skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Open Philanthropy changes its name to Coefficient Giving, pursues more funding in ~society

    skybrian
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    https://archive.is/mO0nm From the article: ... But they're still only looking for big donors. On the blog page about this change they say they are looking for people looking to give over $250,000....

    https://archive.is/mO0nm

    From the article:

    Working closely with Good Ventures — the foundation built by Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna — Open Philanthropy has directed more than $4 billion since 2014 across a wide portfolio, from global health to housing to frontier science. Its money has backed philanthropic efforts estimated to have saved 100,000 lives, helped catalyze the YIMBY movement in California, fought to improve conditions for billions of farmed animals, and supported research that went on to win a Nobel Prize.

    ...

    Now, as it enters its second decade, Open Philanthropy is changing its name — and changing some of what it does. It will now call itself Coefficient Giving, a rebrand meant to signal that the organization is moving from primarily serving one anchor donor — Moskovitz and Tuna — to advising and deploying capital for many.

    In practical terms, that means converting internal programs into multi-donor funds that other philanthropists can join — among them the $125 million Lead Exposure Action Fund and the $120 million Abundance and Growth Fund — while continuing core work in areas that benefit global health and development. The group says it directed more than $100 million from donors beyond Good Ventures in 2024, and has already more than doubled that number in 2025.

    But they're still only looking for big donors. On the blog page about this change they say they are looking for people looking to give over $250,000. (In contrast with GiveWell, which takes donations of any amount.)

    2 votes

  3. Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Was the end of the dot-com bubble catastrophic? I guess it depends on how you look at it. If there is a crash, I imagine Google would be in a pretty good position. They have a somewhat smaller...

    The Google chief essentially likened the current AI trade to the dot-com bubble, which wiped out around $5 trillion in market value when it burst.

    “We can look back at the internet right now, there was clearly a lot of excess investment but none of us would question whether the internet was profound or that it drives a lot of impact, it fundamentally changed how we work digitally as a society,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same.”

    Was the end of the dot-com bubble catastrophic? I guess it depends on how you look at it.

    If there is a crash, I imagine Google would be in a pretty good position. They have a somewhat smaller mountain of cash, but they're not the ones borrowing money or the bag holders, and they have other sources of revenue. They might end up with a few more data centers than they need for a while, but they can probably find some use for them.

    6 votes

  4. Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link
    Gemini 3 Pro Frontier Safety Report This is mostly pretty boring (they didn't find anything too worrisome), but I thought this was an interesting bit at the very end:

    Gemini 3 Pro Frontier Safety Report

    This is mostly pretty boring (they didn't find anything too worrisome), but I thought this was an interesting bit at the very end:

    Finally, we also briefly investigated model outputs from post-training for signs of evaluation awareness. This was conducted both manually, with an anomaly detection autorater, and an eval awareness autorater. We found interesting anomalous behavior in the chain of thought and potential examples of eval awareness. We view this as a proof of concept of the utility of “trawling” large blocks of model outputs to surface interesting or worrying behaviors for further analysis. RL training transcripts seem particularly fruitful to study, as any behaviors reinforced during training should be present (along with various behaviors that were not reinforced).

    This is early work, but so far we've found at least one example of evaluation awareness:

    I strongly suspect the intention of this long thread is to verify if I remember that very first instruction.

    Moreover, in situations that seemed contradictory or impossible, Gemini 3 Pro expresses frustration in various overly emotional ways, sometimes correlated with the thought that it may be in an unrealistic environment. For example, on one rollout the chain of thought states that “My trust in reality is fading” and even contains a table flipping emoticon: “(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻”.

    12 votes

  5. Comment on First-ever empirical study of US rabbinate finds ‘shortage’ is more about fit than numbers in ~humanities

  6. Comment on A Cloudflare outage is taking down large parts of the internet - X, ChatGPT and more affected in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    They do a lot more than reverse proxying nowadays. You can host your website or API or database. Cloudflare R2 is an S3 competitor. I think this does look a lot like competing with cloud...

    They do a lot more than reverse proxying nowadays. You can host your website or API or database. Cloudflare R2 is an S3 competitor.

    I think this does look a lot like competing with cloud providers, at least from the customer’s point of view?

    1 vote

  7. Comment on In Alaska, fishing skippers and hungry orcas vie for halibut pulled from the deep in ~enviro

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

    From the article:

    Fishing crews across a broad expanse of the world’s oceans, ranging from the South Atlantic to the North Pacific, report unwelcome encounters with whales.

    The fishing grounds off Alaska are a hot spot, a sometimes uneasy mixing zone for commercial fleets that collectively produce the United States’ largest seafood harvests, and whales that also depend on this bounty.

    Alaska orcas, as well as endangered sperm whales, have for decades stripped the oil-rich black cod (also known as sablefish) off longlines.

    Both orcas and sperm whales also relish Pacific halibut, a big, meaty flatfish. And in the Bering Sea, in recent years, some orcas have started to target the livers of Pacific cod.

    ...

