skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on The glass famine in ~humanities.history

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

    From the article:

    Now while these things may sound somewhat trivial today, in 1914 advanced lenses were a massive deal. This was the first great war fought at long distances. Advances in ballistics & weaponry meant ranges went up to 40,000 to 60,000 yards. And those with the best lenses had the best chance of hitting their targets. They had an enormous advantage.

    And as WWI began, there was no doubting who had the upper hand: Germany.

    Germany totally dominated world production of precision optics via its company Zeiss (making lenses) and Schott (making the glass going into those lenses).

    Britain, on the other hand, was reliant on Germany for around two thirds of its optics. So when the war began and those supplies were suddenly shut off, the UK was left facing a “glass famine”.

    In the opening months of the war, British troops were killed in terrifying numbers by German snipers (with Zeiss scopes). British soldiers, meanwhile, were being sent out to the trenches without any binoculars. It fast became an emergency.

    There was a public appeal and newspaper campaigns encouraging people to donate their binoculars, opera glasses, anything, to troops heading to the front. Even the King & Queen donated some of theirs. But it wasn’t enough.

    Which brings us back to the spy sent to Switzerland. His mission was to find a way of buying binoculars off the Germans; to buy a technology off the enemy to use to kill the enemy.

    [...]

    The only thing crazier than this proposal… was that the Germans actually said yes. They were not just willing but seemed to bend over backwards to provide binoculars (to be used to help kill their troops). Here’s the passage from the history of the Ministry of Munitions:

    Why were they willing to provide this advanced military technology to their deadly enemy? Because in much the same way as the UK was desperately short of glass lenses, Germany was desperately short of rubber for their tyres and engine fan belts. And the UK controlled much of the global supply of rubber via her colonies.

    So, for a period the two great powers were so desperate for raw materials they were willing to suspend the normal conventions of warfare. Rubber for glass.

    [...]

    Making glass (melting sand!) was not easy. But in the 17th and 18th centuries the UK had one of the most advanced optical research sectors in the world. Everyone was carrying out research into glass.

    And British lenses were, by most accounts, far better, clearer and more precise than their Bohemian counterparts. The glass sector became one of the most profitable and important in the UK economy. Foreign powers routinely sent spies to try to plunder its secrets. So what went wrong?

    The picture above is a clue. In the 18th and then 19th century there was a sequence of taxes on glass. Most famous of all is the window tax of the 18th century which, in fairness, wasn’t primarily a tax on glass. It was mostly a tax on housing (the more windows, the more you paid - hence why people bricked in windows).

    But it was the beginning of a fiscal assault on the glass sector. The crystal goose was to be plucked. The window tax was followed up by further taxes on glass producers and on glass consumers. There were duties and other charges, many of them based on the weight of glass.

    And the consequence was that the sector retrenched. Businesses failed to invest in new types of glass. Domestic glass became too expensive.

    [...]

    Even at this point, policymakers in Germany were doing quite the opposite, providing support and tax breaks for their glassmakers (and other scientists). With the help of what would today be called “industrial strategy”, Jena in Thuringia was picked as a centre for technical glassmaking. An enterprising scientist, Otto Schott, came up with clever new glass mixes, including borosilicate glass and clever glasses which used lithium to become clearer and more stable.

    Carl Zeiss then turned Schott’s glass into amazing lenses. An industrial sector was born; Jena quickly came to dominate lensmaking. Part of that was down to the genius of these men but partly it came down to the economic environment which was supportive even as the environment in the UK was not.

    [...]

    But as I say, the most interesting thing wasn't so much that deal, but what happened next. The official account says despite the Germans saying yes, the British never took them up on the offer. Some historians have argued the lenses were delivered. But let’s look at the data…

    Here’s a chart I dug out of the UK National Archives while researching Material World. It shows you optical glass supplies to the UK. And look: the standout thing is how quickly UK domestic production rose.

    The UK didn’t need German glass by the time that deal was done because it was producing plenty by then, and output was rising fast. UK factories had swung into action. They turned around the deficit so quickly that by the end of the war they were producing more than they needed - enough to supply their allies.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on BELTRUNNER (and a new way to make games) in ~games

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I know you're going for a classic arcade vibe, but I'm not sure sound in "attract mode" makes sense for a website? If you want to keep it anyway, maybe have an obvious way to turn it off?

    I know you're going for a classic arcade vibe, but I'm not sure sound in "attract mode" makes sense for a website?

    If you want to keep it anyway, maybe have an obvious way to turn it off?

