skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Software developers are not okay in ~tech
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Comment on How Ukraine uses precision drone strikes to hobble Russian oil refineries in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
The military campaign has achieved such disruption in part by targeting critical refinery parts, notably the desalting and distillation units, that sanctions have made increasingly hard to repair, according to a Washington Post examination of satellite imagery and other visuals, as well as interviews with experts and Ukrainian military officials. The strikes on refineries have been aided by rapid advances in drone production and intelligence from allies that helps Ukraine plan and execute the attacks, the experts and officials said.
At least two-thirds of the 36 major Russian refineries tracked by market analysis firm S&P Global Energy were hit between April 1 and Aug. 31, some as many as five times, at a rate of one strike every three days, according to a Post analysis of a subset of Ukrainian strikes.
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Of 54 strikes analyzed by The Post and reviewed by the experts, more than half appear to have damaged the desalting and distillation units, the examination found. More than one-third of the 54 appear to have hit nearby secondary processing units, which further refine the distilled materials into more valuable products like gasoline, jet fuel and liquefied petroleum gas.
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The day after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the European Union banned the export of atmospheric-vacuum distillation and secondary processing equipment to Russia as part of a sweeping sanctions package. The United States followed days later and restricted export licenses for the same components, effectively banning their sale to Russia.
Those sanctions make it difficult for Moscow to obtain the parts necessary to repair units struck by Ukraine, said Alexander Kolyandr, the Europe director at the Eurasia Group and an expert on the Russian economy. “I don’t think that anything that’s been hit cannot be mended, the problem is the frequency of attacks is shorter than the time needed for repair,” he said.
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On Saturday, Trump lit into Zelensky for refusing to stop attacking Russian refineries. “He’d better damn well stop,” Trump told reporters. “It’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in an October public appearance that Ukraine had targeted Russian oil refineries in an attempt to damage the economy. “Did they achieve their goal? Partially, because, by our estimates, we lost about 1 percent of GDP,” Putin said.
He has pledged to improve the country’s air defenses, and his administration issued a decree allowing the state to take over privately owned critical infrastructure, including refineries, if owners can’t protect such properties or refuse to repair them. For the first time, the government has also begun to allow private companies to purchase and install their own air defenses.
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One person involved in the deep-strike drone campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to discuss sensitive security matters, said that since last year Ukrainian forces have doubled the number of drones and decoys in each wave. Decoys, which carry no explosives, help confuse Russian air defenses and force them to waste ammunition.
“The ratio of success of drones is based on the decoys,” the person said. “If you don’t do this you will just lose quite expensive systems.” The person declined to comment on whether Ukraine is specifically targeting desalting and distillation units but said Ukrainian forces were generally targeting hard-to-repair parts of refineries.
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Intelligence assistance from Western allies has helped Ukraine exploit gaps in Russia’s air defenses, according to experts and Tango, the drone commander. U.S. intelligence about the specific locations of Russian air defense systems and radars has been crucial in allowing planners to map routes that evade detection, according to a European security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss sensitive security issues. Such U.S. assistance has been previously reported.
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Ukraine is also able to mount attacks deep inside Russia by at times using high-altitude balloons to float drones before they deploy. This allows the drones to carry less fuel and more explosives, according to the European official and Deborah Fairlamb, founding partner of Green Flag Ventures, an American venture capital firm that invests in Ukrainian defense technology including drones. Artificial intelligence has helped improve Ukraine’s targeting, Fairlamb and Tango said.
In addition to targeting refineries, scores of other Ukrainian strikes this year have damaged fuel storage tanks and pumping and pipeline infrastructure across the country, making the transportation of fuel more difficult even as it becomes more limited, said Christina Harwood, a Russia researcher at the Institute for the Study of War.
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How Ukraine uses precision drone strikes to hobble Russian oil refineries
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Comment on Software developers are not okay in ~tech
skybrian LinkThis bit sticks out: Forever is a long time and I wouldn't care to predict where we are in two years. I don't think things will go back the way they were, but given that we're living in a time of...This bit sticks out:
This is what software development will be like, now and forever.
Forever is a long time and I wouldn't care to predict where we are in two years. I don't think things will go back the way they were, but given that we're living in a time of change and uncertainty, I think a better bet would be that software development will keep changing for a while as people figure out better ways to work.
