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EGreg commented on SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)   xorvoid.com/sectorc.html... · Posted by u/valyala
EGreg · a day ago
Reminds me of Allegro SizeHack where we made games in 10KB - but we were using C and Allegro library!

https://www.oocities.org/trentgamblin/sizehack/entries.html#...

EGreg commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
sfink · 4 days ago
Then they also don't get the only advantage of being in space, namely free solar energy.

You'd need to have solar collectors in a sunny spot, beaming energy to the shady spot, or something. (Beaming because they don't get to be in the lagrange point, so cables aren't going to work.) But then you're just inefficiently moving sunlight around (and shifting/narrowing its frequencies, but still).

EGreg · 3 days ago
That’s not true, solar energy still reaches the lagrange point, these tiny machines don’t need that much of it

solar energy reaches the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 (\(L_{2}\)), even though it is located behind the Earth, because it sits slightly beyond the reach of Earth's full shadow (umbra). Here is a breakdown of how this works: Location of \(L_{2}\): The \(L_{2}\) point is located approximately 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth on the side opposite the Sun.Earth's Umbra Length: The tip of Earth's main, total shadow (the umbra) ends before it reaches the \(L_{2}\) point, usually around 92% of the distance to \(L_{2}\).Solar Exposure: Because \(L_{2}\) is outside the full umbra, a satellite at this location (like the James Webb Space Telescope) is never in total darkness.Halo Orbits: Spacecraft at \(L_{2}\) usually do not sit exactly at the point but in a "halo" orbit, which keeps them in constant, direct sunlight to power their solar panels.Penumbra: While the Earth may block some sunlight, the region is technically in a partial shadow (penumbra) or outside of it entirely, allowing for consistent solar energy harvesting. In summary, \(L_{2}\) is not in permanent darkness, and solar power is fully functional there.*

EGreg commented on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers   economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/i7l
EGreg · 4 days ago
That’s exactly what Vladimir Feltsman said about me when I was like 8 LOL. He is on video here saying it… “I want him to start playing concerts 3-4 years later but be in business 40 years longer!”

https://youtu.be/lf2DWzQ-5zk

Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)

EGreg commented on OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been   jakequist.com/thoughts/op... · Posted by u/jakequist
EGreg · 4 days ago
No. Emphatically NOT. Apple has done a great job safeguarding people's devices and privacy from this crap. And no, AI slop and local automation is scarcely better than giving up your passwords to see pictures of cats, which is an old meme about the gullibility of the general public.

OpenClaw is a symbol of everything that's wrong with AI, the same way that shitty memecoins with teams that rugpull you, or blockchain-adjacent centralized "give us your money and we pinky swear we are responsible" are a symbol of everything wrong with Web3.

Giving everyone GPU compute power and open source models to use it is like giving everyone their own Wuhan Gain of Function Lab and hoping it'll be fine. Um, the probability of NO ONE developing bad things with AI goes to 0 as more people have it. Here's the problem: with distributed unstoppable compute, even ONE virus or bacterium escaping will be bad (as we've seen with the coronavirus for instance, smallpox or the black plague, etc.) And here we're talking about far more active and adaptable swarms of viruses that coordinate and can wreak havoc at unlimited scale.

As long as countries operate on the principle of competition instead of cooperation, we will race towards disaster. The horse will have left the barn very shortly, as open source models running on dark compute will begin to power swarms of bots to be unstoppable advanced persistent threats (as I've been warning for years).

Gain-of-function research on viruses is the closest thing I can think of that's as reckless. And at least there, the labs were super isolated and locked down. This is like giving everyone their own lab to make designer viruses, and hoping that we'll have thousands of vaccines out in time to prevent a worldwide catastrophe from thousands of global persistent viruses. We're simply headed towards a nearly 100% likely disaster if we don't stop this.

If I had my way, AI would only run in locked-down environments and we'd just use inert artifacts it produces. This is good enough for just about all the innovations we need, including for medical breakthroughs and much more. We know where the compute is. We can see it from space. Lawmakers still have a brief window to keep it that way before the genie cannot be put back into the bottle.

A decade ago, I really thought AI would be responsible developed like this: https://nautil.us/the-last-invention-of-man-236814/ I still remember the quaint time when OpenAI and other companies promised they'd vet models really strongly before releasing them or letting them use the internet. That was... 2 years ago. It was considered an existential risk. No one is talking about that now. MCP just recently was the new hotness.

