I think you're vastly overestimating the ability of 70s-era spacewalks to assemble a spacecraft in orbit, including handling 600 pounds of radioactive material
You're right, sorry I should have painted the picture in a better way because I just basically shifted the middleman dependency compared to 1password or something.
With a company ran vault, they can mess up by failing to exist, not being honest, and they have to make the correct decision when someone dies.
With Seal, no single person makes the decision when the person is gone/inactive. There's no company to decrypt anything, which is what I was trying to paint the picture of with "no company in the middle", but yeah you have to also make sure the software exists so they can check in.
The envelopes also will open when the user can no longer check in because the countdown will end and the family can use the keys to decrypt without a backend needed.
> I need to log in to your app regularly to avoid being declared dead?
Technically, until we get to a point where we still have embedded "life signal" chips, there's no way to automatically detect that someone has died. Other than those who've actually seen a body, the best we have is "not seen - at Y - for a while".
based on reading through the transcript, this appears to take 10 minutes to say "it doesn't store the entire file as one file, but instead breaks it up into chunks with erasure coding"
> But until now, each machine needed a separate Herdr client, usually in a different terminal tab. You had to remember where each agent was running and switch between those tabs to check on them. That was the bottleneck.
is it, though?
I can imagine having a local Herdr instance and one running on a remote box somewhere, but I can't think of a use case where I'm trying to juggle N different Herdr instances and that overhead becomes a meaningful bottleneck.
> Getting to 1.0
> After this update, what I want is to make connecting those machines more convenient. You shouldn’t need to think about SSH or deal with complicated network setup. It should be easy to connect any machine, anywhere, through one Herdr account.
(emphasis added)
sigh. I'm a daily user of Herdr. I don't have a Herdr account today. I don't want a Herdr account. I don't need a Herdr account.
the product is not even to 1.0 yet and already the writing is on the wall for the path towards enshittification & acquisition by $bigco.
of course, I'm sure there will be some "usage without an account will still work" platitudes, but the trend of development is clearly going to be in the direction of features that "integrate" with the "developers using Herdr pay us money and/or we collect their data" business model.
Same. If asked to create an account, I suspect a lot of us will decline and move on.
The reason Herdr is novel, IMO, is its runtime owns the PTYs and builds a bidirectional messaging system on top of that. It’s like Pi’s RPC - a very limited version of it - which allows one to hook into agent i/o without needing to invoke “$agentcli -p”. There’s a lot they could build on that, and so I wonder why a managed cloud play was first on their list.
> NBC News' Tom Llamas speaks with Tau Robotics CEO and co-founder Alexander Koch about how the robots work and the challenges of making them fully A.I. powered.
sounds like it's another "oh, it's totally a robot, trust us...yes, a worker from overseas might teleoperate it some percentage of the time. how often? well, that's a trade secret, you see"
I find it unfortunate that tele-operated robotics could be a legitimate and successful strategy. But everyone is so desperate for AI hype money that I don’t think we will see it for a while.
this is a news story reported as unambiguous fact, but only based on claims from a single source.
and that single source has a pretty strong motivation for why they might lie or exaggerate the claims - X runs AI data centers and is facing criticism over them. it's in their interest to be able to portray that opposition as astroturfed by foreign interests.
by focusing your question on "what is China doing?" you're already buying in to the framing that this propaganda is pushing - that Chinese people are sneaky and deceitful and we should be worried about what they're doing because obviously they must be doing something aimed at fucking with the US.
Are all of China's problems caused by the US then?
Or contrary to your beliefs, does people have their own home grown problems and should seek to solve them instead of looking at the other nearby tribe to blame.
So fun seeing Americans blame Russia for their issues with racism and China for their issues of bad infrastructure. As if both didn't predate the founding of those countries.
Yes. Before LLMs, I saw a lot of value in it. Building things was how I learned, found gaps in what I knew, and proved to myself that I could take something from an idea to a working system.
I worked day and night for long periods to improve that skill. I put in extra hours because getting better was hard, and there was joy and meaning in finally being able to do things that I could not do before.
Now it feels different. A lot of that work can be done with a few prompts and a short feedback loop, and someone who never spent those years learning can often reach a similar result. That is the part I am struggling with. It feels like years of hard-earned advantage disappeared very quickly.
> The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping.
if the canal didn't exist, and we were designing it as a greenfield project in 2026, that would definitely be a design worth considering.
could it be retrofitted onto the existing canal? sure, in theory.
in practice, they currently handle 36 ships per day, and lowering that limit by just 2-4 per day is significant enough that it makes international news [0]
so whatever retrofitting you have in mind, the construction would need to be done completely non-invasively, without disrupting the daily operation of the locks. it's nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be.
Its not that difficult to do it while in use, you just construct a parallel lock next to the existing ones that can remain in use.
It's even possible to upgrade a lock while in use, you just add new inlets and outlets for the new archimedes screw system, an unused archimedes screw or inlet/outlet is just a differently shaped boundary wall...
Even in 1881 all the necessary physics was already known, but I'm less surprised less informed people could rise to the top that easily back then.
I'm more surprised by the post-war 60's when physics and engineering became a lot more democratized, less elite...
> The Panama Canal expansion project (Spanish: ampliación del Canal de Panamá), also called the Third Set of Locks Project, doubled the capacity of the Panama Canal by adding a new traffic lane, enabling more ships to transit the waterway, and increasing the width and depth of the lanes and locks, allowing larger ships to pass.
Of course widening and deepening not just the short length locks but especially the long length shipping lanes will take a lot of time.
It's not about who's in charge, its about reading carefully what people state, and the goals ogled. The expansion project you posted was about increasing capacity: wider, deeper lanes enabling larger ships to pass. Now go up the thread, you will see none of us discuss that. We were discussing the absolute waste of fresh water (if assuming BBC reporting to be correct), which yes, can be ugraded without interrupting shipping, in a short time frame.
It's different types of upgrade... pro tip: if you don't understand a word that appears, and it turns out to be physics jargon, perhaps take a step back and consider the person may actually know what they are talking about.
> pro tip: if you don't understand a word that appears, and it turns out to be physics jargon, perhaps take a step back and consider the person may actually know what they are talking about.
if you're going to be condescending like this, and then on top of that imply that you have some expertise or qualifications that I lack...
go ahead. tell me what that expertise is. don't be shy. PhD in marine engineering from the University of Panama? Six Sigma Black Belt certified in water pump maintenance & repair?
> But don’t call them Enron. Enron caused the Enron crash.
it needs to come from the Enron region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling creative financial engineering.
> It’s highly unlikely that fraud at that level is being perpetuated now by these companies.
if we're going to have someone make a full-throated defense of the balance-sheet shenanigans AI companies are engaged in - shenanigans he himself describes:
> This way Meta gets its datacenter but most of the debt incurred to build it is not shown as a liability on its books.
...I would really like to hear a stronger claim than it being "highly unlikely" that fraud is occurring.
Meta is a public company. one of the tradeoffs we require public companies to make, in exchange for the larger pool of possible stockholders, is making their financial information publicly available.
so this author, or another journalist, should be able to look at that published financial information and definitively say that large-scale fraud isn't occurring.
but that's not possible, precisely because of the shell game the author is defending, where the liability is not on the books of Meta, but a company named Special-Purpose Vehicle That Is Totally Not Meta, LLC.
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