increased in price by 230 percent; without its long-term agreements to protect it, Apple would face the full brunt of the memory crunch. In order to cope, Apple has announced a wave of delays over the last few months. The iPhone 18 standard model has been delayed to spring 2027; the new Mac Studio was delayed from summer to fall.
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AI is killing the cheap smartphone
9 votes -
Comment on I made my own Reddit alternative in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkSome of the shared links are actually YouTube videos; it might be a good idea to call that out on the front page, so you can tell before clicking on them? More generally, one of the problems with...Some of the shared links are actually YouTube videos; it might be a good idea to call that out on the front page, so you can tell before clicking on them?
More generally, one of the problems with multiplayer games is that you need multiple people to try them out properly :-) I've tinkered with writing an Internet forum, but then built myself a link-sharing website where only the admin can post links. There's still plenty of work to do, but it's much easier to deal with. For socializing, I repost the links to Tildes and I might add Bluesky eventually.
I also imagine releasing the software someday so other people can run it, and then they could somehow connect and we could share links, but the problem with that is that it would be a multiplayer game.
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Comment on An OpenAI model has disproven a central conjecture in discrete geometry in ~science
skybrian Link ParentThis gets into whether mathematical proofs are invented or discovered. In some sense, the information was already implicit in the axioms. But that would be defining creativity in such a strict way...This gets into whether mathematical proofs are invented or discovered. In some sense, the information was already implicit in the axioms. But that would be defining creativity in such a strict way that humans don't do creative work either.
I don't follow the math, but if the mathematicians say it's sufficiently original to publish in a top journal, I believe them.
It seems similar to the situation with AlphaGo. This proof apparently needed some cleaning up for understandability, but maybe that won't be needed in a year or two?
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Comment on Google Search as you know it is over in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentChatGPT in "thinking" mode does a reasonable job too. I imagine that for Google's AI overview, it's based on the results of just one search, good or bad, while the others do multiple searches,...ChatGPT in "thinking" mode does a reasonable job too. I imagine that for Google's AI overview, it's based on the results of just one search, good or bad, while the others do multiple searches, refining the query if the first one didn't work very well.
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Comment on An OpenAI model has disproven a central conjecture in discrete geometry in ~science
skybrian LinkThey got nine mathematicians to improve and comment on the proof and they're all saying nice things about it: Noga Alon: Thomas Bloom: W T Gowers: Daniel Litt: Arul Shankar: ... Jacob Tisimerman:...- Exemplary
They got nine mathematicians to improve and comment on the proof and they're all saying nice things about it:
Noga Alon:
The solution of the problem by the internal model of Open AI is, in my opinion, an outstanding
achievement, settling a long-standing open problem. The fact that the correct answer is not n^
1+o(1) is surprising, and the construction and its analysis apply fairly sophisticated tools from algebraic number theory in an elegant and clever way.Thomas Bloom:
Perhaps tempting fate, on 16th April I included this problem in a blog post on www.erdosproblems.com titled (somewhat tongue in cheek) ‘Top 10 Erdős Problems’. [...] While I believed that AI would make some progress on at least a couple of the problems in that list eventually, I did not expect this to happen just one month later!
If the result of this paper was a proof of the unit distance problem, that would be truly incredible.
While I was still very surprised to hear of the this result, this was dampened slightly when I
learnt it was a construction of a counterexample [...]On examining the construction, it becomes more clear how people had missed this before – it
requires the confluence of several different unlikely events [...] The AI met all of these criteria, and its success here echoes previous achievements: it often produces the most surprising results by persevering down paths that a human may have dismissed as not worth their time to explore [...]Still, while perhaps not the proof of a conjecture that we had hoped for, no doubt this construction and the ideas involved will have a major impact in discrete geometry.
One aspect of this proof should not be overlooked: while the original proof produced by AI was
completely valid, it was significantly improved by the human researchers at OpenAI and the many
other mathematicians involved in the present paper.W T Gowers:
In any case, there is no doubt that the solution to the unit-distance problem is a milestone in AI
mathematics: if a human had written the paper and submitted it to the Annals of Mathematics and
I had been asked for a quick opinion, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation.
No previous AI-generated proof has come close to that.Daniel Litt:
This is the first example of a result produced autonomously by an AI that I find exciting in itself,
as opposed to as a leading indicator.Arul Shankar:
I had not encountered this problem before seeing the proof from OpenAI, and I found the proof
to be a clean execution of a very beautiful idea and quite well written up....
All the same, I would consider this to be a very "human" proof, though a extremely ingenious one.
Jacob Tisimerman:
This is a really impressive piece of work, and I would accept it for any journal without hesitation.
While it’s true in the final solution that nothing is all that surprising, there are many
ways to attempt to set this construction up ... It’s always tempting to look at a completed
proof and declare it obvious after the fact.This may indicate one way that AI systems have an edge: it’s not just that they can try all known
methods, but they can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without
getting overwhelmed. Of course this is not yet robustly true, but this may be a foreshadowing event.Melanie Matchett Wood:
I had not heard of this problem before hearing of the solution from Open AI. I find the argument
to be a beautiful application of number theory to a natural, concrete question.[...] I believe if the level and type of human expertise that is represented on this note had been assembled to find a counterexample to this conjecture a month ago, and those people put in similar amounts of time working on it tha[t] they did to reading and thinking about Chat GPT’s solution, the mathematicians would have found a counterexample. However, without the claimed proof by Chat GPT, there is no particular reason anyone would have tried to look for a counterexample, assembled a group of experts with the appropriate expertise, or that the experts would have agreed to turn their attention to this problem.