I wasn't going to get too involved with building AI platforms but I'm diving in and a month from now I will release an alternative to OpenClaw that actually shows the way how things are supposed to go. It involves completely locked-down environments, with reproducible TEE bases and hashes of all models, and even deterministic AI so we can prove to each other the provenance of each output all the way down to the history of the prompts and input images. I've already filed two provisional patents on both of these and I'm going to implement it myself (not an NPE). But even if it does everything as well as OpenClaw and even better and 100% safely, some people will still want to run local models on general purpose computing environments. The only way to contain the runaway explosion now is to come together the same way countries have come together to ban chemical weapons, CFCs (in the Montreal protocol), let the hole in the ozone layer heal, etc. It is still possible...

This is how I feel:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DIUCiGOTZ8J/

PS: Historically, for the last 15 years, I've been a huge proponent of open source and an opponent of patents. When it comes to existential threats of proliferation, though, I am willing to make an exception on both.

EGreg commented on Why poor countries stopped catching up   davidoks.blog/p/why-poor-... · Posted by u/j-bos
orionblastar · 4 days ago
So they need a social safety net? I agree. They also need a minimum wage to earn enough to live on.
EGreg · 4 days ago
Once people have a UBI you can eliminate the minimum wage laws. People can take unpaid internships, hobbies etc.
EGreg commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
beloch · 5 days ago
I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.

Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.

EGreg · 5 days ago
The ideal would be to park the data centers at the lagrange point behind the Earth in its umbra, so they don't need to dissipate direct solar heat.
EGreg commented on Why poor countries stopped catching up   davidoks.blog/p/why-poor-... · Posted by u/j-bos
vivzkestrel · 5 days ago
did you adjust for purchasing power parity? because 5$ in the USA would buy you a street side hot dog maybe but 5$ here will buy your family lunch at a restaurant, I kid you not
EGreg · 5 days ago
That doesn't really solve things across countries, does it? It just says that low-income people can eat.

Doesn't help you to buy a Macbook, say, if you'll need to save up for 5 years. It holds lots of intelligent people back.

And it's not just about intelligence. It's about global economic opportunities. But it's good to know that food can be produced to feed an entire family for $5 in 2026, somewhere in the world. I might go stay in Bangalore or Goa for a while lol.

EGreg commented on Why poor countries stopped catching up   davidoks.blog/p/why-poor-... · Posted by u/j-bos
orionblastar · 5 days ago
> In the past, he said, poor countries were failing to outgrow rich ones because of unfortunate circumstances (“the war, bad policies, and dysfunctional institutions that afflicted developing nations in the mid-20th century”)

Or is it the wealthy exploiting the poor through low wages?

EGreg · 5 days ago
They’re not exploiting them, it is a function of not having really strong safety nets or even UBI.

So a lot of people are desperate to survive and keep a roof over their head.

And technology makes money flow upwards to the rich and corporations.

Soon with AI employment is going to become pity-employment. Make-work jobs. Because people just can’t seem to trust other people to be charge of their own time and have free money. Overton window in USA is not there yet. So capital will find ridiculous ways to exploit labor via the desperation of the masses. Maybe gig economies and race to the bottom for service providers as out-of-work people flood the market with useless crap, who knows.

EGreg commented on Why poor countries stopped catching up   davidoks.blog/p/why-poor-... · Posted by u/j-bos
EGreg · 5 days ago
Automation, d’oh

Outsourcing worked while we didnt have AI to the level we needed

It was always gonna be a temporary stopgap. Sorry, the global community doesnt have enough empathy for humans THAT far away to actually share wealth w them. At least we graduated to having social safety nets within nations.

EGreg commented on Qwen3-Coder-Next   qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-cod... · Posted by u/danielhanchen
taneq · 5 days ago
At this point isn’t the marginal cost based on power consumption? At 30c/kWh and with a beefy desktop pc pulling up to half a kW, that’s 15c/hr. For true zero marginal cost, maybe get solar panels. :P
EGreg · 5 days ago
This is an interesting question actually!

Marginal cost includes energy usage but also I burned out a MacBook GPU with vanity-eth last year so wear-and-tear is also a cost.

u/EGreg

KarmaCake day7710March 27, 2008
About
Gregory Magarshak Internet innovator :)

1. Social operating system for the Web, to liberate people from Big Tech and let them choose where to host their own community:

https://qbix.com/platform

2. Economic system for the Web, to monetize open source, journalism and other digital content without ads:

https://qbix.com/token

3. Economic and governance system for the real world, leveraging blockchains to enable local community currencies, universal basic income and democratic governance decision making on-chain:

https://intercoin.org

I have been working since 2011 on liberating people from Big Tech, and move digital society from Feudalism to a Free Market. A lot of the above is working, documented, and in some cases has attracted millions of people in 95+ countries, and translated into 15 languages. Feel free to reach out and join.

http://qbix.com/about to contact me

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