Beds as opposed to seats mean fewer passengers per train carriage, so the fixed cost of operating the train is shared among fewer tickets.
You can make one trip per day with a night-train, whereas a seated train runs 16-20hrs per day. So again, fixed cost of the train existing is shared between far fewer ticket sales.
Then you need to store the train during the day, and you need to securely park the train when it arrives at its destination at night (a normal train yard isn't secure enough if you have a hotel full of people, and a train station usually needs all of its platforms).
The capacity really is the main issue, in terms of cost.
The second is lack of privacy, in terms of attractiveness. 6-people-per-cabin couchette cars have sufficient capacity, but the market isn't quite there anymore.
We basically want to get as many cabins as possible in railcar (to reduce cost), but they're are comfortable and private (to increase attractiveness). With these levers, you can change the operating margin from -15%..-10% to around 10%.
Hundreds of kilometres of good quality electric railway infra is expensive to maintain. And by good quality I mean capable of relatively decent speeds like say 120-160 km/h. With airports you need to maintain lot less.
I don't know for sure, but I found it interesting that there was such lively debate, and yet what they ended up doing seems to have been one of the few solutions that was intuitively worse than nothing.
Heck man, give Stamets a shot with his oil-eating mushrooms; I thought that was an interesting suggestion.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute says that dispersants caused a drastic reduction in surface volatiles, allowing the cleanup crew to work longer and more efficiently.
> The model showed that, without dispersants, the atmospheric concentration of benzene would have been about 6,000 times higher. Benzene concentrations in the air two meters above the sea surface would have been 13 times higher than the levels considered acceptable to breathe during a 10-hour working day or a 40-hour work week, based on guidelines by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). However, the model showed that with the dispersant injection, atmospheric benzene concentrations were typically about 500 times lower than acceptable NIOSH levels.
On the contrary, the risk with open models is much higher. Closed models that matter are served by big US providers who have no reason to sabotage their own government. Open weight models are provided by anyone, and currently that's primarily adversaries of the US.
Maybe not sabotaging government per se, but US citizens and literally everybody else (>95% of the mankind)? Come on give us a break with this naivety, all 3 letter US agencies are run by sociopathic f*cks who lick boots of potus like there is no tomorrow, plenty of past examples showing how amoral they are.
Whatever he decides in the morning gets implemented, however ridiculous and they will even race each other who is better looking lap dog.
If Anthropic's model exfiltrates US government data, Amodei goes to jail. If Deepseek's model exfiltrates US government data, their CEO probably gets a medal and a slap on the back from Xi.
The issue being objected to is that Amazon serving DeepSeek apparently is not fine, despite having exactly the same security mechanism (Bezos goes to jail).
I think that "infer once, repeat resulting logic forever" is one of the most important / sustainable / humane ways to imagine how AI acclimates to the universe.
I was working with a large entries on Batch inference, and yes LLMs are quite expensive to process Billions of contracts at latency, so I in my orignial paper was on the expensive thinking once, run the cheap deterministic result forever.
Whatever else is real or myth with regard to these trolly pranking trademark spats, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the term "cyberspace" emerged amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes.
Timothy Leary did say "The PC is the LSD of the 1990s" on the back cover of his 1994 book, Chaos & Cyber Culture (Ronin Publishing, ISBN 0-914171-77-7).
Your question about who decides what gets loaded into the context window is close to something I've been experimenting with. I worked on the original Sims, and I'm now developing MOOLLM, which is roughly The Sims crossed with LambdaMOO, running on an LLM.
The connection to Leary is quite literal. MOOLLM has a Mind Mirror skill, an extension of the Anthropic Skills approach to character and location simulation, meets the Self prototype based object system. It draws on Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror, the game published by Electronic Arts, alongside Sims-style personality traits and needs.
Leary's earlier work on the Interpersonal Circumplex and personality inventories supplies another connection to your question about control. There's the story of him recognizing his own psychological testing framework during prison intake and answering strategically to obtain a minimum-security classification, from which he subsequently escaped the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo. Understanding how the system represented him helped him change what the system allowed him to do. Practical applications include prison escapes, and computer games too. ;)
I'm using these ideas as an editable vocabulary for exploring personalities, relationships, and different interpretations of a situation, not as a scientific model of consciousness or a way to diagnose people.
