Mesh is inherently easy to track for the government though (even if we ignore DoS). You could analyze irregular RF patterns and target node operators. Wouldn't take long before people completely stop using them.
The goal is to have comms even if the government turns off their networks. Mesh networks or private cell networks do that. Some desire to get information out of Iran. Others just want to check in on loved ones. Anything is better than nothing.
Running comms during war is dangerous but it has to be done. I think the people I have seen asking how to communicate when the government turns of networks understand the risks.
I get where the author is coming from, but (I promise from an intellectually honest place) does it really matter?
Modeling software in general greatly reduced the ability of engineers to compute 3rd, 4th and 5th order derivatives by hand when working on projects and also broke their ability to create technical drawing by hand. Both of those were arguably proof of a master engineer in their field, yet today this would be mostly irrelevant when hiring.
Are they lesser engineers for it? Or was it never really about derivatives and drawings, and all about building bridges, engines, software that works?
I haven't kept up to date but does the US have that much more leverage over Canada anymore? Last I checked we have tariffs on most exports, including crude, wood, steel and aluminium (probably missing a bunch). General goods are tariff'ed at 35% while China is tariff'ed at 47.5%.
They could get us to ban DJI for sure but I'd assume it'd be more through carrot than stick, because at this point we've been pretty consistently beaten for the last year.
> General goods are tariff'ed at 35% while China is tariff'ed at 47.5%.
Incorrect. General tariffs are only on goods not already covered by CUSMA, which, other than the specific items already called out (aluminum, steel, etc.), is a very small set.
It's impressive how JLCPCB somehow made this process seem so seamless and easy for PCBs but also for other random components one might want.
Recently needed an 4 adapters in sheet metal for a project, two fabrication shops near me quoted >100$. Got JLCPCB to do them all for 12$ with 20$ of shipping. Got them in less than 2 weeks.
It's interesting that you get downvoted for what is, from a historical perspective, a very down-to-earth reasonable take.
I don't have kids but I am at the age where more and more of my friends are having kids, there definitely does seem to be something there. They are exhausted but most definitely have a renewed spark of sorts.
Unfortunately this is difficult to A/B test. So I'd avoid having kids to fix burn out.
I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it.
Like two people can't be together without being married.
But mostly it's a low effort low with quality comment that adds zero value and implicitly passes judgment on those who are not married and don't have kids.
As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
> I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it.
I should have made that part clearer but my comment was solely on the kids part of their statement. I don't think marriage is inherently different from any other long-term partnership when it comes "existentially starving".
> As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
That's not what I meant at all. The article is about how burnout is a catchall that hides that at our core we actually struggle for meaning. "When facing the existential vacuum, there's only one way out - up, towards your highest purpose". Children do in a lot of way give meaning to your life, suddenly you have a reason for suffering. It's a hell of a stretch to call that happiness, but it's definitely something.
I've worked on document extraction a lot and while the tweet is too flippant for my taste, it's not wrong. Mistral is comparing itself to non-VLM computer vision services. While not necessarily what everyone needs, they are a very different beasts compared to VLM based extraction because it gives you precise bounding boxes, usually at the cost of larger "document understanding".
Its failure mode are also vastly different. VLM-based extraction can misread entire sentences or miss entire paragraphs. Sonnet 3 had that issue. Computer vision models instead will make in-word typos.
Why not use both? I just built a pipeline for document data extraction that uses PaddleOCR, then Gemini 3 to check + fix errors. It gets close to 99.9% on extraction from financial statements finally on par with humans.
I did the opposite. Tesseract to get bboxes, words, and chars and then mistral on the clips with some reasonable reflow to preserve geometry. Paddle wasn’t working on my local machine (until I found RapidOCR). Surya was also very good but because you can’t really tweak any knobs, when it failed it just kinda failed. But Surya > Rapid w/ Paddle > DocTr > Tesseract while the latter gave me the most granularity when I needed it.
Edit: Gemini 2.0 was good enough for VLM cleanup, and now 2.5 or above with structured output make reconstruction even easier.
Same, 5800X in my X470 AORUS mobo and it's been fantastic, no desire to upgrade (already had the 64gb ram, so the CPU swap was simple, I think I got $50 from my old 2700 cpu)
I feel like the case for Microsoft inability to execute in a lot of verticals should really be studied, not saying this as a sound bite, I'd genuinely like to know how that is possible.
