Readit NewsIMTDb commented on CPS investigated her 4 times because she let her kids play outside reason.com/2025/08/09/chi... · Posted by u/leephillips
When I grew up we used to play in the streets all the time.
How many hours did you spend playing on the highway ?
IMTDb commented on CPS investigated her 4 times because she let her kids play outside reason.com/2025/08/09/chi... · Posted by u/leephillips
Is that the fault of the parent, or is the state trying to cover up incredibly bad transportation and land use planning? Kids should just be able to walk to stores without getting hit by cars.
It is basically crazy how car obsession has turned America into such an unsafe place for children, and the statistics show it;
> In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school. In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school.
http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
> Is that the fault of the parent [...] ?
Yes, it is.
You can complain all you want about land allocation, but when there are 2 tons vehicles going 100+ Kmh/h somewhere and it's closed to pedestrian you don't let your kid got there. Period.
Similarly, if they are reintroducing wolves and grizzlis in a forest near you, and they close it off for trails etc, you don't organize a weekend camping trip there.
Sometimes it's about common sense, stop blaming "society and the government" for your inability to function as a reasonable human being.
IMTDb commented on XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising ft.com/content/25aab987-c... · Posted by u/andsoitis
Microsoft really put this notion under a spotlight with how they deal with LLMs in VSCode Copilot. The LLMs are just a drop-down menu that you can switch between at any moment, on a whim. They all plug into the same toolchains and are essentially generic commodities. They have slightly different prices for usage but that's about it, their outputs aren't wildly different. On topic for this post: it's very telling that Grok models aren't available in Copilot and nobody cares.
I think this arrangement is probably the future of LLM usage, and it does not bode well for everyone betting the farm that their model will be special.
Search engine are as well. At least in the eu they literally are the first thing a browser asks you when you launch it for the first time.
On a dropdown you have 2 clicks to do to change. For search engine you are prompted to using Google is one click; using something else costs the same click.
Google is still managing an outrageous domination.
Being percieved as the best is still a huge headstart. 99% of the population is not using “last weeks llm that topped AIME and ARC-AGI“. They are using “ChatGPT” with the default model selected.
People are going to switch when “their tech friend tells them to switch”. The same way they switched from internet explorer to chrome. Once you reach that position you can afford being “not the best but good enough” for a long time.
xAI needs to convince investors that: OpenAI is struggling so there is an opening to take the crown and be popular enough to get people to switch. They have twitter to help make that happen.
And they need to convince that no one else is going so much better than they are anytime soon; they just need to be good enough
IMTDb commented on Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S. spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear... · Posted by u/rbanffy
As far as reactors that could be deployed in the next 10 years, very optimistically we have:
- Westinghouse AP1000
- EDF EPR
- GE-Hitachi BWRX
The AP1000 and EPR have been shown to be very underwhelming, in the US and Europe, respectively. Those failures are prompting Canada to look at the much smaller 300MW BWRX in Ontario. However before any cost-overruns the BWRX is getting priced at $14/W recently, and the eye-popping cost of the Vogtle AP1000 at $16/W has scared all potential builders away.
If we could return to the older designs, we might be able to complete them at cheaper prices, but as our knowledge has advanced, nuclear has gotten more expensive.
The European EPR aren’t underwhelming: the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned. The underwhelming part comes from delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision, as well as difficulties finding builder with the required know-how.
Despite this both France (which has just finished building an EPR) and the UK (which is building one right now) are doubling down and launching new projects to capitalise on the knowledge gained.
In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more. This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience, causing cost overruns on the new constructions. This is not inherent to the technology itself but a symptom of our decision to put it aside for a while. As an example when I was in engineering school I remember being told “don’t do a nuclear physics major there is no job for that in the future”. Not easy retaining excellence in a field when that’s what you tell your children. All the dude that went there anyway are in very very high demand today, as you might expect.
The new generation of reactors is more complex, mainly because of additional security and reliability requirements, which is a good thing. Those are certified for a lifespan of 60 years and costs are computed on that base. Some old gen reactors in the us are looking to extend their lifespan to 80 years. It’s extremely likely the new - safer - reactors will be able go beyond that, reducing the MW costs compared to current estimates.
We are slowly re-learning to build reactors, and mastering a new technology at the same time. The more reactors we build based on that experience the more that initial cost will be distributed.
There is nothing underwhelming in what was delivered; the process to get there was, but we will get better at that.
IMTDb commented on Apple just released a weirdly interesting coding language model 9to5mac.com/2025/07/04/ap... · Posted by u/ksec
Without having tried it, what I keep getting surprised with is how apparently widely different architectures (and in other cases training data) lead to very similar outcomes. I'd expect results to vary a lot more.
I would expect a lot of attempts to fail and those tend to not be published, or gather less attention. So if we have reached a local optimum, any technique that gets close to the current benchmarks is worth publishing, as soon as results reach that point. All the one that are too distant are discarded. In the end all the paper you see are close to the current status quo.
It's possible that some of those new architecture / optimization would allow us to go beyond the current benchmark score, but probably with more training data, and money. But to get money you need to show results, which is what you see today. Scaling remains king; maybe one of these technique is 2025 "attention" paper, but even that one needed a lot of scaling to go from the 2017 version to ChatGPT.
IMTDb commented on ClickHouse raises $350M Series C clickhouse.com/blog/click... · Posted by u/caust1c
What's the significance of "online" in these acronyms?
Online means you expect the responses to come quickly (seconds) after launching the request. The opposite is "offline" where you expect the results to come a long time after making the request (hours / days).
ClickHouse is designed so you can build dashboard with it. Other offline system are designed so you can build reports that you send in PDF over email with them.
IMTDb commented on France Endorses UN Open Source Principles social.numerique.gouv.fr/... · Posted by u/bzg
Talk is cheap, did you create any PRs for the suggested changes?
This is the GH for the official LibreOffice project: https://github.com/LibreOffice
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
IMTDb commented on Fingers wrinkle the same way every time they’re in the water too long binghamton.edu/news/story... · Posted by u/gnabgib
Lol what, just try it ffs. I dont get why people make up such elaborate claims and never bother to test them trivially.
One example - I did ie yesterday shower at gym after workout, after sauna, but didnt have shampoo so just water, cold and warm. Then washed just my hair at home. Hair and skin without any oil in gym, but very different feeling and also behavior of hair when combing. Shampoo makes hair much smoother for example, also less tough / more bendy.
I sadly don’t have enough hair to actually test it myself :( but thanks for sharing your experience
IMTDb commented on Fingers wrinkle the same way every time they’re in the water too long binghamton.edu/news/story... · Posted by u/gnabgib
> shampoo did nothing to your hair
I don't know the scope of "nothing" in your statement, but shampoo does help remove dirt and oil, in a way that washing with water only cannot achieve, which is the number one goal of using shampoo for most people.
This is verifiable by observing and touching hair of other people's hair before and after shower, which eliminates the possibility of shampoo manufacturers secretly altering what you perceive with your fingers.
> This is verifiable by observing and touching hair of other people's hair before and after shower, which eliminates the possibility of shampoo manufacturers secretly altering what you perceive with your fingers.
No; you would need to touch people hair after a shampoo shower and after a non shampoo shower to see the difference.
My very possibly wrong understanding is that plain water + the mechanical action of the water being sprayed on the hair + your hand scratching the scalp does a huge portion of the work. Shampoo itself does very little. So if you don’t have any at your disposal; just does “as if”; and for slightly longer and you will essentially be good to go.