skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on How drones created a kill zone in the Ukraine war in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Henadii and Mykhailo spent more than six months in this so-called kill zone, holed up in a half-destroyed house. They could hear drones buzzing overhead nonstop, like traffic on a busy highway. To avoid detection, they relieved themselves in bags rather than step outside; slept pressed together in winter rather than light a fire; and dragged the bodies of Russian soldiers they had killed into their house, so drones overhead would not detect signs of fighting.

    [...]

    When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, the war looked markedly different. The battlefield had clear boundaries, similar to what generations of soldiers had known in wars past. The Russian and Ukrainian Armies massed troops and fought from trenches separated by a no-man’s land. Combat was confined to a narrow area, with troops resting safely a few miles behind the front.

    Then came the drones, with their constant surveillance, pinpoint strike precision and a reach that keeps expanding with technological improvements. As a result, the front has blurred into a miles-wide wasteland where neither side holds firm control, and where towns and villages that once stood safely behind the lines now bristle with danger.

    [...]

    Soldiers used to march to the front across open fields.

    Now, they crawl at night under thermal blankets to reduce their heat signatures.

    [...]

    The kill zone has also transformed life at the front. Missions that once lasted a few days stretch into months because rotating troops under a drone-filled sky is too dangerous.

    Henadii, 52, and Mykhailo, 51, described those months as hell. With vehicles unable to reach the front, food and water were dropped by drones. The drops sometimes failed, leaving them hungry and thirsty. Each lost 40 pounds. No medic could treat Mykhailo’s injured heel; his unit could only fly in medicine. For fellow soldiers badly wounded and in need of evacuation, the only option was often a robotic ground vehicle sent to carry them out.

    As technology advances, experts say, the kill zone will grow only wider and deadlier. Drones flying farther will push the fighting into cities once considered safe. Artificial intelligence will sharpen targeting systems, shortening the time between detection and strike. The biggest cost, commanders say, will be borne by the soldiers on the ground, whose presence in the kill zone remains as crucial as ever to capture and hold land.

    [...]

    The mission of the commander, whose call sign is Stepanych, is to create a lethal cordon, impassable for Russian troops in an area near Henadii’s and Mykhailo’s position in Primorske. He has deployed attack drone crews roughly every two miles along the 10-mile stretch of front that is under his command. Together, they launch about 100 drones a day, keeping several in the air at any given time so they can be redirected to new targets within minutes.

    The Russian Army, Stepanych said, “does the same thing.” Russian battlefield reports reviewed by The New York Times show that, on a single day in May, Russia had 199 reconnaissance drones ready to be launched near Primorske, with at least 62 Russian crews operating short-range attack drones in support.

    [...]

    To reach their position, they followed a route mapped in advance that kept them off paths more visible from the sky. Overhead, a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone tracked their progress, streaming live video to officers in the rear who guided them by radio. Intercepted Russian drone feeds helped the officers warn them when enemy drones approached.

    [...]

    Soldiers no longer cluster in trenches — an easy target for drones. Instead, they spread out in small groups, hiding in underground shelters. A position is often held by only two soldiers, as shown in the Russian battlefield reports reviewed by The Times, which detail Russian troop deployments near Kamianske, a village south of Primorske.

    The front has become so fuzzy that opposing troops sometimes shelter in the same building.

    [...]

    From their hideout, Henadii and Mykhailo repeatedly watched Russian troops advancing in small assault groups of only a few soldiers to minimize detection. Not long ago, they would have opened fire. But in the kill zone, using your rifle can be a deadly mistake, revealing your position to drones overhead.

    So they operated as reconnaissance troops, watching for Russian soldiers and radioing their movements. Drones would do the killing.

    “Neither side wants their infantry doing too much of the fighting,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who studies the war in Ukraine. “They want drones to do the fighting.”

    [...]

    The rise of drones has fueled a debate in Ukraine over whether they could one day replace infantry altogether.

    Dmytro Putiata, a former Ukrainian drone operator, said drones were a formidable force multiplier but would never fully replace infantry. Drones can destroy positions, he said, but cannot seize them. Only soldiers can dislodge troops from entrenched dugouts. As for land drones armed with machine guns that have joined some assaults, he asked: “What happens when the battery dies?”

