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re 2: special relativity is not general relativity - large elements will not provide testable predictions for a theory of everything that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics.

re: "GR environments (such as geostationary satellites)" - a geostationary orbit (or any orbit) is not an environment to test the interaction of GR and QM - it is a place to test GR on its own, as geostationary satellites have done. In order to test a theory of everything, the gravity needs to be strong enough to not be negligible in comparison to quantum effects, i.e. black holes, neutron stars etc. your example (1) is therefore a much better answer than (2)


Re 2 I was wondering if there may be some GR effect as well, as the element's nucleus would have some effect on spacetime curvature and the electrons would be close to that mass and moving very fast.

For geostationary orbits I was thinking of things like how you need to use both special and general relativity for GPS when accounting for the time dilation between the satellite and the Earth (ground). I was wondering if similar things would apply at a quantum level for something QM related so that you would have both QM and GR at play.

So it may be better to have e.g. entangled particles with them placed/interacting in a way that GR effects come into play and measuring that effect.

But yes, devising tests for this would be hard. However, Einstein thought that we wouldn't be able to detect gravitational waves, so who knows what would be possible.


Well according to the FT article that this article is based on:

a) it's $800B

b) this is the largest such selloff since April

https://archive.ph/bzr5G


> They explicitly stay around just weeks away from being able to perform a nuclear weapons test

Do you have a citation for "weeks away"? Wikipedia only says "within one year": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_progr...


There’s no citation, because why would there be?

But: if you consider the amount of nuclear generating capacity has (4th in the world, more than Russia), and its advanced space program, “within one year” probably means closer to “weeks or months” than “three hundred and sixty four days”.


> poorly designed storage layer, poorly designed column formats, and a terrible SQL implementation

Is this opinion shared by others?


Dr. Hipp has said several times that nobody expected a weakly-typed database to achieve the pervasiveness that is observed with SQLite.

At the same time, strict tables address some of the concern of those coming from conventional databases.

Dates and times are a core problem to SQLite not seen elsewhere as far as I know, but this does evade UTC and constantly shifting regional time. My OS gets timezone updates every few months, and avoiding that had foresight.

Default conformance with Postel's Law is SQLite's stance, and it does seem to work with the ANSI standard.


> Dr. Hipp has said several times that nobody expected a weakly-typed database to achieve the pervasiveness that is observed with SQLite.

I don't remember ever saying that. Rather, see https://sqlite.org/flextypegood.html for detailed explanation of why I think flexible typing ("weak typing" is a purgative and inaccurate label) is a useful and innovative feature, not a limitation or a bug. I am surprised at how successful SQLite has become, but if anything, the flexible typing system is a partial explanation for that success, not a cause of puzzlement.


Did I misinterpret the experts' assertion of imposibility?

"I had this crazy idea that I’m going to build a database engine that does not have a server, that talks directly to disk, and ignores the data types, and if you asked any of the experts of the day, they would say, “That’s impossible. That will never work. That’s a stupid idea.” Fortunately, I didn’t know any experts and so I did it anyway, so this sort of thing happens. I think, maybe, just don’t listen to the experts too much and do what makes sense. Solve your problem."

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/


> Did I misinterpret the experts' assertion of imposibility?

Misstated, I'd say. You said "nobody" but the actual quote is about the assumed conventional wisdom of the time, which is quite different. And while this was probably inadvertent, you phrased it in a way that almost made it sound like that was Dr. Hipp's original opinion, which, of course, is the opposite of true.


While nobody expected it … it should not be unexpected.

Typically, the Lowest-Common-Denominator wins mass appeal/uasge.

By not having safety checks and even typing enforcement, SQLite caters to actually more use cases than less.


I often forget or mix up which "Law" refers to which observation, and I'm surely not the only one. So:

Postel's Law, also known as the Robustness Principle, is a guideline in software design that states: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."


SQLite probably doesn't do anything with times and dates except punting some functions to the limited libc facilities because including any proper date-time facilities would basically double the footprint of SQLite. Same for encodings and collations.


Same for encodings and collations.


I think it's one of the reasons DuckDB has seen the popularity that it has.


DuckDB is a columnar database, and columnar DBs are way better for analytics, statistics... That is its main reason for its popularity, the ability to run specific workloads that row based databases will struggle/be slower at.