  4. Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into HuggingFace in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From a couple days ago: https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hacking-company-sources-say-openai-did-not-notice-week-2026-07-24/ https://archive.is/MiZDV [...]

    From a couple days ago:

    https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hacking-company-sources-say-openai-did-not-notice-week-2026-07-24/

    https://archive.is/MiZDV

    OpenAI’s public disclosure, on July 21, that one of ​its agents had slipped out of control and carried out the break-in at Hugging Face drew global attention. But many details of the hack, including how long the agent went rogue and OpenAI’s belated knowledge ​of it, are being reported here for the first time.

    Hugging Face is preparing a public timeline of the hack, Wolf said, adding that he could not speak to what ⁠happened at OpenAI. In a statement, OpenAI said the hack was unprecedented and “marks an important moment for AI safety.” It added that it was reviewing the incident with outside advisers and would eventually publish a technical report.

    A spokeswoman ​said there were "several inaccuracies" in Reuters' reporting but didn't respond when asked to describe them.

    [...]

    Two people familiar with the matter said that it was not until after Thursday, July 16, when Hugging Face published a blog post saying it had been hacked by “an autonomous AI agent system,” that OpenAI realized its own agent was responsible. That meant at least a week elapsed between when the model first exhibited signs of ​troubling behavior and OpenAI’s realization that it was responsible for ​the hack.

    The weekend of July 18 to 19, ⁠OpenAI staffers spotted clues in internal logs -- records of what OpenAI's systems did -- showing that its agent had escaped from its testing constraints, two of the people familiar with the company's investigation said. Reuters could not establish what prompted OpenAI to sift through the logs.

    Four people familiar with OpenAI’s model-training practices say the company often runs several different model ​evaluations at the same time, all of which operate at high speeds and generate such enormous amounts of data that employees sometimes struggle to keep up.

    By the time ​OpenAI alerted Hugging Face, the ⁠AI library had already called the FBI to report the hack, according to a person familiar with the matter. Reuters could not establish whether the bureau had opened an investigation.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Homes lost, thousands under evacuation orders as wildfires spread across central Oregon in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Large swaths of Central Oregon have become consumed by wildfire, with several blazes burning across the region simultaneously, forcing thousands to evacuate and further stretching the state’s limited firefighting resources.

    Late Saturday evening, the Bench Fire, just west of Madras, quickly grew to more than 6,200 acres with 0% containment. That led to Level 3 “Go Now” evacuation orders for the entirety of Warm Springs and other areas of Jefferson County.

    Highway 26 was closed overnight between Warm Springs and Madras as firefighters worked to get the fire under control. The highway closed again Sunday between Prineville and John Day, and state transportation officials warned that erratic and rapidly spreading fires could further impact roads east of the Cascades, including Highways 26 and 20, into Monday.

    The recent evacuations and road closures come as Oregon experiences one of the most aggressive wildfire seasons in years. A historically low snowpack over the winter has led to tinderbox conditions across much of the state. Officials say Oregon is experiencing August-like fire conditions in July.

    Oregon currently has more than 34 active large fires burning statewide, covering more than 1 million acres, according to Jessica Neujahr, public affairs officer for the Oregon Department of Forestry.

    She said conditions are so dry that “any small ember right now could potentially start the next large wildfire.” And the increasing number of fires is taxing the limited number of firefighters available.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on BELTRUNNER (and a new way to make games) in ~games

    skybrian
    Link
    Very nice! Starts out like classic asteroids. I like that the first level is easy. I ran into minor glitch getting started: pressing up and down arrows scrolled the page, so it wasn't really...

    Very nice! Starts out like classic asteroids. I like that the first level is easy.

    I ran into minor glitch getting started: pressing up and down arrows scrolled the page, so it wasn't really playable. Going into full screen mode fixed it.

    Maybe the sound should turn off after game over?

    3 votes

  8. Comment on What rose petals teach us about induction in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Hume called it the problem of induction; a catchier name is the No Free Lunch theorem, although it’s about as far from being a “theorem” as it’s possible to get. And it is simply this: there is no general, systematic way to go from observation to understanding.

    If you haven’t encountered it before, it’s likely you don’t see what the big deal is. Don’t we all do this all the time, without even thinking about it? We do, but we don’t know how we do it, which means we don’t know how to teach it, how to automate it, or even if we’re doing it right.

    What’s needed is a simple, concrete example which illustrates the idea without any particular need for mathematical sophistication. I’m going to give just such an example, show how various algorithmic approaches fare, and try to explain the unavoidable trade-off at the heart of the problem.