Their investment in OpenAI, giving them what was, at least ~1-2 year ago if not now, the best possible LLM to integrate in the office suite yet they are unable to deliver value with it.
Their ownership of Xbox and Windows should have allowed them to get a much better foothold in gaming yet their marketplace is still, to this very day, a broken experience with multiple account types. It's been 10 years.
The counter point is Azure obviously which still has great growth numbers, but that's a different org.
From the outside, it just seems like they should be doing better than they are. They have much better business integration than Google and Amazon. The fit is obvious and people are borderline hooked on excel. Why aren't they dominating completely?
Netflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me.
Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.
They claim that streaming over WiFi to a single mobile device is 37W:
Because phones are extremely energy efficient, data transmission accounts for nearly all the electricity consumption when streaming through 4G, especially at higher resolutions (Scenario D). Streaming an hour-long SD video through a phone on WiFi (Scenario C) uses just 0.037 kWh – 170 times less than the estimate from the Shift Project.
They might be folding in wider internet energy usage?
It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest.
My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic.
> I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people. What can be done?
Why? We are gregarious animals, we need social connections. ChatGPT has guardrails that keep this mostly safe and helps with the loneliness epidemic.
It's not like people doing this are likely thriving socially in the first place, better with ChatGPT than on some forum à la 4chan that will radicalize them.
I feel like this will be one of the "breaks" between generations where millennial and GenZ will be purist and call human-to-human real connections while anything with "AI" is inherently fake and unhealthy whereas Alpha and Beta will treat it as a normal part of their lives.
The tech industry's capacity to rationalize anything, including psychosis, as long as it can make money off it is truly incredible. Even the temporarily embarrassed founders that populate this message board do it openly.
> Even the temporarily embarrassed founders that populate this message board do it openly.
Not a wannabe founder, I don't even use LLMs aside from Cursor. It's a bit disheartening that instead of trying to engage at all with a thought provoking idea you went straight for the ad hominem.
There is plenty to disagree with, plenty of counter-arguments to what I wrote. You could have argued that human connection is special or exceptional even, anything really. Instead I get "temporarily embarrassed founders".
Whether you accept it or not, the phenomenon of using LLMs as a friend is getting common because they are good enough for human to get attached to. Dismissing it as psychosis is reductive.
Thinking that a text completion algorithm is your friend, or can be your friend, indicates some detachment from reality (or some truly extraordinary capability of the algorithm?). People don't have that reaction with other algorithms.
Maybe what we're really debating here isn't whether it's psychosis on the part of the human, it's whether there is something "there" on the part of the computer.
We need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for all of this someday, and a lot of people will need to be behind bars, if there be any healing to be done.
If you read through that list and dismiss it as people who were already mentally ill or more susceptible to this... that's what Dr. K (psychiatrist) assumed too until he looked at some recent studies:
https://youtu.be/MW6FMgOzklw?si=JgpqLzMeaBLGuAAE
Clickbait title, but well researched and explained.
Using ChatGPT to numb social isolation is akin to using alcohol to numb anxiety.
ChatGPT isn't a social connection: LLMs don't connect with you. There is no relationship growth, just an echo chamber with one occupant.
Maybe it's a little healthier for society overall if people become withdrawn to the point of suicide by spiralling deeper into loneliness with an AI chat instead of being radicalised to mass murder by forum bots and propagandists, but those are not the only two options out there.
Join a club. It doesn't really matter what it's for, so long as you like the general gist of it (and, you know, it's not "plot terrorism"). Sit in the corner and do the club thing, and social connections will form whether you want them to or not. Be a choir nerd, be a bonsai nut, do macrame, do crossfit, find a niche thing you like that you can do in a group setting, and loneliness will fade.
Numbing it will just make it hurt worse when the feeling returns, and it'll seem like the only answer is more numbing.
This is an interesting point. Personally, I am neutral on it. I'm not sure why it has received so many downvotes.
You raise a good point about a forum with real people that can radicalise someone. I would offer a dark alternative: It is only a matter of time when forums are essentially replaced by an AI-generated product that is finely tuned to each participant. Something a bit like Ready Player One.
Your last paragraph: What is the meaning of "Alpha and Beta"? I only know it from the context of Red Pill dating advice.
Gen Alpha is people born roughly 2010-2020, younger than gen Z, raised on social media and smartphones. Gen Beta is proposed for people being born now.
Radicalising forums are already filled with bots, but there's no need to finely tune them to each participant because group behaviours are already well understood and easily manipulated.
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