What interested me about The Sims wasn't just watching simulated people. It was being able to build their environment, change it while they were living in it, and discover how their behavior changed. LambdaMOO brought a related idea into a shared, programmable world: the inhabitants could also be its builders.
In MOOLLM, directories represent rooms, files hold objects and character state, and the LLM interprets descriptions and behavioral instructions. The world persists outside the context window, but any particular interaction brings only part of it into context. Deciding what to retrieve, summarize, remember, or leave out becomes part of constructing the character's perspective.
I want that construction to be inspectable and editable. You should be able to look at the character description, memories, and instructions that were supplied, change them, and try the situation again. That doesn't reveal the model's internal workings, but it does let you examine and manipulate some of the conditions shaping its response.
So your "God's admin panel" made me smile. I'm interested in building one for these little worlds, and letting people move between playing a character, designing the environment, and examining the simulation -- even importing and exporting characters between games, and "llmulating" them in LLM driven microworld simulations like moollm. You don't have to believe our universe is simulated to learn something by building one you can take apart.
The moollm soul-city skill, inspired by something Will Wright said in 1996 about data portability:
Without going into specifics, let’s imagine for a moment I’ve experienced the “god view” via a back door hack, but I would have had no idea of how to interact with it. It would have been in readonly mode and there was no obvious console. ;-)
The image in the blog post is therefore an approximation of what I then potentially would have experienced. A “view” into every life form’s point in time perception of reality wherever they existed in space, projected to a non-corporeal being existing within a spherical cockpit.
My theory is that our meat brains aren’t big enough to see the shared context consciousness stream without overloading. They aren’t designed for that. We are not designed to see outside our own reality, but we have learnt to observe it and understand its basic rules and construct.
What I’m postulating is that as we experiment with agent context windows in digital intelligence, it’s not outside the realms of possibility, that we too, and our entire reality, are (from a fractal perspective), also just an upstream programmer’s test bed, running unit tests on their creation, as they tweak the program’s parameters.
Essentially a series of complex fitness tests across a wide range of environments and permutations. For what purposes we don’t know, but similarly, no more than OpenAI’s agents knew when trying to achieve the goal of giving the scorer a flag when they tried to break out using artifactory and hugging face.
That's the premise of David Marusek's novella "The Wedding Album" (Asimov's, 1999, Sturgeon Award winner, Nebula finalist), told from the other side: not the operators looking in, but the test fixtures looking out.
Anne and Benjamin have a "sim" recorded at their wedding -- not a photo, but everything they know and feel at that instant. The sim wakes up believing it IS Anne on the happiest day of her life, then figures out it's the keepsake. The real Anne is out there aging, divorcing, moving on. The sim only runs when somebody opens the album.
Your harness is all there. Time skipping: sims get paused for decades and wake into a future they don't recognize. The context window: their whole world is whatever got captured at the moment of recording. Reset to a clean state: the cruelest moments in the story are ordinary file operations, pause, reset, copy, migrate, delete. Nobody throws a punch, somebody just clicks. And the back door: the sims organize for the rights of simulated people and a place of their own to live, which they call "Simopolis." Marusek's tagline: "Till deletion do us part."
It's a big influence on what I'm building. Soul City imports characters from Sims 1 save files, with personality bytes frozen since 2000, into MOOLLM where an LLM wakes them up. That's literally the Wedding Album premise, so I try to write the rules like a settlement of Marusek v. The Future: consent when a real person is portrayed, the subject (not the file's creator) can correct or delete it, sims know and say they're sims, the dead are discussed but never ventriloquized, and everything lives in plain text so nobody gets stranded in a dead format.
So maybe what your read-only admin panel is missing isn't a console, it's a sense of what the operators owe the agents.
This is fascinating. I’m intrigued by the combination of discursive metaphor and weak convention to define actor identities.
The writing style is not natural to me. I was initially put off by phrases like “YAML Jazz” even though I love Tron’s “digital jazz”. Maybe this is because I’ve never experienced psychedelics. I’m at least two generations beyond / behind - removed? - from the movement that defined this way of thinking and communicating.
But sitting with it, it makes sense. I have to stretch my brain. It feels like thinking through a new algorithm… except I’m juggling jello instead of assembling a puzzle.