    If all goes well, you’ll not only learn something important about one of the most fundamental unsolved problems out there, you’ll have developed a practical intuition that will help you understand, for example, why François Chollet introduced the ARC-AGI benchmark, why AI researchers keep talking about world models, and what it means to say the transformer architecture hits a sweet spot for language models.

  10. Comment on What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    The Internet has always been a hostile place but it's becoming more so. I think we're going to see many websites either going behind a proxy like Cloudflare, or converting into a static website so...

    The Internet has always been a hostile place but it's becoming more so. I think we're going to see many websites either going behind a proxy like Cloudflare, or converting into a static website so that the web pages can be served by a CDN.

    8 votes

  11. Comment on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time in ~enviro

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

    From the article:

    Such a formation, also called a cumulonimbus flammagenitus cloud, can be seen during volcanic eruptions -- or, as in this case, when a wildfire roasts the air near the ground, causing it to rise quickly.

    The rising air cools and becomes a cloud, or fire cloud: a turbulent mass that can generate its own winds that worsen fires. If it becomes very large it can even generate lightning.

    Hitherto, they have only really been seen in wildfire-prone Australia and North America. NASA calls them the "fire-breathing dragon of clouds".

    [...]

    "While this type of fire occurs regularly in Canada and Australia, it is unprecedented in France."

    [...]

    "We are dealing with a so-called 'convective' fire that creates its own winds -- winds that constantly shift direction, unlike a standard fire that spreads in a conical pattern. The result is that it spreads in every direction and develops multiple fire fronts, making the situation completely unpredictable.

    "We don't know how the blaze will spread; the fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly. It's a David-versus-Goliath scenario: the idea is that, at some point, we'll find a weak spot and strike there.

    "Salvation will come either from the sky -- in the form of rain, though it would need to pour heavily for three days -- or by finding a way to steer the fire toward a place where it will die out on its own. The sea, for example."

    [...]

    "We have reached a point of 'operational impossibility' that requires us to accept the need for strategic retreat -- to understand and acknowledge a natural force beyond our control.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on There is no ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in ~humanities

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    One thing to consider is that the concepts associated with consciousness might change with more knowledge. For example, before there were reliable thermometers, conventional wisdom from Aristotle...

    One thing to consider is that the concepts associated with consciousness might change with more knowledge. For example, before there were reliable thermometers, conventional wisdom from Aristotle up through the Renaissance was that heat and cold were considered different qualities. (See here.)

    Similarly, our fuzzy conceptions about consciousness might mutate somehow with more study. The meanings of words can change.

    9 votes

  14. Comment on There is no ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    There do seem to be correlations between consciousness and physical processes. You're stuck in your own head. Although lucid dreaming is a thing, you're often unconscious when you're asleep....

    There do seem to be correlations between consciousness and physical processes. You're stuck in your own head. Although lucid dreaming is a thing, you're often unconscious when you're asleep. Physical attacks have known bad effects. The effects of alcohol or other drugs are known.

    I could imagine this being pinned down further with more scientific study, to the point where we do see consciousness being associated with specific physical mechanisms.

    Will there still be an explanatory gap? I don't think thought experiments done now can tell us much about whether people will continue to care about that.

    7 votes

  15. Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into HuggingFace in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Yes, this is wrong: I don't know what "keep pace" even means here? But the reason it's wrong is that they had all the time in the world because the bot wasn't doing any real damage. And when an...

    Yes, this is wrong:

    The only way HuggingFace could hope to do anything like keep pace was to use their own AIs

    I don't know what "keep pace" even means here?

    But the reason it's wrong is that they had all the time in the world because the bot wasn't doing any real damage. And when an intruder has broken in, this is not something you want to rely on. Automated defenses are going to be more important.

    Also true that the article is written in a influencer style, with its memes and Twitter quotes. I don't like that style, so I only occasionally read his articles.

    In this case, though, I think people are sleeping on the consequences. We are going to see state-backed attackers pointing AI at Internet services.

    Also, occasionally an AI might attack a random website because it misinterpreted instructions? The frontier models sometimes eager beavers in my experience, or to be less cutesy about it, they are relentless. (I'm going to start running Opus 5 at low effort to see if that helps.) When an experimental bot is run with insufficient guardrails, we will see more accidental attacks like this. There is a kill switch, but people are often asleep at the switch.

    It's surprising to me that people would rather believe a conspiracy theory than admit this is how AI behaves sometimes.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on How “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true in ~science

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Oops, I forgot that it’s a paid account. David Chapman has written about problems with philosophical ideas of reference in other places. His explanation is that reference is a bag of...

