skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Videos of a robot performing tasks from the “Robot Olympics” in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Benjie Holson proposed a set of "Robot Olympics" challenge tasks in a recent blog post,, with seemingly simple everyday behaviors like spreading peanut butter, washing a greasy pan, putting a key in a lock, and turning socks inside-out. These challenge tasks might not seem as cognitively demanding as math olympiad problems, but robotics experts believe they present exceptional challenges for autonomous robots.

    We wanted to see how many of these tasks we could tackle just by fine-tuning our latest model, based on π0.6.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on The tools bookmakers use to block data-savvy gamblers, and how to get round them in ~life

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/kyqxs …

    https://archive.is/kyqxs

    Most punters are unaware that betting firms, whose adverts promise glittering riches, are at pains to shut out winners. If pressed, the firms stress that very few players are restricted. A report by Britain’s Gambling Commission found that 4.3% of accounts active in the past year have “stake factors”—the proportion of the maximum bet offered to a new customer—below 100%. American books give a longer leash: only 0.64% of accounts in Massachusetts are limited, for instance. But restrictions are rare only because most customers are “square”—that is to say, losers.

    No one knows how many people make a living betting. However, they range from stealthy lone wolves to “syndicates” as big as a hedge fund. Contrary to popular perception, advantageous wagers are everywhere if you know how to look for them. The profit margins sportsbooks build into their odds are as low as 4.5%, and they accept bets on far more events than their algorithms can price accurately. So their business model works best if they strive to identify and restrict sharps. “Betting is easy,” says Antonino de Rosa, whose syndicate has 17 employees and wagers an average of $12m a week. “Betting a lot of money is hard.”

    A good “player-profiling” strategy can boost a betting firm’s margins by 10-20%. It is not simply a case of shutting out people who win large sums. Such folks may be lucky rather than skilled. If so, bookies want to give them a chance to lose it all again.

    At the same time, they want to hook big losers, or “whales”. When betting firms spot punters who appear deep-pocketed and reckless, they raise their limits and offer them vip treatment to keep them playing. Such inducements are especially lavish in America, where rules to protect problem gamblers are comparatively lax. However, some “whales” are sharps in disguise.

    …

    The profiling process starts before you place a bet. Are you using a phone, like most punters? Good. Or a computer, which makes it easier to compare odds? Not so good. Did you deposit by debit card, or via the e-wallets preferred by syndicates? Are you a woman? That is suspicious. Far fewer women bet than men, and many sharps get women to place bets for them.

    The first wager you place speaks volumes. Normal punters bet on the most popular spectacles, such as English Premier League football or America’s National Football League (nfl), starting around half an hour before kickoff. They generally bet on who will win, what the scoring margin will be and which statistical milestone a star player will achieve, paying little attention to the odds. Square players love to combine multiple bets into a “parlay” or “accumulator”, which delivers a big payout only if all of them win.

    Sharps have the opposite tendencies. They target less popular leagues and bet as soon as odds are published, when they are most likely to be mispriced. They shop around. They like obscure “derivative” markets, such as how many points will be scored in the third quarter, and bets on lesser-known players to perform poorly. They rarely use parlays. They make big deposits, and seldom withdraw winnings. “By the time a customer places his first bet, [sportsbooks] are 80-90% certain they know the lifetime value of the account,” says Ed Birkin of H2, a gambling consultancy.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on What are junk theorems? in ~science

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: Also see Junk theorems in Lean.

    From the article:

    But this looks a bit like rubbish, doesn’t it? That’s why such theorems are sometimes called junk theorems: they do not prove anything sensible that we would expect to be true of natural numbers. On the face of it, it surely looks wrong to calculate the intersection of two natural numbers.

    Also see Junk theorems in Lean.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on exe.dev, a service for creating Linux virtual machines and vibe-coding in them in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This is an alpha release that got some attention before they were ready, so it’s like judging a game before it’s done. The sensible thing to do would be to ignore it for now and come back in three...

    This is an alpha release that got some attention before they were ready, so it’s like judging a game before it’s done. The sensible thing to do would be to ignore it for now and come back in three months to see what they have.

    What are some good alternatives for cheap VM’s with similar specs?

  8. Comment on Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space in ~space

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I imagine they’re talking up training and not inference because the networking requirements are lower. They still need to upload the training data, though. Perhaps some of it would be preinstalled...

    I imagine they’re talking up training and not inference because the networking requirements are lower. They still need to upload the training data, though. Perhaps some of it would be preinstalled before launch?

    2 votes

  9. Comment on Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space in ~space

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: … … … This is just a tech demo (or a stunt if you’re uncharitable) and I’m skeptical that it will compete with regular data centers on costs any time soon. But they do seem...

    From the article:

    Last month, the Washington-based company launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit, sending a chip into outer space that’s 100 times more powerful than any GPU compute that has been in space before. Starcloud was able to train and run NanoGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, on the H100 chip in orbit using the complete works of Shakespeare.

    …

    The company’s Starcloud-1 satellite is also now running and querying responses from Gemma, an open large language model from Google based on the company’s Gemini models, in orbit, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been run on a high-powered Nvidia GPU in outer space, CNBC has learned.

