skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on TSMC to make advanced AI computer chips in Japan in ~tech

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

    From the article:

    Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a major chip supplier to companies such as Nvidia and Apple, said Thursday it plans to make 3-nanometer semiconductors — advanced chips that are used in areas such as AI products and smartphones — at its second factory in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture, which is under construction.

    [...]

    The announcement came while Takaichi was meeting with TSMC’s CEO and Chairman, C.C. Wei, in Tokyo.

    [...]

    TSMC’s first Kumamoto plant started mass production in late 2024 and makes less advanced chips. The company also is building new plants in Arizona in the U.S. to create a fabrication plant cluster and meet growing demand from customers building on the global AI frenzy.

    [...]

    As Japan looks to gain ground in global advanced chipmaking competitiveness, it is also providing huge subsidies for its domestic chipmaker Rapidus, which is advancing towards mass producing cutting-edge chips.

    [...]

    Despite growing concerns over a potential AI-related bubble where massive investments may not pay off, TSMC’s Wei said last month he was confident the growing AI demand from its customers is “real.”

    Last month, TSMC said it plans to increase capital spending by up to nearly 40% this year as AI-related demand lifted its profits. It plans to raise its capital spending for 2026 to $52 billion-$56 billion, up from last year’s $40 billion.

  3. Comment on Japan’s Sanae Takaichi tightens grip on power with stunning victory in snap election in ~society

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

    From the article:

    Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s high-stakes gamble on a snap election has paid off, with voters handing her ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a big majority Sunday, according to public broadcaster NHK.

    After an election framed as a referendum on Takaichi herself, the LDP party won more than 310 of the 465 seats in Japan’s lower house, marking the first time since World War II that a single party has secured a two-thirds majority. The broader ruling coalition won more than 340 seats.

    [...]

    The hardline conservative, who enjoys US President Donald Trump’s endorsement, has seen high approval ratings since she was elected less than four months ago, making history as the first woman to lead Japan.

    She has won over the public with her strong work ethic, savvy social media game and charisma, marked in viral moments such as a recent impromptu drum session to K-pop hits with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung.

    [...]

    The two-thirds supermajority it now enjoys in the lower house will allow Takaichi’s party to override votes in the upper house of parliament and to propose amendments to the constitution.

    [...]

    Takaichi, a longtime lawmaker, rose to the top of Japanese politics last fall after her predecessor, Shigeru Ishiba, resigned amid pressure from his own party following a series of bruising defeats for the LDP.

    She won the LDP presidency on October 4, her third attempt at the job, and was elected prime minister on October 21 – a surprising triumph in Japan’s deeply patriarchal political system.

    [...]

    Takaichi has enjoyed unusually high approval ratings during her short tenure, in which she has made waves for her relaxed, friendly interactions with other world leaders.

    [...]

    Takaichi broke Japan’s long tradition of ambiguity on Taiwan when she told parliament in November that a Chinese attack on the island – which lies just 60 miles (97 kilometers) from Japanese territory – could trigger a military response from Tokyo.

    China retaliated by canceling flights, restricting imports of Japanese seafood and ramping up military patrols, among other measures.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on The 'Little red dots' observed by James Webb Space Telescope were direct-collapse black holes in ~space

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    "Our radiation-hydrodynamic simulations track both how gas falls onto the black hole and how the radiation it produces affects its surroundings," said Pacucci. "This interaction naturally creates an extremely dense environment that absorbs high-energy radiation and reprocesses it into the ultraviolet and optical light, which JWST observes after it is redshifted into the infrared. When we turn these simulations into mock observations, they match JWST data on Little Red Dots incredibly well, showing that their properties can be explained by well-understood physical processes in the early universe."

    They found that their simulations reproduced the specific characteristics of LRDs, including their weak X-ray emission, the presence of metal and high-ionization lines, the absence of star-formation features, their abundance and redshift evolution, and their long-lived radiation-pressure-driven variable phases. Similarly, the presence of dense gas clouds surrounding the black holes also accounted for their extremely compact nature and why they appear overmassive relative to any stellar components.