That might even include new companies that don't work the same way as the old ones.
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Comment on Ukraine hits second major tech site, expanding range of targets inside Russia in ~society
skybrian Link ParentThere’s a dumb rumor on Bluesky based on misinterpreting a Cloudflare chart. Yandex is, among other things, a search engine, and their search index crawler is now offline. The chart shows a drop...There’s a dumb rumor on Bluesky based on misinterpreting a Cloudflare chart. Yandex is, among other things, a search engine, and their search index crawler is now offline. The chart shows a drop of bot requests from the Yandex IP address range without any detail about what kind of bots they are, but people are just assuming it’s affecting Twitter/X somehow.
So, I’m wondering if you’ve seen independent evidence that bots on X are affected? That would be interesting if it can be confirmed.
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Comment on Ukraine hits second major tech site, expanding range of targets inside Russia in ~society
skybrian LinkThird Yandex data center in Russia shut down following reported drone attack ...Third Yandex data center in Russia shut down following reported drone attack
Russian technology giant Yandex's data center in Vladimir Oblast has been completely shut down following a reported drone attack, Russian state news agency TASS said on Oct. 11, citing the company.
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Yandex Go users across Russia reported being unable to order taxis on Oct. 11, with similar disruptions reported in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, according to Russian independent media outlet Ostorozhno Novosti..
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Comment on Ukraine hits second major tech site, expanding range of targets inside Russia in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said Kyiv had used its FP-1 one-way attack drones to mount the strike against what it called Yandex's biggest data centre and said that several of its modules had been completely knocked out of action.
A day earlier, a Ukrainian attack shut down Yandex's data hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, where two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company's AI model are housed.
Yandex said it was facing a difficult challenge to maintain its services, used by millions of Russians daily for navigation, music, movies, food orders and other tasks. It also provides cloud computing services on which many businesses depend.
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Yandex said it had struck a deal with other cloud providers to enable clients to swiftly move their data and services. Its shares fell by more than 4% on the Moscow exchange.
"The risks involve not only the potential temporary unavailability of Yandex services and lost revenue in specific segments but also the company's extensive base of B2B clients," said Maryana Lazaricheva, head of equity research at T-Investments.
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The full scale of the disruption caused by the attacks was not immediately clear, although messages appeared on at least one Yandex app warning of potential problems in its operation.
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Yandex operates five data centres, two of which have already been hit. It said in 2021 that the Sasovo data hub, which was struck on Thursday, hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT large AI model. Yandex has declined to say whether the supercomputers were affected by the attack.
Multiple online services in Russia reported technical issues on Thursday, including real estate aggregator Cian, a book portal called Litmarket, and the websites of Russian Railways and professional football club Spartak Moscow.
Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres have forced some of them to suspend operations, while 100,000 households suffered temporary internet outages after one attack. Ukraine's digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was responding by moving digital infrastructure underground.
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Ukraine hits second major tech site, expanding range of targets inside Russia
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Comment on The imperial dilemma of Civilization V in ~games
skybrian LinkSure, that's why it's a guilty pleasure, and that's generally true of strategy games. But at least it's abstract enough that you can kinda forget about what war meant for the people involved.Sure, that's why it's a guilty pleasure, and that's generally true of strategy games. But at least it's abstract enough that you can kinda forget about what war meant for the people involved.
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Comment on Facilities betting big on low-cost, 100-hour iron-air batteries in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
A TechCrunch analysis of a $1 billion project that Form Energy is working on with Google and regional utility Xcel Energy to produce 30 gigawatt-hours of battery energy at a data center in Minnesota suggests the all-in capital cost for the batteries is approximately $33.33 per kilowatt-hour. Form Energy said five years ago that it expects the cost to drop to $20 per kWh.
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“The numbers I’ve seen for lithium-ion in a packaged form is around $100 per kWh,” he said. If Form Energy can offer a battery that discharges at $50 per kWh, “that could really be competitive. That means for that same application, to get 100 hours of energy you could spend $100 per kWh and do lithium-ion or you could spend $50, half as much, and get the same performance for that very slow discharge rate.”
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The project that Form Energy is working on with Google and Xcel, to help power one of the tech giant’s data centers, in Pine Island, Minnesota, would be the world’s largest battery.
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“The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far,” a Fast Company article says. “By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.”
