picafrost (u/picafrost)

picafrost commented on New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely lafollette.wisc.edu/news/... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

9dev · a day ago

Fair enough. If we reach a point where we’ve discovered all fundamental truths of the universe and no more knowledge is helping towards solutions we need, then yes, that may imply awareness of the plateau; I’ll give you that. It also seems fantastically far away, so much so that it seems an exercise in futility to speculate about it.

picafrost · 20 hours ago

We didn't need to discover every mathematical truth to discover that there are limits to what we can mathematically prove. Nor did we need to discover every algorithm to know that we can't determine if a program will halt. Both of these have helped understand where plateaus exist in their respective domains. We don't need to enumerate every truth to understand that there are some things we cannot do.

picafrost commented on Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy anthropic.com/news/update... · Posted by u/porridgeraisin

gloosx · 2 days ago

>Anthropic has had the most reasonable business model

Is this a joke? Anthropic burned $5.6 billion in 2024 and is expected to lose about $3 billion this year and it's reasonable business model?

picafrost · a day ago

I didn't claim they are profitable. There are endless articles about how it is not and may never be. But compared to the burn of OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Google, etc, it is burning billions less and focusing on a niche with demonstrated use cases and customers.

picafrost commented on How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs? data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-al... · Posted by u/aerodog

wildzzz · a day ago

Owning a gTLD isn't the same as registering a trademark. It's on par with petitioning the local government to rename the street your business is on to your business name. There's an incentive to fight for your trademark, Apple would probably sue anyone starting a business with the word Apple in it if there was any chance that the company does anything with technology. However, Apple has no ownership of the word Apple. I could start a pick your own apple orchard called Apple Farms and buy the gTLD so I could have pickyourown.apple.

picafrost · a day ago

I agree that owning a gTLD is not the same as registering a trademark, but I'm claiming that to a company it's the same as protecting their trademark. For the same reason that companies register their names on every new social networking website, even if they don't actively use it.

To give a slightly ridiculous example (just for fun), just as someone could make pickyourown.apple they could also register tim.apple and start an excellent phishing campaign.

picafrost commented on New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely lafollette.wisc.edu/news/... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

9dev · a day ago

This realisation is by definition wrong, or coincidence. You can’t know the future, so you’ll never know whether something will eventually come around and change everything.

picafrost · a day ago

I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.

picafrost commented on New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely lafollette.wisc.edu/news/... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

picafrost · a day ago

I admire the human belief that the improvement of technology and our living standards will be infinite. It will be a bitter moment if we finally realize the plateau we've been stuck on is not temporary and all future gains will be marginal.

picafrost commented on How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs? data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-al... · Posted by u/aerodog

uz3snolc3t6fnrq · 3 days ago

.george is a pretty funny one. apparently Walmart owns it, so you probably won't be able to register a .george domain any time soon.

https://icannwiki.org/.george

do companies even use these in the wild or are they buying these TLDs for nothing? ".brother", ".canon", ".nokia", ".panasonic", ".playstation", ".xbox", ".xerox"... there's even ".sandvikcoromant", which is some sort of Swedish metalwork company.

picafrost · 2 days ago

I wouldn't say it's for nothing. Brands with trademarks have a legal incentive under trademark law to acquire their trademarked name everywhere. Not doing so immediately risks a future legal and bad PR battle if some smaller company acquires it first.

picafrost commented on Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy anthropic.com/news/update... · Posted by u/porridgeraisin

picafrost · 3 days ago

The AI fever dream of unbounded training and inference is ending and reality is settling in. Anthropic has had the most reasonable business model of the AI players with their focus on code, as far as I can tell, but it still won't be enough.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, but even when I am a paying customer my data is taken as gratuity and used (+ spread around!) in extremely opaque ways. I am tired of it. Honestly, I'm just getting tired of the internet.

picafrost commented on Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed fortune.com/2025/08/23/ne... · Posted by u/danielmorozoff

picafrost · 6 days ago

I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave. I do not know much of anything about medical science, but my impression is that we are still very, very far from having a deep grasp of how both the brain and the immune system work. Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object.

Many tech professionals work on projects that effect people's lives in very serious ways. But a lot of folk seem to feel a bit of meaninglessness in this career and the threshold of making a mistake isn't very high. If it's an off day, sloppy work yesterday can be fixed with another PR.

Building something that is meant to attach to someone's brain would be quite the burden to carry.

picafrost commented on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android 9to5google.com/2025/08/25... · Posted by u/kotaKat

picafrost · 6 days ago

The further into this corporatized "vision" of technology we go, the more I relate the elves in LoTR who basically said "our time is over" and then just leave Middle Earth.

There is no turning back. Generations of developers will grow up thinking every form of communication and technology by virtue of existing needs a corporate groundskeeper. Government identification will be required for most things.

I don't really blame the companies, though. Unfortunately, it actually is the best means to keep a society of the masses functioning more safely online. What makes it all the more sour is that the very idea that things could be different is eroding away, too.

picafrost commented on US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices cnbc.com/2025/08/24/solar... · Posted by u/rntn

UebVar · 8 days ago

As you can see in the first link, there was a 472 TWh production of nuclear Nuclear power in 2024, in contrast to your claim that it was phased out. It didn't really changed that much - the absolute change in coal or renewables combinded is larger.

picafrost · 8 days ago

This chart shows that nuclear produced >900 TWh in the EU in the early 2000s and the latest data point is 619 TWh (2023). That's a >30% reduction with a clear trend. I did not claim that every nuclear reactor in Europe was turned off.