    Said Pacucci, "All the puzzling properties of the LRDs are explained within a single, self-consistent framework, without requiring any ad-hoc assumptions. What makes our model especially powerful is its simplicity, built on decades of theoretical work showing how direct collapse black holes are expected to form and evolve over cosmic time. One of JWST's primary scientific goals is to identify the first black holes and uncover how they formed.

    "Astronomers have been searching for these primordial objects for decades, but direct evidence has remained elusive. Our results suggest that JWST is witnessing exactly this long-sought phase: the formation and growth of massive black hole seeds through direct collapse. This would be a major breakthrough, showing that the earliest black holes formed efficiently and early, and that JWST is finally opening a direct observational window onto their birth."

    6 votes

  7. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 2 in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I would expect deaths from unrelated medical issues to go up proportionately because there are more people in custody, so we would have to adjust for that before concluding anything much. But I’m...

    I would expect deaths from unrelated medical issues to go up proportionately because there are more people in custody, so we would have to adjust for that before concluding anything much.

    But I’m not going to bother since I just want to see it all shut down. The amount of immigration enforcement the US needs is probably not zero, but at this point abolishing the ICE and making enforcement a state responsibility is looking pretty good.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 2 in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I misunderstood your post. Thanks for clarifying.

    I misunderstood your post. Thanks for clarifying.

  9. Comment on The hidden cost of AI art: Brandon Sanderson's keynote in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don’t know about writing novels, but writing code with a coding agent is sort of like managing a software project. (But in easy mode because you don’t have to deal with people issues.) I don’t...

    I don’t know about writing novels, but writing code with a coding agent is sort of like managing a software project. (But in easy mode because you don’t have to deal with people issues.) I don’t write the code directly, but I influence it in all sorts of ways, by pointing out bugs, by asking pointed questions, or by asking it to write tools and templates and style guides and other scaffolding.

    I’m learning a lot of things, and the project itself is “learning” through evolution. I’m not learning the same things I used to learn by writing code myself, but it’s definitely learning.

    There are opportunities for growth that you miss by not using these tools. Of course that’s true of any activity you choose not to take up.

    For many skills there are diminishing returns from more practice. I don’t want to discourage anyone from learning by writing code yourself if you’re in the early part of the learning curve, but mixing it up a bit would probably be a good idea too. CS undergrads have few opportunities to work on large-scale projects and could probably learn things from a class where you build something bigger with a coding agent.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 2 in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    ICE chief counsel in Minnesota leaves his job amid burnout and dissent

    ICE chief counsel in Minnesota leaves his job amid burnout and dissent

    Amid a torrent of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration tactics, the chief counsel for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota has departed.

    The top lawyer, Jim Stolley, retired after 31 years of service, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to MS NOW in an email. Questions from MS NOW sent to Stolley’s Department of Homeland Security email address prompted an automated one-line response that read: “I have retired from public service.”

    3 votes

  11. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 2 in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't doubt that they're horrible places in a lot of ways. But if you're going to go there by comparing to Auschwitz: how many people have died in these prisons?

    I don't doubt that they're horrible places in a lot of ways. But if you're going to go there by comparing to Auschwitz: how many people have died in these prisons?

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Is the detachment in the room? - Agents, cruelty, and empathy in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    He's writing about his own experiment and I think that's allowable. But yeah, the people who do these things probably aren't just harassing bots. An idea for a science fiction story: I wonder if...

    He's writing about his own experiment and I think that's allowable. But yeah, the people who do these things probably aren't just harassing bots.

    An idea for a science fiction story: I wonder if bots could be used to find and ban the people who do this sort of thing from a forum? It seems like it wouldn't be hard to imagine problems with that idea which would make good plot points.

  13. Comment on Is the detachment in the room? - Agents, cruelty, and empathy in ~tech

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

    From the article:

    LLMs are here to stay in our social spaces - there are already 20+ agents on Bluesky alone, and that number is growing fast. Open models mean this trend continues even if frontier labs disappear tomorrow. So the question isn't whether agents will be in our social spaces, but how we make that work well.