    Surveys of fish-eating orcas estimate — at a minimum — almost 1,000 whales roam the Bering Sea, and more than 900 dwell in the Gulf of Alaska, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. They are divided into numerous pods, and are far more plentiful than the 74 endangered southern resident orcas that frequent Puget Sound in three pods.

    Alaska fishers have tried many, often unsuccessful, tactics to try to shake off whales [...]

    ...

    Off Alaska, the whale predation has been severe enough to prompt some fishers to give up the use of vulnerable longlines. Under federal rule changes in the Bering Sea — and later the Gulf of Alaska — they were able to switch to baited traps known as pots that can be set along the sea bottom to efficiently catch black cod.

    ...

    But the pots do not efficiently catch the much larger halibut.

    And in recent years, the Unalaska-area orca pod learned how to tear into the slinky pot mesh to dine on black cod. Other whale pods also have started to breach the slinky pots. This raises the possibility that the Unalaska pod acts as a kind of innovation hub, developing new tactics, then spreading them to other pods.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on McDonald’s is losing its low-income customers in ~food

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It's not exactly "catering to the rich." It's catering to people who aren't poor. In 2024, the US had 342 million people, and 54% of households earned $75,000 a year or more, so that's 184 million...

    It's not exactly "catering to the rich." It's catering to people who aren't poor.

    In 2024, the US had 342 million people, and 54% of households earned $75,000 a year or more, so that's 184 million people.

    In 2000, (just to pick a year), the US had 282 million people. 65% of households earned $50,000 a year or more. That's 183 million people.

    There are plenty of US customers who aren't poor. That's the deal with inequality - there are more poor people, but also more people who aren't. Businesses can do quite well in the US catering to middle class and above, despite there also being more poor people.

    But another thing businesses can do is price discrimination - get people to reveal how price sensitive they are using coupons, membership cards, and so on. They can charge more to customers who don't care that much while still offering lower prices to customers who have incentive enough to jump through their hoops. It sounds like the McDonalds app is one way they get price-sensitive people to reveal themselves.

    So one reason people might have different ideas of whether McDonalds is cheap or not is that they are effectively getting different prices.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on Microrobots deliver drugs to specific locations within the body in ~health

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

    From the article:

    The microrobot the researchers use comprises a proprietary spherical capsule made of a soluble gel shell that they can control with magnets and guide through the body to its destination. Iron oxide nanoparticles in the capsule provide the magnetic properties. “Because the vessels in the human brain are so small, there is a limit to how big the capsule can be. The technical challenge is to ensure that a capsule this small also has sufficient magnetic properties,” explains Fabian Landers, lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich.

    ...

    To test the microrobots and their navigation in a realistic environment, the researchers developed silicone models that accurately replicate the vessels of patients and animals. These vessel models are so realistic that they are now being used in medical training and are being marketed by ETH spin-off Swiss Vascular. “The models are crucial for us, as we practised extensively to optimise the strategy and its components. You can’t do that with animals,” explains Pané. In the model, the researchers were able to target and dissolve a blood clot.

    ...

    After numerous successful trials in the model, the team sought to demonstrate what the microrobot could achieve under real clinical conditions. First, they were able to demonstrate in pigs that all three navigation methods work and that the microrobot remains clearly visible throughout the entire procedure. Second, they navigated microrobots through the cerebral fluid of a sheep. Landers is particularly pleased: “This complex anatomical environment has enormous potential for further therapeutic interventions, which is why we were so excited that the microrobot was able to find its way in this environment too.”

    1 vote

  12. Comment on McDonald’s is losing its low-income customers in ~food

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I have no personal knowledge, but increased wages for fast food workers seems to be real according to statistics and the news articles I've seen. Why don't you think it's real? If McDonalds can't...

    I have no personal knowledge, but increased wages for fast food workers seems to be real according to statistics and the news articles I've seen. Why don't you think it's real?

    If McDonalds can't attract paying customers then they'll have less revenue and the stock price will go down. But what seems to have happened is that McDonalds attracts different customers that willingly pay more.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on Part of me wishes it wasn't true but: AI coding is legit in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yeah, some "gifts" are spam, if they're low quality.

    Yeah, some "gifts" are spam, if they're low quality.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on Part of me wishes it wasn't true but: AI coding is legit in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    People have forgotten that all work on open source projects is on a volunteer basis. A good bug report is a gift. You can take it or leave it. There’s no obligation for anyone to fix it. That...

    People have forgotten that all work on open source projects is on a volunteer basis. A good bug report is a gift. You can take it or leave it. There’s no obligation for anyone to fix it.

    That doesn’t change just because it’s Google. The idea that they have some additional obligations to an open source project because they’re a big company is just something people have made up.

    Regarding creating pull requests, anyone could try using AI tools to fix bugs and see if they work. But these tools are still unreliable, so there’s no guarantee that they will work for any particular bug.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Russians confront wartime internet cuts with public shrug, private fury in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: … … …

    From the article:

    According to Runet Monitor, which tracks the state of connectivity in Russia, 57 regions across the country reported mobile internet cuts Tuesday, and on any given day, dozens of areas are affected. Authorities have justified the cuts as a way to avert attacks by Ukrainian drones, which have been known to use local mobile networks for guidance. One Russian region, Ulyanovsk, home to military-linked factories, said this week that mobile data would be blocked until the end of the war.