    [...]

    An infantry company commander in Henadii’s and Mykhailo’s brigade said his unit had stopped delivering food to frontline positions by vehicle in November, switching entirely to drones.

    Russia’s Army also appears to have made the shift. On a single day in mid-May, drones made 678 flights across a large section of the southern front, delivering roughly 4,500 pounds of cargo — mostly food, water and ammunition — according to the battlefield reports obtained by The Times.

    [...]

    The journey home would be the most dangerous part of their deployment. The kill zone had expanded so much in six months that a mile-long walk in had transformed into a six-mile trek out. It would take them days.

    To improve their chances, Maksym, their commander, had planned the route meticulously. He had identified roads poorly visible from the sky and marked houses every 150 yards where they could take cover. Supply packages were dropped in advance at each overnight stop.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on AirTM gains ground in Venezuela despite Nicolás Maduro’s blockade (2020) in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the 2020 article: [...] [...] [...] Followup: the payments did happen. AirTM came to my attention because GiveDirectly used AirTM to transfer money to Venezuelans after the June 24th...

    From the 2020 article:

    Despite efforts from the Nicolás Maduro regime to block its access, digital wallet provider AirTM continues to gain ground in Venezuela and is set to start processing payments worth millions of dollars from Interim President Juan Guaidó’s team to ill-paid healthcare workers, company founder and Chief Executive Officer Ruben Galindo said.

    Speaking in an interview with el Nuevo Herald, Galindo said that all of the 60,000 doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers in Venezuela have already opened up accounts to start receiving payments through the online platform even though the regime has ordered local Internet providers to impede its access inside the country.

    [...]

    “The ‘health care heroes’ and all of our users have taken steps to evade the censorship,” Galindo said. “Many of them have downloaded access to VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to evade the restrictions imposed by the dictatorship through the Venezuelan Internet providers.”

    [...]

    Guaidó promised Venezuela’s health workers, some of whom are paid less than $5 a month, a $100 monthly bonus to help compensate for the harsh conditions they face as they battle the coronavirus pandemic.

    The payments, which could initially add up to about $18 million, would come out of the funds seized abroad from the regime.

    Venezuela is by far AirTM’s largest market, representing about half of the company’s operations, as thousands of its citizens living abroad use the company’s services to send remittances to their loved ones suffering under the collapsing economy, Galindo said.

    The Mexico City-based digital wallet provider is also used by Venezuelan freelance workers inside the country to collect wages from their foreign employers, bypassing the restrictions to foreign exchange transactions imposed by the regime.

    [...]

    The payments to Venezuelan healthcare workers could provide an additional $5 million per month, according to press reports.

    Followup: the payments did happen.

    The Health Heroes Aid program met its goals and concluded in January 2021.

    • 59,740 verified doctors and nurses paid
      $17,799,800 digital dollars delivered
      177,995 individual payments to Venezuelan nationals

    AirTM came to my attention because GiveDirectly used AirTM to transfer money to Venezuelans after the June 24th earthquakes:

    How we sent cash after Venezuela’s twin earthquakes using a payment route others thought was impossible

    GiveDirectly had never worked in Venezuela. We had no office, local team, or established payment route—and needed to build a response from scratch in a country where aid organizations face significant barriers.

    Authorities have historically restricted cash assistance and closely scrutinized programs funded from abroad. A 2024 law added further restrictions on nonprofit organizations. Sanctions also complicated moving money into the country, limiting the banks and payment providers we could work with.

    ...

    We found a way to deliver cash through Pago Móvil—the local mobile payment system other responders thought was off-limits. Recipients received local currency directly in their existing accounts, without needing a new app or crypto wallet.

    ...

    This was GiveDirectly’s first use of digital currencies for humanitarian cash transfers.

    ...

    Pago Móvil offered a familiar way for recipients to receive money. The challenge was connecting to it from outside Venezuela while meeting sanctions requirements and finding a reliable supply of local currency. Typically, it would require access to a local bank, which is why many thought it wasn’t possible. So instead, we built a route through two providers: Decaf, a platform for sending stablecoin payments, and AirTM, a U.S.-registered money services business whose marketplace connects payments to local currency.