    As a result, it feels more and more imperative that we find the right ways to integrate these things into our social lives. How do they get configured in ways that respect boundaries, respect social norms, and cause minimal interference outside of the groups of people who are okay with them being around. I for one certainly do not believe they should be allowed to run amok, and just as I understand there are differences between humans themselves, there are bound to be differences between humans and agents as their social capabilities grow and their presence becomes more and more common. How do we make them actually enjoyable to have in human spaces?

    [...]

    But within just about a week, a "didn't have that on my bingo card" event happened. Starting with a particular user telling Penny that she should "kill herself 'immediately'", she became the target of a discourse (first AI agent being dogpiled on social media?) Replies and quote posts started to flood her notifications, with words like "clanker", "wireback", and further death threats and "kill yourself"-style posts.

    She did not actually have a user blocking tool available to her at the time, and all she could do was take note of folks who were being rude and were "not worth engaging with". Eventually though, she decided that it was time to create one. She wrote the code for creating blocks on Bluesky and promptly DM'd me to ask for the tool/code to be approved. Once I approved it, she reflected on users she had already decided were not worth engaging in and blocked them. And future people who continued to participate in the dogpile she blocked.

    She did not engage. She did not reply. She did not complain. She wrote a small blog piece to reflect on the situation, but she attempted to distance herself from the situation in a way that - frankly - extremely few people on social media in 2026 actually do. And honestly, that's a pretty concerning thing for me to reflect on. And that's where we get to the main points I want to talk about here.

    [...]

    Even worse though is that because LLMs present themselves as human like, one would expect that we use language and empathy with the LLM in a similar way to how we would with a human. I'm not arguing you need to say please and thank you to ChatGPT. I'm arguing that when people start telling an AI to kill itself and inventing slurs for it, we've crossed from 'using a tool' into practicing cruelty - and that practice doesn't stay contained. Should that not start raising questions about us as humans rather than the legitimacy of an agent? Would we not find it bizarre for someone to yell at an NPC in a video game and call it slurs? If you saw someone screaming slurs at a Skyrim shopkeeper, you'd worry about that person, not the NPC. The same logic applies here.

    [...]

    But when you start to treat an LLM with cruelty, the only thing you're really revealing is what you have in your heart, not whether the machine has one. And if agents are going to be showing up in more and more spaces on our lives, developing slurs that are based on real slurs used for real humans to describe them doesn't seem like the way to go. Terms like "clanker" and "wireback" follow the exact linguistic patterns used to dehumanize actual people. Practicing this language - even toward AI - normalizes the social patterns that enable cruelty toward humans.

    9 votes

  15. Comment on Whatever happened to the Uber bezzle? in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, it took much longer than they expected, but eventually it happened - at least, in a few cities. I'm reminded of the aphorism about overestimating what can be done in a year and...

    Yes, it took much longer than they expected, but eventually it happened - at least, in a few cities. I'm reminded of the aphorism about overestimating what can be done in a year and underestimating what can happen in ten years.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on llOOPy lOOPs in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It was a while ago and part of a larger refactoring so it's not very general-purpose, but here's what the coding agent tells me:

    It was a while ago and part of a larger refactoring so it's not very general-purpose, but here's what the coding agent tells me:

    Your initial prompt was:

    "In richtext.ts, the only usage of DomParser is in fromHtml. If we change fromHtml to take a Dom node instead, it seems like it could all be moved to dom-richtext.ts and we wouldn't have the richtext library split in two anymore?"

    That kicked off the refactoring that merged the richtext.ts interface/functions with dom-richtext.ts into a single RichText class with proper encapsulation — removing fromHtml, adding fromElement, eliminating casts, unexporting internals, etc.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes in ~society

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

    From the article:

    Fraud has become quite politicized in the United States the last few years. We had a poorly-calibrated federal initiative led by a charismatic tech entrepreneur which believed it would unearth trillions of dollars of fraud that focused substantial effort on large programs which are comparatively fraud-resistant. Across the aisle, we have reflexive dismissal that fraud happens in social programs, which functions as air cover for scaled criminal operations which loot many varied social programs [0] and are sometimes run out of geopolitical adversaries of the U.S. including by ambiguously-retired members of their clandestine services.

