According to a research article by David Derbes, a gravitational machine can be defined as a group of gravitating masses that have the potential to extract useful energy. These machines can exist if the masses are of normal astronomical size, and an example is given consisting of a double star with smaller masses orbiting around […]
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Reddit’s impending changes to its public API will have widespread impact on Redditors, including the death of beloved third-party clients. Independent subreddits may even go dark indefinitely, which marks the beginning of Reddit’s inevitable devolution as a platform. Reddit’s non-monetary value as a knowledge store is priceless, which is why concerns have been raised about […]
If you need a lot of storage for your project, look no further than 922.7 GiB of storage. That’s nearly a terabyte! Imagine all the data, files, and media you could store on such a machine. Of course, there might be some controversy over whether all that storage is necessary or overkill, but if you’re […]
The author reflects on their employment history at Texas Instruments during the time of the TI Explorer Project, where they worked on one of the last Lisp machines that ran Lisp directly out of the microcode. The author had had extensive memories of those days, including memories of coding in Pascal and Common Lisp, debugging […]
Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the recent reveal of Apple’s Vision Pro during a companywide meeting with Meta employees, stating that he is not fazed by the device and that its vision for how people will use the headset is “not the one that I want.” Zuckerberg emphasized the differences in values and visions between the […]
According to a new study by Julian Kolev, Alexis Haughey, Fiona Murray, and Scott Stern, startups are more likely to engage in potentially disruptive R&D than established firms since they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Patents granted to startups are also more likely to be disruptive than those granted to incumbent firms […]
Infinite Mac is an easily accessible project for classic Mac emulation created by Mihai Parparita. It uses WebAssembly ports of Mini vMac, Basilisk II and SheepShaver to enable a wide range of System Software/Mac OS versions to run on the web. The project provides shortcuts to popular versions such as system6.app, system7.app, kanjitalk7.app, macos8.app, and […]
Large language models like GPT-3/4, LLaMA, and PaLM work in terms of tokens, and OpenAI provides a Tokenizer tool while the author has created his own Observable notebook. Playing around with the tokenizer has revealed that most common English words are assigned a single token and many words have a token that includes a leading […]
most challenging part of the build process. The aim was to drill a very small hole through the brass pulley at the center, without breaking through to the other side. The hole was necessary to allow the pulley to sit securely on the stem. To accomplish this, the author used a drill press and a […]
Google is downsizing its office space in Mountain View and Sunnyvale, reportedly leaving behind more than a million square feet across multiple addresses. The company confirmed that the tech giant is reducing its Bay Area office space by 1.4 million square feet. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the addresses that Google is leaving include […]