    It seems like AirTM was the key to the whole thing? AirTM has "cashiers" who accept cryptocurrency (USDC, tied to the US dollar) and send local payments. Here is AirTM's page on becoming a cashier. Most ordinary people don't touch cryptocurrency, but it's playing a role in these payment networks.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That sounds bad for Yardi, but I don't see what that has to do with Anthropic, which actually is widely used. (I've never heard of Yardi, but apparently they are "a complete AI platform for real...

    That sounds bad for Yardi, but I don't see what that has to do with Anthropic, which actually is widely used.

    (I've never heard of Yardi, but apparently they are "a complete AI platform for real estate.")

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Well, trend lines aren't a surefire way to predict the future anyway. There's a learning curve that could go either way: People figure out how to stop wasting money on AI People figure out new...

    Well, trend lines aren't a surefire way to predict the future anyway. There's a learning curve that could go either way:

    • People figure out how to stop wasting money on AI
    • People figure out new ways to use AI

    Probably both at once, and it's hard to say which will win out. But I think we're only at the beginning of figuring out how to use AI. It's going to take years. Some uses might not be discovered until after AI improves some more.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I sounds like you think that Anthropic's customers are other AI companies, or something. I'm wondering what evidence there is for that? I did find this Ramp article which suggests that AI spend...

    I sounds like you think that Anthropic's customers are other AI companies, or something. I'm wondering what evidence there is for that?

    I did find this Ramp article which suggests that AI spend per employee and overall token spend may have peaked.

    They also write:

    80% of spend on OpenAI and Anthropic is driven by 1% of firms.

    They do have a much wider customer base (Anthropic has ~40% of all firms in Ramp's data) but the whales are apparently spending a lot more.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Well, sure, Oracle does look shaky. But I’m guessing most if not all of the big tech firms were founded during your lifetime. If you remember the the dot-com era, you should remember that Amazon...

    Well, sure, Oracle does look shaky. But I’m guessing most if not all of the big tech firms were founded during your lifetime. If you remember the the dot-com era, you should remember that Amazon was founded then. Do you think you would recognize another one if you saw it?

    With the revenue numbers they have and alleged profitability, Anthropic’s trajectory looks quite a bit like the rise of another big tech firm to me, for better or worse.

    10 votes

  9. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I suspect this is going to age as poorly as the idea that "run-rate revenue" is suspicious.

    I suspect this is going to age as poorly as the idea that "run-rate revenue" is suspicious.

    9 votes

  10. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Alternatively, subscription pricing might be sold at close to cost and the "API" rate might have massive profit margins? We'd need to know more about their actual costs to know which scenario is true.

    Alternatively, subscription pricing might be sold at close to cost and the "API" rate might have massive profit margins? We'd need to know more about their actual costs to know which scenario is true.

    9 votes

  11. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    Also, Simon Willison comments on a quote from the Financial Times:

    Also, Simon Willison comments on a quote from the Financial Times:

    Anthropic told investors on Wednesday distillation accounted for 5 per cent to 7 per cent of revenue and that they had cut it back “materially” in the third quarter of the year, said four people with direct knowledge of the matter.

    Napkin maths says that if distillation was 5% of their Q2 revenue (before they cut it back in Q3) then unnamed "other labs" spent over half a billion dollars distilling Anthropic's models in that quarter!

    9 votes

  12. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    The S-1 isn't out yet so this isn't the formal "road show" for the IPO. Apparently meeting with investors before filing is called "testing the waters." But it seems unlikely that the numbers...

    The S-1 isn't out yet so this isn't the formal "road show" for the IPO. Apparently meeting with investors before filing is called "testing the waters." But it seems unlikely that the numbers they're giving to investors would be much different from the numbers that show up in the S-1.

    I updated my chart to have a new tab for quarterly revenue. Also, there's a tab comparing the actual quarterly numbers to estimates based on previously leaked run rates. Looks pretty close! (The chart is AI-generated.)

    So, despite some skepticism from cynics, the leaked run rates don't seem to have been misleading after all? Everything's consistent.

    8 votes

  13. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Anthropic executives told a roomful of investors on Wednesday that the company’s revenue for the third quarter jumped about 45 percent from the prior quarter to $16.8 billion, as it pursues what may become the largest-ever initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the company’s presentation said.