Nothing to do with the posters badly formatted complained about Sqlite. By that metric DuckDB has a ton of issues that even out scale Sqlite.


thats a strange argument DuckDB is for OLAP and SQLite is for OLTP


Yeah, but most applications are small. So, at the scale of most applications you can drop in DuckDB with zero change in actual performance. It still has indexes to support highly selective queries because it needs to have functional primary keys.


https://imgur.com/a/sDJTiyK

That 100x zoom looks a bit... sloppy...

The car has one wing mirror and the rear tire is wider than the front. Edit: this might be real, see child comments.

Is there someone who knows more about cars who can confirm that this is in fact, not real?


This looks to me like something resembling a 65 mustang.

If you look at some 65 mustangs they only had a driver side wing mirror as that was the law back then. The wider rear tire also makes a lot of sense, as it's a RWD car that needs wider rear tires to support the traction.

If the car in the photo is a 65 mustang, I think the AI did pretty good.


This is like using a 6-fingered person in an AI imaging advert.


This is an old classic car/truck. Only one mirror was somewhat common back then. Also, wider rear tires are not unusual. Especially on anything with a bed, since you want additional loading capabilities in the back.


What looks off the most is the fact that the blinkers under the bender aren't even remotely close to looking similar. The rest of the car could pass as a restomod, but the fact that so many things are asymmetrical between the two sides just looks completely wrong. Blinkers, hood clips, mirror-no-mirror, etc.


That looks vaguely similar to a 60s Mustang (although also has a lot of details that are wrong) and old muscle cars like that often have wider rear tires for better traction


The bigger issue I have is that when they change from 1x to 5x - car changes its location and angle a bit.


I think the rear looking bigger is an artifact of the zoom, where your brain expects it to look smaller, but it's actually the same size due to the extreme cropping


No, it's definitely wider in the photo. The rear tire is about double the width of my mouse pointer while the front tire is about 1x the width.

That said, as other commentators have mentioned, it might also be wider in real life, so not necessarily an artifact at all.


And the height?


> For instance, when you're calling an airline, it can automatically find your flight details from your email and display it during your phone call.

Is this really the best example usecase they can think of? How often does an individual call an airline? I'm sure in aggregate they get a lot of calls, but I don't think I've ever had to.

It just seems really weird that this is the top example of on-device AI. The other examples mentioned, like "finding the right photos to share with a friend", seem more relatable.


> How often does an individual call an airline?

It's a very simple example that people can see the value for right away. It also acts as a good placeholder for hotel, car rental agency, restaurant, etc. Any place you'd have a ticket/reservation for that you might need to call.


Like parent, I did not "see the value" "right away", but on the contrary, I am more confused about what the phone brings.


It is odd that they considered that a common usecase.

Perhaps they really wanted to show a good looking widget and I suppose flight info was the best candidate.

I have had some calls with family or friends about an upcoming flight where this could've saved a few seconds.

Would I want to save a few seconds in exchange for their processing of my whole conversation even if offline? That's another story.


To me it's a solution looking for a problem. Just revisit Microsoft's marketing material for their Copilot products. Bizarre use cases one after another.



Yes exactly like that!


"Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it"

Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?


Sure; but (IIRC) at the time Facebook was burning cash and the board could have threatened future funding if he refused the offer. He may have been able to get more funding anyway but the larger point is these things are never as simple as the legal docs might imply.


Yup It is power dynamics always, legal documents only matter in court.

At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks and any one of them could have climbed to the top.

Facebook wasn’t unique tech wise by all accounts one huge 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS.

FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of spectacular growth and failures in the social network space

The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP compatible language couple of years later then things like relay , graphQL, react and so on.


Where I live, the early Facebook apps were the killer feature of the early days of Facebook.

Genuinely asking, what other software company did something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old enough


Flash Apps hosting which was Facebook did then was not ground breaking at all, There were many other competing flash hosting sites .

The killer thing others couldn’t do Facebook did was make available social APIs for the app developers to integrate into their platform to make the apps viral, which benefited both them and Facebook.

OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual application runtime .


Recall that Kalanick had majority control at the time that he was ousted.


Travis Kalanick of vibe-physics near-breakthroughs fame?


Ha! I don’t listen to the All In podcast, but I did see this:

https://youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY


Those are points (2) and (5).



> In one, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was deported to Lebanon after trying to re-enter the United States with a valid visa. It was later reported that pictures on her phone had linked her with Hezbollah, which US authorities consider a foreign terrorist organization.

This is the only example in the article.


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