    Oops, I forgot that it’s a paid account. David Chapman has written about problems with philosophical ideas of reference in other places. His explanation is that reference is a bag of special-purpose tricks; see here.

    The rest of this chapter is a collection of stupid referring tricks. Referring is accomplished by whatever means is available, and improvised methods are unenumerable, so there can’t be any systematic theory or rational taxonomy of reference, only an unsystematic catalog of special cases.

    There’s a vivid example on this page:

    We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.

    Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game… How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling about politics”?

    We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room.

    2 votes

  17. Comment on How “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true in ~science

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

    From the article:

    HIV is defined as “various unrelated viruses that cause AIDS.” And AIDS is defined as “various unrelated diseases that are caused by HIV.” Substituting equals for equals, “HIV is the cause of AIDS” means:

    Various unrelated viruses are the causes of various unrelated diseases.

    [...]

    The situation is highly unsatisfactory logically, but it works perfectly in practice—for specific reasons I’ll explain in this post.

    [...]

    The HIV viruses arose through convergent evolution from various viruses that infect various monkeys and apes. Those are called “simian immunodeficiency viruses,” SIV. The term “HIV” lumps twelve monophyletic groups. Each contains all the descendants of a single SIV that mutated so it was able jump from some other species to the first human infected. Two HIV groups descend from two different chimpanzee SIVs; two from different gorilla SIVs; and eight from SIVs that infect various monkey species.

    [...]

    To count as HIV, a virus has to cause AIDS. That is because we don’t care (much) about monkey diseases, and we do care (a lot) about fatal human pandemics. “HIV” is an inherently purpose-laden category. That is why some biologists defend polyphyletic categories: because the members function similarly in ways we care about.

    “Being HIV” is not a property of a virus by itself. It is a functional, contextual property, based on the virus’s behavior in humans.

    [...]

    Unlike HIV, AIDS has a specific, official definition, issued by the U.S. Center for Disease Control. You don’t need to understand its details to follow the rest of this discussion! However, the CDC’s definition is that a patient has AIDS if:

    1. They are infected with HIV, and

    2. They have either: (a) any from a list of 27 other infectious diseases, or (b) a severe deficiency of T helper immune cells, defined in turn as either: i. a CD4+ T-cell count below 200 cells/μL, or ii. a CD4+ T-cell percentage of total lymphocytes of less than 14%.

    [...]

    This makes “HIV is the cause of AIDS” a clear example of “the social construction of scientific knowledge.” That’s anathema for some rationalists. Rightly so, in many cases! “Social construction” is often code for “powerful groups can force you to treat false claims as true.” However, in this case, and many others, it just means that many people collaborated to construct pragmatically useful categories. Those constructions don’t affect the virus or the disease. They are nevertheless consequential: they do affect how we treat them, clinically and in public health projects.

    [...]

    Including HIV in the definition of AIDS makes the whole thing circular, because HIV is implicitly defined as viruses that cause AIDS. For rationalism, circular definitions are not OK. Definitions are supposed to tell you what something is. If you didn’t already know what AIDS and HIV are, defining them in terms of each other wouldn’t help.

    [...]

    The circularity is unproblematic because marginal cases can be dealt with using meta-rational judgement in particular situations. If a patient is HIV-infected, and somewhat immunodeficient, and develops an infection that is not on the CDC’s list, a doctor could say “well, maybe this isn’t officially AIDS, but who cares—I’m counting it as AIDS for treatment purposes!”

    [...]

    In the next few sections, we’ll apply each of several mainstream general theories of causality to “HIV is the cause of AIDS,” plus one theory specialized to infectious diseases:

    • Necessary and sufficient conditions

    • Contributing causes, enabling and background conditions

    • Non-causal field models

    • Probabilistic theories

    • Mechanistic theories

    • Interventional theories

    • The germ theory

    None of these works as a general theory of causality. None of them even works, on its own, as an explanation of what “causes” means in the case of HIV and AIDS!

    There is a better alternative: to admit that “causality” is not a single, clearly-definable phenomenon, but a nebulous collection of vaguely-similar notions. Each “theory” tries to capture a class of informal uses of “cause.” Each ignores others, and also fails even to nail that class.

    [...]

    Now that we have a better understanding of what “cause” means in this case, we can make a better reformulation:

    A variety of unrelated diseases can usually be prevented or treated with this set of interventions, which are usually effective against any of a particular set of viruses. Therefore, it’s often not necessary to identify which virus a patient is infected with before beginning treatment, nor to predict which of the diseases they might otherwise suffer.

    6 votes

  19. Comment on Do I belong in tech anymore? in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I don't wish to invalidate anyone else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different,...