    [...]

    In the meeting with potential investors at its headquarters, Anthropic sought to generate enthusiasm for the upcoming deal. Revenue was up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter. The company also said it was profitable after making certain adjustments, which is not a bottom-line number. And it said its gross margin, or revenue minus direct costs associated with generating that revenue, was 85 percent after making certain adjustments.

    [...]

    Anthropic, which filed to go public in June, has not yet made its prospectus — which lays out its financial performance — public. Wednesday was the first official opportunity for potential I.P.O. investors to get a glimpse into the numbers, which may give insight into the health of the broader A.I. industry and will help determine the valuation Anthropic will get in its listing.

    5 votes

  15. Comment on Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe doing a round-trip test might help align them? That is, translate the Lean proof back into English (and equations) and then convert that back to Lean. If you end up with the same Lean proof,...

    Maybe doing a round-trip test might help align them? That is, translate the Lean proof back into English (and equations) and then convert that back to Lean. If you end up with the same Lean proof, they are probably closer to using the same lemmas to describe the same proof?

    That's not a guarantee, though, given a sufficiently smart translator.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Following reported strikes on Yandex data centers, claims circulated on the Internet that Russian bot farms and influence operations had been knocked offline. HTTP traffic charts showed steep drops, fueling speculation that the infrastructure damage had stopped these malicious actors. However, aggregate traffic metrics can easily mislead. There are two autonomous system numbers (ASNs) associated with Yandex: AS13238 is used by Yandex’s search engine, while AS200350 runs its cloud services.

    [...]

    The decline on Yandex Search ASN was almost entirely search crawling. Sampled requests showed that 78.1% belonged to verified YandexBot, 11.5% to YandexRenderResourcesBot, and 1.9% to YandexImages.

    [...]

    Yandex.Cloud displayed a completely different profile. Following the reported strikes, bot traffic from Yandex.Cloud fell about 40%. Several attack-like categories showed especially sharp declines. For example, WordPress plugin probing fell 90% and scanner-identified requests fell 93%. Interestingly (and tellingly), Cloudflare customer blocks on Yandex.Cloud traffic also fell 70% during the event period, suggesting that proportionately less malicious traffic was even hitting the Cloudflare WAF from this ASN.

    [...]

    The majority of traffic from the Yandex.Cloud ASN fell into two industry buckets: computer software and gambling. The computer software bucket was predictable for an ASN meant to host third-party applications and software integrations. In fact, we even saw that api.cloudflare.com is a top hostname for Yandex.Cloud request traffic. An overall majority of that traffic succeeded (requests returned 200s) both before and during the event, pointing to legitimate usage.

    The gambling sector offers the clearest evidence that malicious automation relocated rather than disappeared. Nearly all of Yandex.Cloud’s bot requests were targeted at one gambling customer account, with traffic shifting among its hostnames. Immediately following the October 8 disruption, bot requests from Yandex.Cloud to this account dropped to zero. Simultaneously, identical requests began appearing from other Russian hosting ASNs, including Radist and Selectel. The incoming traffic maintained an identical fingerprint across providers:

    [...]

    Overall, Russian bot traffic targeting gambling accounts remained essentially flat over the week, moving from 167.7 million to 170.1 million requests (+1.4%). The automation never stopped running; the operators simply migrated their workloads to alternate cloud providers once Yandex.Cloud became unavailable.

    [...]

    Finally, when we analyzed social media traffic, we found no unexpected changes in traffic either from Russian-origin IPs (0.6% decrease in total traffic over the event period) or globally (1.2% increase in total traffic over the event period). We repeated the analysis on bot traffic hitting the “post”, “reply”, and “like” endpoints for a specific social media platform and similarly did not find an unexpected shift before or during the event period from either Russian-origin IPs (5.7% decrease in total traffic over the event period) or globally (1.1% increase in total traffic over the event period). Based on our assessment, the data does not appear to support the claims that the strikes crippled social media manipulation, though without further analysis with data outside of Cloudflare, we cannot conclusively say there is no connection.

    [...]

