I used to buy stuff from AS&S back in the day. I went to their web site to see if there was anything I might order to help stave off the wolves. But most of it is utter crap. The actual surplus goods are down to almost nothing. And the utter crap is really, truly, utter crap, like stuff bought from AliExpress.

Perhaps it is a result of supply --- lean manufacturing means there should no longer be large quantities of interesting stuff on the B2B surplus market, cutting off places like AS&S (and All Electronics, and C&H Surplus, RIP to both) from sources of material to sell. Going into places like C&H Surplus, I *always* walked out having bought something, and wishing I had more money to spend. Surplus goods places were the play-bed of makers before the term was coined.

But it appears these sorts of stores are incompatible with current business models.

The really entrepreneurial ones never touch the merchandise, and just drop ship it from the manufacturer directly to the purchaser.

An evolutionary change from selective pressure becoming evident over 10 generations seems to be a recurring theme. The silver fox, for example, was domesticated in about 10 generations: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Actually, that's exactly what we should be doing: planting gob-smacking numbers of trees, turn them into manageable-sized bits, burying them in the ground where the carbon came from, and then planting more trees, ad nauseum. Planting fast-growing trees might not be the sexiest way of capturing carbon, but it works, really, really well.

It also looks like he didn't shorten the wires to the stepper motors at all, meaning he may have found he could not reliably drive them faster than he did, a problem which could have been addressed by cutting them to proper length and ensuring the driver circuitry was up to the task of dumping massive currents to move the rotors quickly and absorbing massive flyback spikes when breaking the circuit. It also wasn't clear that he was using any advanced techniques for stepper motors, like ramping up and down acceleration, making sure each command to advance in a sequence happened with exactly the right timing to ensure smooth motion (you can hear a buzz when the motors are moving, which you don't as much when the timing is spot-on), etc. I'm pretty sure a lead-screw design rather than a belt-driven one, would have an higher ultimate driving speed as well. And now that I think of it, it isn't clear you need the full range of motion that a linear actuator provides when there are only three positions that are useful, so stacked solenoids (which can go crazy fast) might do the trick.

I don't mean to belittle his achievement -- it is impressive indeed! I just see plenty of potential to bring it to human speed without unreasonable amounts of additional effort since he's already done much of the difficult engineering.

Did you watch the video? This is an application were a non-humanoid hand has clear superiority. His manipulator design is spot-on.

The limiting factor was that his motors weren't fast enough: the linear positioning of the hands was much slower than I can imagine is possible, and the rotation speed, while better, was still slower than I'd expect. With bigger stepper motors, I would easily expect his design to go twice as fast and be in the realm of human speed. Faster than that might take substantial additional engineering, and perhaps better solving algorithms. I understand that the optimal solver for 3x3 is known, but is that true for 4x4?

Or does it break down the glues and resins that hold bits and bobs together, resulting in package or PCB delamination and your nice pristine servers turning into piles of mush?

... no one will be.

This report confirms my suspicions that most of the boot / connect / shutdown time for computers is spent in timeouts. Modern CPUs are stupidly fast. Negotiations between components and even systems should take no more than milliseconds. Any human-scale delays are indicative of a programming oversight or outright error of one sort or another.

And, indeed, you sometimes find systems that are working correctly that are close enough to instant-on or instant-connect that it doesn't matter. My current Linux laptop and my home router are a great example of how things work when they should: from my perspective, the laptop is always connected because by the time my hands have moved from opening the clamshell to typing my password, the wifi connection has been re-established. Contrast to my Windows tablet and work wifi where it takes a good 30-60 seconds to connect. The tablet is waiting for a frustrating series of timeouts that are entirely opaque to the user, and resist efforts to bypass them by selecting networks, disconnecting and reconnecting, etc.

Poor programming and/or system architecture is the only explanation that makes sense.

You can build in any shape you want, as long as it is an extrusion without any overhangs, and you don't mind an ugly layering effect.

It is correct in Modern Greek: upper-case letters lose their diacritics. Except if you're writing in the older variant, Katharevousa, which keeps them.

In other words, it is true to say that different languages have different rules for case insensitivity. You could even say that it is true even in a single language, since there is at least one instance (Modern Greek) where it depends on the dialect.

The real question is if these AI-generated questions were going to be counted in the final score, or if they were merely being evaluated for inclusion in future exams.

A colleague of mine is getting his MD, and the periodic tests they take contain a fair fraction of questions that are being evaluated for inclusion on future exams, but do not count toward the present score. Could the same have been happening here, but that important distinction being lost in the clamorous din?

As with any professional qualification exam, there is a certain level of knowledge that must be demonstrated. As long as the questions being used to demonstrate that knowledge are vetted by experts in the field and validated before being officially used, does it really matter who wrote them or how?

If these libraries are repeatedly hallucinated, do they represent gaps in functionality that should exist that human coders have missed? Do they represent open opportunities?

Peer review is still valuable. Although there are occasional inclusions that a reviewer asks to have included that are not quite on-point, for the vast majority of my papers, they have been improved by going through the process of peer review. Then there's the odd case that when I read the review, I think, "no, that's absolute shite," but, perhaps months later, I get over myself and realize that the reviewer was, in fact correct.

While there are many problems with peer review, it is, on the whole, better than the alternative of not having peer review.

For years, I have tried to explain that the value that journals ultimately provide is curation. That they do this based primarily on peer-review is important, because no journal will have the necessary breadth and depth of expertise on its editorial staff, even for specialty journals (I'm reminded of one instance where I got an immediate, hard reject from a highly specialized journal saying our work was out of scope for them; I politely responded with a list of the ten publications from that journal that were on the same topic, and the editor subsequently sent ours out for review, with the paper eventually being accepted; not every editor is going to be familiar with every topic a journal publishes).

I recognize that my view is unpopular in this forum, but peer review is important, and journals provide a valuable service. It's good that alternate methods are being tried, supported by new technologies, but just because a method isn't all shiny and new doesn't mean it is bad. Could peer review be improved? Absolutely. I want to get paid for reviewing papers, for example. Could the income model be refined? With certainty. Would the world be a better place if journals didn't make such obscene amounts of money? Perhaps so. But would the world be better off without journals? No, most definitely not.

The removal of the scene with Jaba at the entrance to the Millennium Falcon (as a human, forget the CG version that makes Jaba a slug) makes the story that much more compelling -- we have reference to an unknown, ongoing potential threat, and the audience's imagination back-fills a story about Han in a way that including the scene with Jaba does not. Thankfully, the original editors understood that, even if George Lucas still does not.

Think of the scene from Breaking Bad where Saul Goodman claims he's a friend of the cartel and mentions Lalo by name. Instantly, Saul's backstory fills with rich complications that define the character, without introducing Lalo (until the *fourth* season of Better Call Saul). It's exactly the same storytelling technique.