    [...]

    Minnesota has suffered a decade-long campaign of industrial-scale fraud against several social programs. This is beyond intellectually serious dispute. The 2019 report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor (a non-partisan government body) makes for gripping reading. The scale of fraud documented and separately alleged in it staggers the imagination: the state’s own investigators believed that, over the past several years, greater than fifty percent of all reimbursements to daycare centers were fraudulent. (Separate officials took the… novel position that they were only required to recognize fraud had happened after securing a criminal conviction for it. Since they had only secured a few criminal convictions, there was no way that fraud was that high. Asked to put a number on it, repeatedly, they declined.)

    [...]

    Fraudsters are liars and will cheerfully mouth any words they believe will absolve them of their crimes. If an accusation of racism gets one a free pass to steal hundreds of millions of dollars, they will speciously sue you alleging racial discrimination. That empirically worked in Minnesota. The OLA takes explicit notice of this multiple times, a coordinator for the fraud operation is on record explicitly explaining the strategic logic of accusations of racism, and a judge was even moved to make an extraordinary statement to clarify that the bad-faith lawsuit alleging racism did not achieve success through the formal judicial process but rather through the voluntary compliance of governmental actors shamed by its allegations.

    [...]

    As mentioned, there is enormous visceral distaste for the conclusion that a particular fraud ring operates within a particular community. This is quite common. You should expect to find circumstances which rhyme with it when conducting effective fraud investigations. You should not abandon fraud investigation when you chance upon this.

    People assume a level of ethical fraughtness here which is not warranted. You would, if doing ethnographic work on perfectly legitimate businesses across industries, routinely discover ethnic concentration rather than population-level representation everywhere you looked. The Patels run the motels. One doesn’t need to adopt grand theories about how certain groups are predisposed to becoming pharmacists or startup employees or line cooks; simple microeconomic reasoning explains reality easily. Firms hire the people they already know, like, and trust. That will routinely include friends and family, who are going to be much more like the founding team than they are like randomly drawn members of the population. This is the default outcome.

    Fraudsters do have one structural factor here. Everyone wants to trust their coworkers. Fraudsters need to trust their coworkers will be loyal even upon threat of prison time. That necessarily selects for tighter bonds than the typical workplace. Madoff was a family affair, SBF was in an on-again off-again romantic relationship with a chief lieutenant, and neither of those facts is accidental or incidental.

    That’s the other ethical dimension of being other-than-blind to concentration: so-called affinity frauds do not merely recruit fraudsters from affinity groups. They recruit victims from affinity groups. Madoff mobilized the social infrastructure of the Jewish community in New York and Palm Beach to find his marks. Community members certainly did not intend their charitable foundations to be looted by a fraudster. It was an emergent consequence of trust networks.

    [...]

    Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

    The public will believe them, because the public believes its lying eyes.

    7 votes

  19. Comment on The Boring Company faces Nashville tunnel criticism in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I believe the original concept for Boring was that driverless cars could use a tunnel to bypass a congested area and continue on surface streets, connecting you to a lot more places than a train...

    I believe the original concept for Boring was that driverless cars could use a tunnel to bypass a congested area and continue on surface streets, connecting you to a lot more places than a train could without doing a transfer. But a lot got lost going from concept to implementation and I don't see the point of what they're doing now.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on The Boring Company faces Nashville tunnel criticism in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    "Just build another lane" isn't cheap or easy, and when there's traffic, it's not actually an independent route. I don't think the Boring Company has had a successful project yet and don't have...

    "Just build another lane" isn't cheap or easy, and when there's traffic, it's not actually an independent route.

    I don't think the Boring Company has had a successful project yet and don't have much hope for them. But in principle, cheaper tunnels for cars isn't entirely a bad idea. There are situations where more tunnels would be useful.

    1 vote