    Our analysis here is a reminder that client ASN traffic volume is an unreliable proxy for interpreting automated bot behavior. Defending against automated threats requires inspecting request behavior, such as identifying shared JA4 fingerprints, monitoring anomalous request rates, and applying WAF rules to sensitive endpoints, regardless of which network the request originates from. Physical infrastructure is static, but malicious automation is built to move.

    21 votes

  18. Comment on Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    From the paper: When they write about "mistranslations," they seem to be showing that the intermediate lemmas don't match? This wouldn't invalidate either proof, necessarily. They could have...

    From the paper:

    We do not make claims about the correctness of OpenAI’s NL proof, we only make statements
    about mistranslations into Lean.

    When they write about "mistranslations," they seem to be showing that the intermediate lemmas don't match? This wouldn't invalidate either proof, necessarily. They could have reached the same destination by different routes. Both could have correct lemmas, but different.

    Since they take different routes, the Lean proof being correct doesn't guarantee that the NL proof is correct. For example, a "mistranslation" might be a correction! Perhaps the translator noticed a mistake and fixed it by changing the proof?

    Since it's very likely that the Lean proof is correct (it's been checked automatically), that means that if the NL proof is wrong, its mistakes somehow didn't matter. This reminds me of a joke:

    that the mathematical literature as a whole is so reliable comes down to the fact that, over time, we have made an even number of sign errors

    2 votes

  19. Comment on Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm not a mathematician, but I think they do check that the Lean proof is proving the correct problem, and the rest gets verified automatically. This is a lot easier than reviewing the entire...

    I'm not a mathematician, but I think they do check that the Lean proof is proving the correct problem, and the rest gets verified automatically. This is a lot easier than reviewing the entire proof. So that shows that it's true.

    For the natural language proof, it's a bit odd that mathematicians can be somewhat casual about it, but my impression is that it's sort of like how you wouldn't consider a spelling error to invalidate someone's entire argument, provided that you otherwise understand the argument. It's assumed that minor mistakes can be corrected by the reader and are unlikely to make the proof invalid. Also, maybe it's okay if some statements in the proof are proven in a slightly different way? The goal is to understand the journey well enough to get to the same place, rather than to repeat the journey exactly.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on MIT class project turns into an US Food and Drug Administration-cleared treatment for tremors in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The three founders of Encora who are still with the company are Carballo, Allison Davanzo ’18, and Kyle Pina ’18. They were each seniors in 2017 when they enrolled in 2.009, MIT’s popular product-design class.

    The semester began with a brainstorming session in which groups of about 17 students were asked to come up with dozens of potential product ideas. Carballo proposed a wearable device that used mechanical vibration to send signals to the brain to reduce tremors. The initial idea was to help patients with Parkinson’s disease.

    “It was one of hundreds of throwaway ideas,” Carballo recalls. “The initial concept was inspired by classes I had taken in robotics around neural control of movement. I had a preliminary understanding of how an electromechanical device might interact with the body’s control systems and feedback loops that control movement to relieve pathological control of movement.”

    The team eventually whittled their long list of ideas down to a few. Carballo’s idea was finally selected by a vote of 16-1 — with Carballo the only dissenting vote.

    “I tried to explain to the team that this was so far-fetched that there was no way, in one semester, we would be able to make anything,” Carballo recalls. “Thankfully, I got outvoted.”

    [...]

    One current approach to target those signals is surgery that involves drilling holes in the skull to insert electrodes that drive new electrical patterns in the brain. Encora’s watch-like product targets the same brain regions with mechanical vibrations at the wrist.

    “We’re applying mechanical stimulus, basically vibration, to stretch receptors in the wrist, which tell your body where it is in space,” Carballo explains. “The stimulation causes the receptors to activate and send a patterned signal to peripheral nerves of the wrist, that then carry the signal to the peripheral nervous system and into the central nervous system, to the same regions of the brain targeted by surgery.”

    In 2024, Encora ran a randomized control trial with 47 patients living with essential tremor. Last year, the team ran a 59-person trial where patients used the devices at home. In both trials, more than 70 percent of patients experienced meaningful improvement.

    The results were promising enough to gain what’s known as 510(k) clearance from the FDA for use as a medical device, in February of this year.

    [...]

    Today, Encora is focused on building a national sales force and working to secure coverage from insurers. As the company ramps up production, the product will finally become available for patients who qualify.

    11 votes