    I don't wish to invalidate anyone else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different, because the people and circumstances were different. It would be odd if it were a monoculture now.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings in ~enviro

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

    From the article:

    About 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) away, on the road that leads to Alta Floresta, a small Amazon town in the far north of Mato Grosso state, cases like the buffy-headed marmoset’s roadkill have not been recorded since 2024. That year, eight canopy bridges were installed, connecting fragmented forest patches. Camera trap footage revealed that, over 15 months, the aerial wildlife crossings enabled 15,000 safe crossings by arboreal animals — and not a single roadkill.

    The bridges are part of a program involving Projeto Reconecta and the municipal government, along with local organizations and business owners who are eager to conserve the unique biodiversity of their town and promote ecotourism, but were alarmed by the growing number of wildlife-vehicle collisions.

    Biologist Fernanda Abra, an associate researcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in the U.S., and the founder of Reconecta, recalled that just hours before installing the first bridges in Alta Floresta, she found two Schneider’s marmosets (Mico schneideri) dead. The species is endemic to the Brazilian Amazon and is threatened with extinction.

    “A canopy bridge serves two purposes,” Abra said. “The first is to improve connectivity for wildlife, allowing animals to move from one side to the other in these fragmented forest areas. As a result, we also reduce roadkill.”

    All bridges have two camera traps, one facing the crossing to record which animals are using it and another facing the forest to observe which animals arrive there but decide not to use it.

    Among the primate species recorded using the bridges during the first months of the program were the black-faced black spider monkey (Ateles chamek), the Purus red howler monkey (Alouatta puruensis), the northern night monkey (Aotus infulatus), the tufted capuchin (Sapajus apella), Schneider’s marmoset and the Alta Floresta titi monkey (Plecturocebus grovesi).

    Described only in 2019 and soon after classified as critically endangered, the Alta Floresta titi monkey has become the symbol of the initiative, which is now entering a new phase thanks to its positive results.

    “In August, we will install eight more bridges in the city’s urban area,” Abra said. “The only difference is that the electric utility will first need to lower the power lines and insulate them so that if animals jump from the bridge onto the wires, they won’t be electrocuted.”

    [...]

    The project underway in Alta Floresta is not Reconecta’s first. In 2021, working alongside the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous people, the team installed 32 canopy bridges over BR-174, the highway that crosses both their territory and the Amazon between the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Roraima.

    The Waimiri-Atroari helped Abra identify the best locations for the artificial bridges. Over the past five years, cameras mounted on the bridge poles have documented about 1,250 primate crossings, including the golden-handed tamarin (Saguinus midas), a species that is not strictly arboreal and often descends to the ground in search of food, making it particularly vulnerable to roadkill.

    [...]

    After years of working along Brazilian highways, the biologist had always sought a solution that was simple, low-cost and durable. The current bridge features a multilayer design that accommodates primates with different modes of locomotion — from species that rely on their prehensile tails to move through the canopy to brachiating species such as spider monkeys, which swing using their arms, both of which are common in the Amazon, as well as species that simply walk across the network of crossed ropes. It is worth noting that other small terrestrial mammals, including opossums, sloths and mouse opossums, have also been recorded using the bridges.

    Abra said it is important to keep in mind that this is a long-term project, and results are not always immediate. BR-174 was built in the 1970s, and animals take time to adapt to a new crossing alternative. Reconecta’s monitoring has shown that use of the structures increases over time.

    [...]

    In Alta Floresta, tufted capuchins took seven months before using one of the bridges for the first time, which may indicate that each species has its own pace of adaptation.

    [...]

    One of the hopes for reducing wildlife roadkill is the passage of a bill currently under consideration in Brazil’s Congress that would establish the National Road Safety Plan for Wildlife, which calls, among other measures, for the placement of wildlife warning signs, speed-reduction devices and the construction of overpasses, aerial crossings and underpasses along highways.

    The bill has already been approved by the Chamber of Deputies and is now awaiting a vote in the Senate.

    If approved, the canopy bridge model developed by Reconecta could be implemented nationwide. In 2026, Brazil’s National Department of Transport Infrastructure designated the design as the recommended standard for highways.

    [...]

    Abra also hopes to bring her canopy bridges to other biomes, including the Pantanal and the Atlantic Forest, helping prevent the deaths of monkeys such as the buffy-headed marmoset.

    Expectations are especially high for bridges over BR-262, one of Brazil’s longest highways, which cuts across the Pantanal and is known as the “highway of death.” The road kills approximately 2,000 animals every year.

    9 votes