    …

    Starcloud — a member of the Nvidia Inception program and graduate from Y Combinator and the Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator — plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with solar and cooling panels that measure roughly 4 kilometers in both width and height. A compute cluster of that gigawatt size would produce more power than the largest power plant in the U.S. and would be substantially smaller and cheaper than a terrestrial solar farm of the same capacity, according to Starcloud’s white paper.

    …

    Along with Starcloud and Nvidia’s efforts, several companies have announced space-based data center missions. On Nov. 4, Google unveiled a “moonshot” initiative titled Project Suncatcher, which aims to put solar-powered satellites into space with Google’s tensor processing units. Privately owned Lonestar Data Holdings is working to put the first-ever commercial lunar data center on the moon’s surface. Aetherflux, founded by former Robinhood co-founder and chief executive Baiju Bhatt, on Tuesday announced a target to deploy an orbital data center satellite in the first quarter of 2027.

    This is just a tech demo (or a stunt if you’re uncharitable) and I’m skeptical that it will compete with regular data centers on costs any time soon. But they do seem rather committed to the bit.

    14 votes

  11. Comment on Backing up Spotify in ~music

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    There are probably some people like that, but how many? If we rephrase this as a neutral question, perhaps something about the spending habits of people who torrent music, how could we even begin...

    There are probably some people like that, but how many? If we rephrase this as a neutral question, perhaps something about the spending habits of people who torrent music, how could we even begin to answer it?

    Maybe there are studies out there.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on Backing up Spotify in ~music

    skybrian
    Link
    It's kinda weird how people are not nearly as angry about this sort of thing as they are about, say, AI companies. Spotify doesn't pay much in royalties, but Anna's Archive pays nothing. Isn't...

    It's kinda weird how people are not nearly as angry about this sort of thing as they are about, say, AI companies. Spotify doesn't pay much in royalties, but Anna's Archive pays nothing. Isn't that worse?

    2 votes

  13. Comment on A history of PG&E and how we got here in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    This Reddit post is a summary of California Burning (2022) by Katherine Blunt. It's a history of Pactific Gas & Electric, describing what challenges it faces and why it went bankrupt twice.

    This Reddit post is a summary of California Burning (2022) by Katherine Blunt.

    It's a history of Pactific Gas & Electric, describing what challenges it faces and why it went bankrupt twice.

    7 votes

  15. Comment on I sell onions on the Internet (2019) in ~food

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Yeah, that jumped out at me too. Maybe he was more prepared to start a new business than he lets on? But if nothing else, he could probably have sold it and gotten most of his money back.

    Yeah, that jumped out at me too. Maybe he was more prepared to start a new business than he lets on?

    But if nothing else, he could probably have sold it and gotten most of his money back.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on exe.dev, a service for creating Linux virtual machines and vibe-coding in them in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm not sure it is any better, but here's what I figured out: They're still in alpha and not charging money yet, but on their pricing page, they say they will let you have up to 25 VM's for...

    I'm not sure it is any better, but here's what I figured out:

    They're still in alpha and not charging money yet, but on their pricing page, they say they will let you have up to 25 VM's for $20/month, that all share the same quota on RAM and disk.

    Looks like Digital Ocean droplets start at $4 / month, which is more than I'd want to pay for a barely used app that I nontheless still want to leave running. That seems appealing to me since I've been dabbling with free tiers for various services (like Deno Deploy), but it doesn't give me a Linux VM.

    So I guess it's for developers who want a lot of tiny VM's.

    Other than that, they hope to offer a better developer experience. For example, when you create a personal website, authentication is already set up so only you can access it.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on I sell onions on the Internet (2019) in ~food

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: I checked Twitter and his blog and he's still doing it. He has a few other domain names.

    From the article:

    Back in 2014, the domain name VidaliaOnions.com expired, and went up for auction. For some reason the original owner abandoned it, and being a Georgia native, I recognized it ’cause I was familiar with the industry. I’ve been buying expired or abandoned domain names for a while, and enjoy developing them into niche businesses. This one was different though – I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks & giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.

    5 minutes later, I was the proud owner of VidaliaOnions.com. I had no idea what to do with it. Ready, fire, aim.

    I checked Twitter and his blog and he's still doing it. He has a few other domain names.

    13 votes

  19. Comment on When crisis hits, emergency cash could arrive in days, not months in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ...

    From the article:

    We’ve responded to one-off crises since 2017, building tools to send emergency cash that have improved all our programs. That track record – combined with growing mobile phone coverage and new tech capabilities – convinced us there’s a big opportunity to improve crisis responses for people in need.

    So this year, we went for it, starting on a moonshot bet that could radically improve the systems meant to support people in crises.

    ...

    Families have used GiveDirectly’s emergency cash to buy food, relocate to safety, repair homes, & restock shops – all before any other aid has even reached them. The UN’s own humanitarian leaders have said there’s no reason more humanitarian shouldn’t look like this, asking donors to fund cash “‘not incrementally, but ambitiously.”

    Our moonshot: build a five-day global emergency cash system

    ...

    Our plan: testing, scaling, and influencing over 5 years

    We’re not going to flip a switch overnight; we’re building this system in stages.

    4 votes