No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF.
I love sumatra but I can't figure out how to sign with it.
Readit NewsMengkudulangsat commented on Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable vincentuden.xyz/blog/pdf-... · Posted by u/vincent-uden
If you are doing a lot of miniature photographies, black paints / fabrics made with graphene are great for lighboxes.
Musou black is what I tried.
Mengkudulangsat commented on The murky economics of the data-centre investment boom economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
Every time I read one of these articles the main issue I have is that it doesn't take into account the huge shortages of compute that are going on all the time. Anthropic and Google especially have been incredibly unreliable, struggling to keep up with demand.
Each of the main providers could easily use 10x the compute tomorrow (albeit arguably inefficiently) by using more thinking for certain tasks.
Now - does that scale to the 10s of GWs of deals OpenAI is doing? Probably not right now, but the bigger issue as the article does point out in fairness is the huge backlog of power availability worldwide.
Finally, AI adoption outside of software engineering is incredibly limited at work. This is going to rapidly change. Even the Excel agent Microsoft has recently launched has the potential to result in hundred fold increases in token consumption per user. I'm also suspect of the AI sell through rate being an indicator that it's not popular for Microsoft. The later versions of M365 copilot (or whatever it is called today) are wildly better than the original ones.
It all sort of reminds me of Apple's goal of getting 1% in cell phone market share, which seemed laughably ambitious at one point - a total stretch goal. Now they are up to 20% and smartphone penetration as a whole is probably close to 90% globally of those that have a phone.
One potential wild card though for the whole market is someone figuring out a very efficient ASIC for inference (maybe with 1.58bit). GPUs are mostly overkill for inference and I would not be surprised if 10-100x efficiency gains could be had on very specialised chips.
"The later versions of M365 copilot (or whatever it is called today) are wildly better than the original ones."
I find AI agents work very poorly within the Microsoft ecosystem. They can generate great HTML documents (because it's an open source format maybe?) but for word documents, the formatting is so poor I'd had to turn it off and just do things manually.
What can you do with lots and lots redundant climate-controled buildings?
Indoor strawberry farms.
Mengkudulangsat commented on Do not download the app, use the website idiallo.com/blog/dont-dow... · Posted by u/foxfired
>app icons are just "advertisement"
You wouldn't believe the volume of actual advertisements that show up as push notifications on my wife's phone
These are so infuriating they should be illegal.
Especially when they come from apps you can't delete like your bannking app.
Mengkudulangsat commented on Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system newyorker.com/news/annals... · Posted by u/dmazin
The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine.
That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized. They are designed to have enough capacity so that the grid continues to function at peak demand. Off peak, there is a lot of under utilized cable capacity. An obvious use for that would be transporting power to wherever batteries need to be re-charged from wherever there is excess solar/wind power. And cables can work both ways. So import when there's a shortage, export when there's a surplus.
And that includes the rapidly growing stock of batteries that are just sitting there with an average charge state close to more or less fully charged most of the time. We're talking terawatt hours of power. All you need to get at that is cables.
Long distance cables will start moving non trivial amounts of renewable power around as we start executing on plans to e.g. connect Moroccan solar with the UK, Australian solar with Singapore, east coast US to Europe, etc. There are lots of cable projects stuck in planning pipelines around the world. Cables can compensate for some of the localized variations in energy productions caused by seasonal effects, weather, or day/night cycles.
For the rest, we have nuclear, geothermal, hydro, and a rapidly growing stock of obsolete gas plants that we might still turn on on a rainy day. I think anyone still investing in gas plants will need a reality check: mothballed gas plant aren't going to be very profitable. But we'll keep some around for decades to come anyway.
I do not feel as optimistic about any uptick in cables as I do about solar and wind. Solar and wind can grow through a multitude of small, plug-and-play projects. Cable projects like HDVC are still giant, long-term punts.
Mengkudulangsat commented on What to build instead of AI agents decodingml.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
I've been building what's called ai agents since gpt3 came out. There are plenty of other people who did the same thing. That's five years now. If you can't be an expert after 5 years then there is no such thing as experts.
Of course agents is now a buzzword that means nothing so there is that.
Jiro's son is only allowed to make sushi after 30 years.
Mengkudulangsat commented on Reinventing circuit breakers with supercritical CO2 spectrum.ieee.org/sf6-gas... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Isn't SF6 very dense?
Why would its greenhouse warming potential matter if it's never going high up into the atmosphere in the first place?
Sounds like a race to the bottom.
First, there's Tether > We're the only option in town. Then, there's Circle > We're more legit than Tether, we're based in the US. Now, there's the banks > We're more legit than Circle, we're banks!
Eventually, the Fed itself will start issuing stablecoins and out-legitimize everyone else.
What happened in that crucial period? Did GW manage to spread its brand awareness to the mainstream public?
Which was what got me stuck in this expensive hobby