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Comment on OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO in the coming weeks in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI don't see this as obvious at all. It's a difficult forecast. "Not going to last forever" isn't saying very much, but I wouldn't want to bet on whether the stock will be up or down a year after...I don't see this as obvious at all. It's a difficult forecast.
"Not going to last forever" isn't saying very much, but I wouldn't want to bet on whether the stock will be up or down a year after the IPO. There are good arguments in either direction, plus it depends on world events.
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Comment on An OpenAI model has disproven a central conjecture in discrete geometry in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place n points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?
This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.
Today, we share a breakthrough on the unit distance problem. Since Erdős’s original work, the prevailing belief has been that the “square grid” constructions depicted further below were essentially optimal for maximizing the number of unit-distance pairs. An internal OpenAI model has disproved this longstanding conjecture, providing an infinite family of examples that yield a polynomial improvement. The proof has been checked by a group of external mathematicians. They have also written a companion paper explaining the argument and providing further background and context for the significance of the result.
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Fields medalist Tim Gowers, writing in the companion paper, calls the result “a milestone in AI mathematics.” According to leading number theorist Arul Shankar, “In my opinion this paper demonstrates that current AI models go beyond just helpers to human mathematicians – they are capable of having original ingenious ideas, and then carrying them out to fruition”.
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The proof is available here. The companion paper by leading external mathematicians is available here. You can find an abridged version of the model’s chain of thought here.
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An OpenAI model has disproven a central conjecture in discrete geometry
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Comment on What has changed as you've gotten older? in ~talk
skybrian Link ParentI've never asked, but I'm doubtful that the doctors at Kaiser (where I go) have much freedom to do things their way? How many doctors work for themselves or a small office nowadays?I've never asked, but I'm doubtful that the doctors at Kaiser (where I go) have much freedom to do things their way? How many doctors work for themselves or a small office nowadays?
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Comment on Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame. in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
During the war, oil and gas shortages led Japan to turn to the nation's most abundant natural resource – forests – as a source of fuel for home and industry. The result was widespread deforestation of natural forests, with the mountains around major cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe completely stripped bare of trees.
"After World War Two, many of Japan's mountains became barren, causing disasters in various regions," says Noriko Sato, a professor and forestry researcher at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. (Bare mountains can increase the incidence of landslides and flooding). "Large-scale afforestation was carried out by public works, funded by tax revenues, to prevent soil erosion."
Aiming for rapid reforestation, the government chose to plant reams of only two different native, fast-growing evergreen species that could quickly reforest landscapes and provide wood for future use in construction: the Japanese cedar, sugi, and the Japanese cypress, hinoki.
Today, these hinoki and sugi plantation forests still cover around 10 million hectares (25 million acres) – a fifth of Japan's entire land area.
The problem is, sugi and hinoki trees also produce large amounts of lightweight pollen which can easily drift into cities. It's this pollen, often released all at once from the monoculture plantations, that is responsible for most seasonal allergies in Japan. The issue has become all the worse since these trees release ever more pollen after maturing at 30 years of age – now the case for nearly all of them.
"Pollen allergies have become a national health issue in Japan," says Sato. "Addressing this problem is urgent."
In 2023, Japan declared allergies a national social problem and the central government set out an ambitious plan – reduce pollen by 50% in 30 years. As a first step, it aims to reduce the forest areas planted with sugi trees by 20%.
But swapping out forests covering over 2% of Japan in 10 years is a massive endeavour. Plus, simply cutting these trees down won't be enough – they also need to be replaced with new forests to avoid soil erosion or accidentally undercutting Japan's own climate targets.
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Still, even before the 2023 government declaration, some local actors and non-profits had begun efforts to turn these forests into biodiverse ecosystems, and some are already seeing the benefits. The small town of Nishiawakura, Okayama, for example, has created an entire economy around reducing the 84% of its forests made up only of hinoki and sugi, turning wood into heat for eel farms as well as chopsticks and timber.
In 2020, Kobe, a larger port city in central Japan with a dense urban core and vast forests within its city limits, began an effort to turn more than 180 hectares (445 acres) of plantation back into natural broadleaf forests in a 15-year cycle.
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Similar projects are beginning in other parts of Japan. One project in Hotani, Osaka, is now restoring wetlands and grasslands. And the largest effort aims to turn 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of plantation forests in Gumna prefecture to meadows and mixed deciduous woodland.
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Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame.
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Comment on Donald Trump’s deal to drop suit against US Internal Revenue Service creates $1.8b ‘anti-weaponization fund’ in ~society
skybrian Link ParentI believe the term for this is control fraud.I believe the term for this is control fraud.
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Comment on The unreasonable effectiveness of ProseMirror model in rich text transformation in ~comp
skybrian LinkNice explanation! I came up with a vaguely similar design for converting paragraphs that I want to quote from HTML to Markdown. My bookmarklet uses a RichText class that contains a text string...Nice explanation! I came up with a vaguely similar design for converting paragraphs that I want to quote from HTML to Markdown. My bookmarklet uses a RichText class that contains a text string that’s annotated by contiguous spans with marks. Since it works one paragraph at a time, handling multiple nodes like ProseMirror wasn’t needed.
This is also how Bluesky represents rich text within a post. See here.
Nit: I think there might be a typo in one of the mappings in the article? “1 → 0, 2 → 3, 3 → 2” seems wrong because it seems like the positions both before and after the mapping should be in order?
From the article:
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