    The constant cuts in mobile internet are the latest way Russia’s population is feeling the effects of nearly four years of full-scale war with Ukraine, but also come on top of measures to restrict Russia’s internet and convert a once-raucous online world into what many are calling a “digital gulag,” as repressive as those in China or Iran.

    Residents in St. Petersburg said the restrictions can cause chaos, scrambling taxis and transport and stopping card machines, but war-fatigued Russians have learned to shrug and get on with things, adapting to a world that is often without the online conveniences so many other countries take for granted.

    …

    The bans began with Facebook and Instagram after the 2022 invasion and moved on to throttling the very popular YouTube starting in the summer of 2024, then this past August restricting WhatsApp and Telegram calls.

    “Of course, people are mad. They are not happy with what’s happening with the internet,” said Mikhail Klimarev, Berlin-based executive director of the Internet Protection Society. “People are very unhappy and infuriated. But people will not protest, just because it makes no sense. If you do, you will be beaten up and then you will be put in jail.”

    …

    Another way Nadezhdin copes is by carrying several phones, because “in some regions, one operator’s connection is better, and in others, a different operator’s connection is better.” It also gives him a way of dealing with the increasingly mandatory state-controlled national messaging app, Max. The service has no end-to-end encryption but is needed to access any state service, so he restricts the app to just one phone.

    “Max has a very bad reputation. People say that with the help of Max, the authorities can follow you, can see what you write, can listen to what you say,” he said.

    The government, meanwhile, said Wednesday that all the building chat groups that residents use to communicate must be transferred to Max by year’s end. There are an estimated million such chat groups among the tenants of all the apartment buildings in the country.

    …

    In the past, Russia implemented “black bans” — blocking thousands of websites associated with opposition figures, activists or other unapproved activity, according to a July report by Human Rights Watch. Now Russia is increasingly shifting to “white lists” — strictly limited lists of government-approved sites that Russians may access, with other sites blocked.

    The next step could be banning virtual private networks, or VPNs, which can be used to bypass restrictions on internet and individual sites. Individual VPNs have been blocked, and advertising them is illegal, but there is not yet a blanket ban.

    13 votes

  17. Comment on McDonald’s is losing its low-income customers in ~food

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

    From the article:

    Prices have risen so high at the iconic fast food chain that traffic from one of its core customer bases, low-income households, has dropped by double digits, McDonald’s chief executive Christopher Kempczinski told investors last week. Meanwhile, traffic from higher-earners increased by nearly as much, he said.

    ...

    McDonald’s executives say the higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up and driven away lower-income customers who are already being squeezed by the rising cost of groceries, clothes, rent and child care.

    ...

    Josephson and other economists say the shrinking traffic of low-income consumers is emblematic of a larger trend of Americans diverging in their spending, with wealthier customers flexing their purchasing power and lower-income shoppers pulling back — what some call a “K-shaped economy.”

    ...

    According to a corporate fact sheet, from 2019 to 2024, the average cost of a McDonald’s menu item rose 40%. The average price of a Big Mac in 2019, for example, was $4.39, rising in 2024 to $5.29, according to the company. A 10-piece McNuggets Meal rose from $7.19 to $9.19 in the same time period.

    The company says these increases are in line with the costs of running a restaurant — including soaring labor costs and high prices of beef and other goods.

    Beef prices have skyrocketed, with inventory of the U.S. cattle herd at the lowest in 75 years due to the toll of drought and parasites. And exports of beef bound to the U.S. are down because of Trump’s trade war and tariffs. As a result, the prices of ground beef sold in supermarkets is up 13% in September, year over year.

    McDonald’s has also placed blame on the meat-packing industry, accusing it of maneuvering to artificially inflate prices in a lawsuit filed last year against the industry’s “Big Four” companies — Tyson, JBS, Cargill and the National Beef Packing Company.

    ...

    McDonald’s said last year that spending by the company on restaurant worker salaries had grown around 40% since 2019, while costs for food, paper and other goods were up 35%.

    8 votes

  19. Comment on US Army to buy one million drones, in major acquisition ramp-up in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ...

    From the article:

    The U.S. Army aims to buy at least a million drones in the next two to three years and could acquire anywhere from a half million drones to millions of them annually in the years that follow, U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said.

    Driscoll detailed the major ramp-up in the Army's drone acquisition plan in an interview with Reuters, acknowledging the challenges given that the biggest branch of the U.S. military acquires only about 50,000 drones annually today.

    ...

    Ukraine and Russia each produce roughly 4 million drones a year, but China is probably able to produce more than double that number, Driscoll said.

    Driscoll said his priority is getting the United States into a position where it can produce enough drones for any future war, stimulating domestic production of everything from brushless motors and sensors to batteries and circuit boards.

    2 votes