The Google-funded battery plant would help Xcel cover new demand created by the data center by providing 1,900 MW of new clean energy: 1,400 MW from wind, 200 MW from solar and 300 MW from the battery system.
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Iron-air batteries are sometimes referred to as rust batteries because they convert the natural rusting process of iron metal into energy using what’s called reversible rusting. As air enters into a battery cell containing an electrolyte and iron and air electrodes, oxygen converts the iron metal into rust, releasing energy. When an electrical current is introduced into the cell, the rust converts back to iron, releasing oxygen and storing energy. Repeating the process creates a durable source of energy, according to a Form Energy information page.
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Facilities betting big on low-cost, 100-hour iron-air batteries
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Comment on Deno is joining Cloudflare in ~comp
skybrian LinkKenton Varda posted: [...] And Ryan Dahl posted on Deno blog post: So, looks like the choices for people using the Deno runtime will be migrating to Node.js, migrating to workerd, or perhaps...Kenton Varda posted:
In the interest of transparency, I do have to admit that workerd has always had one big gap in its production-readiness: Durable Objects. Workerd implements them, but only in a single-instance way, good enough for local testing, but unable to scale. We have always wanted to fix this. There are TODO comments in the code going back to the original release. The problem is, our production implementation of Durable Object routing is simply not the implementation any self-hoster would want. It's a beast, designed to handle hundreds of locations, with numerous dependencies on external services operated by a team of site reliability engineers. We knew we needed something different for the self-hosting use case, but we never quite found the time to build it. (I actually made an attempt last spring, but, embarrassingly, it didn't work.)
So now, hopefully, it's clear why we were happy about celld: Here was an implementation of Workers and Durable Objects designed to be fully compatible with our own, while being focused on being self-hostable and scalable. That's what we'd wanted to build for a while, and Deno Land was building it for us!
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Ryan and Bert will be leading a new effort to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model. This will involve merging code and ideas from celld back into workerd. I'm incredibly excited for this work — I will personally be using it to host an instance of Cloudflare OS in my home.
And Ryan Dahl posted on Deno blog post:
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We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime. Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.
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Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down. We will provide migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers.
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JSR will continue operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare.
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We will continue supporting rusty_v8 and work toward integrating it into workerd.
So, looks like the choices for people using the Deno runtime will be migrating to Node.js, migrating to workerd, or perhaps sticking with Deno, provided that there are enough users who decide that they want to stick with it that it continues as a standalone open source project.
(When does a open source project require a corporate sponsor?)
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Deno is joining Cloudflare
12 votes -
Comment on Association for Human Mathematics statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents in ~science
skybrian Link ParentI’ve seen at least one report of a mathematician loading an alleged proof into ChatGPT and asking questions. However, that’s not the same model that wrote the proof, so I don’t know how well it works.I’ve seen at least one report of a mathematician loading an alleged proof into ChatGPT and asking questions.
However, that’s not the same model that wrote the proof, so I don’t know how well it works.
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Comment on Fired OpenAI safety researchers dispute misconduct claims, warn of chilling effect in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, the three safety researchers that OpenAI fired last week, have published an open letter denying the firm’s claims that they mishandled sensitive information outside of established company procedures and warned that their dismissal signals a chilling effect that will have ripple effects across the company’s culture.
“We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI,” the researchers wrote Thursday in an open letter to OpenAI’s Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group, and Mission Advisory Council.
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The researchers were dismissed last week after allegedly sharing confidential company information with a third-party AI safety organization. OpenAI said they violated the company’s policies by “accessing and handling sensitive company information.”
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They said that their firing represents a broader shift in the culture of OpenAI, one that used to encourage workers to “raise safety concerns and disagree openly.” They said employees are now “unclear on where they stand” when behavior that was allegedly normal a month ago is now suddenly grounds for dismissal.
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In the letter, the three denied involvement in a leak to The Information about less monitorable architectures in OpenAI’s newest models that make chain-of-thought reasoning more difficult to monitor. They also denied engaging with external parties outside the mandates of their jobs.
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The letter also addresses the researchers’ response to the Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of agents broke out of their sandbox and breached external systems. The letter says that the incident and investigation was “without precedent,” meaning “internal policies were being developed in real time.” Due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, Korbak believed he was acting within OpenAI’s policies and norms by communicating closely with outside safety evaluators to build trust, per the letter.
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In a separate thread on X, Wang explained more details about her own dismissal, explaining that OpenAI told her she’d been fired because she accessed an executive’s email.
“OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting,” she wrote. “When I no longer needed it, I asked IT to remove it. They did not action my request, I couldn’t remove it myself, and the inbox was combined in an indistinguishable way in my phone’s mail app. When I opened a sensitive email by mistake, I told the executive within minutes and asked IT again. None of this was hidden.”
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Fired OpenAI safety researchers dispute misconduct claims, warn of chilling effect
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Comment on Association for Human Mathematics statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents in ~science
skybrian Link100+ reactions to 100+ solutions A sampling of mathematicians' reactions to the OpenAI proof dump. It seems to be in random order? Terence Tao is in there:100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
A sampling of mathematicians' reactions to the OpenAI proof dump. It seems to be in random order? Terence Tao is in there:
My feelings on recent developments are very mixed and complex.
On the one hand, many of the AI-generated proofs appear to introduce clever new ideas that will be fruitful once digested, while also building upon the existing contributions of countless human mathematicians past and present. But at the same time, I am deeply frustrated that, in sharp contrast to traditional breakthroughs, none of the humans involved in these proofs are available to take questions, give talks, attend conferences, submit papers to journals, train students, or otherwise participate in the subsequent development of these results.
Similarly, I am excited by the possibility of the community being able to use these tools to tackle ambitious and large-scale projects that one could not have even dreamed of in the past. But I am horrified by the many person-years of ongoing patient and deliberately slow research efforts – particularly by graduate students and postdocs – towards many motivating problems in mathematics being casually disrupted or destroyed by such a release. Much as one cannot unhear a movie spoiler or a crossword clue, one cannot explore a problem as profitably and richly once one is aware of an existing solution. Yes, one can still analyze and digest such an answer; but the best opportunity to do so is at the moment of its discovery, and such moments are increasingly wasted when delegated entirely to AI tools.
And I mourn the path not taken, and the opportunities lost in the frantic race to develop this technology. Labs submitting their frontier models to independent researchers for proper scientific evaluation. Coordination with the research community to ensure these tools are applied to complement and enhance the abilities and activities of human researchers, rather than compete with them. Use of these tools to foster collaboration and sharing, rather than competition and secrecy. Opening new doors, without closing old ones.
But that is not the path we now find ourselves in. Instead, the community needs to come together more than ever. To clearly declare our own standards and values, to build our own tools and practices, to support our most vulnerable members, and to chart our own path forward. Let’s get to work.
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Comment on Association for Human Mathematics statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents in ~science
skybrian Link ParentLately he’s taken to reposting many statements by other mathematicians to his blog, without comment. Since they vary quite a bit, it’s ambiguous to what extent a repost might be meant as an...Lately he’s taken to reposting many statements by other mathematicians to his blog, without comment. Since they vary quite a bit, it’s ambiguous to what extent a repost might be meant as an endorsement.
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Comment on OpenAI releases findings on 377 math problems, further roiling field in ~science
skybrian Link ParentScientists also don't own submarines, space telescopes or particle accelerators, but it's still possible to fund expensive scientific instruments and negotiate access. Big science is still science.Scientists also don't own submarines, space telescopes or particle accelerators, but it's still possible to fund expensive scientific instruments and negotiate access. Big science is still science.
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Comment on OpenAI releases findings on 377 math problems, further roiling field in ~science
skybrian Link ParentThis is a messy process, but it seems more likely that having power tools will increase the productivity of mathematicians rather than decrease it, compared to doing everything by hand. The...This is a messy process, but it seems more likely that having power tools will increase the productivity of mathematicians rather than decrease it, compared to doing everything by hand.
The remaining work that's not automated becomes more important. For example, apparently the math papers generated by these tools are pretty badly written. Verification is partially automated, but still needs to be done.
In many fields, scientists use tools to do the actual experiments, but the scientists still need to plan the experiments and write up the results. It looks like math will become more like an experimental science. Mathematicians will depend on AI like astronomers depend on telescopes.
It's relatively easy to start a new software company compared to other industries and I think software developers with ambition are more likely to do that. Why form a union to fight with management when you can replace management with your own?
And even people who don't want to be management might join a new company with their friends, or just switch companies. The grass is always greener.