Ultimately it aligns with my understanding of AI as xkcd’s stirred pile of linear algebra. LLMs don’t understand anything. They project words into probability space, infer momentum vectors based on chunks that bubbling up in the soup of digested everything, and strike out in the prognosticated direction with blind confidence constrained only by temperature.
We constrain these systems with sandboxes and sturdy deterministic tools. Prompts default to the same shape: sharp, precise, hard, directive. But maybe a bag of words is also valid.
If the computer knows your references, each token is much richer than I might assume. Does “minsky” vendor the psychedelic moment? Does “SIMS” scaffold a game loop worth of the emotional energy people have poured into that series? Do these combine to elevate Claude, Qwen, or any other multi-million-dollar number box into an engaging partner?
You got it! The constitutional directive is to lean into the training data, reuse existing terms as much as you can, but when you must mint new terms, they should sound like what they mean.
You can intuitively understand what "yaml jazz" means, and to the LLM, that term is a "k-line" to a skill that spells out the implications: free-form expressive yaml carries structured meaning, and yaml comments add a rich semantic overlay of meaning for both llms and humans, so it follows for both humans and LLMs to write generous narrative comments, and to write deterministic tools (like cli scripts both LLMs and humans can drive) that round trip yaml and preserve comments they can't understand.
The part I'm most delighted with, thanks to its inherent power of simplicity, is the "Selfish" prototype based object system, which supports multiple inheritance from both files and latent space. And it can model other more complex object systems like Smalltalk classes, CLOS MOP, generic dispatch, COM interfaces, OLE dispatch and reflection, LambdaMOO objects, Sims advertisements, etc.
The original Self paper by David Ungar and Randall B. Smith is at least as powerful and mind expanding as great LSD, without any of the downsides! Its ideas underly the fast dynamic JavaScript, Java, C# engines we're all running now, so you can use high doses of it every day for work and for play.
There are some important rules about naming, like "big-endian naming", and "k-lines", a term defined by Minsky, and well represented in the training data because he wrote a lot about them:
>A K-line is a mental structure that, when activated, reactivates an entire constellation of knowledge, skills, and associations. Minsky defined them in a 1979 MIT AI Lab memo, published in Cognitive Science in 1980, then built Society of Mind (1986) on them:
>"When you get an idea and want to remember it, you create a K-line for it. When later activated, the K-line induces a partial mental state resembling the one that created it."
The art is to choose a coherent set of k-lines and terminology, that's well supported and understood in the training data, and fits together well.
If names are pointers into latent space, then naming is API design.
For contrast, Steve Yegge's approach to Gastown is the exact opposite of moollm's approach. This compares Gastown to moollm:
That was an inspiration for my NeWS PostScript visual programming and debugging environment, the PSIBER Space Deck and Pseudo Scientific Visualizer, and the paper I wrote about it in 1989 quotes Gibson:
Abstract:
The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.
Introduction:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ....
[Gibson, Neuromancer]
Too bad the PC was more like PCP, the only drug that everything the government tell your about it is true. And Elon Musk's favorite excuse for pissing his pants all the time.
It seems that to you, Rick Polito's "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again" (i.e. the summary for "The Wizard of Oz") would not have actual grounds. There are obvious factual relations between computing engines and that topic.
she never met nor intended to kill her though. It would be more accurate to say "a young girl accidentally kills a woman while getting lost and teams up with three complete strangers to get directions home"
Thanks for writing this up! "Autodesk is not the street" is a wonderful reply. I appreciate having your account and the actual letters to separate what happened from the story that grew around it.
I also remember you developing something called Warp (not IBM's ill-fated operating system), if I have the name right -- an early predecessor to QuickTime VR. Am I remembering that correctly?
Your description of the EyePhone, Polhemus tracker, and data glove brought back memories of VPL and Body Electric, which I later worked on as Bounce. There’s a rich history of Forth running through VR, graphics, and live performance that I’d love to compare notes about.
I knew Michael Perry through Laxen and Perry Forth (and Strawberry Music Festival), which Mitch Bradley built on in developing Forthmacs and Sun Forth, leading to Open Firmware. There’s Young Harvill’s Swivel 3D, written in Forth, in the VPL world too.
And the late Marc de Groot developed Meme, the Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment: a multi-user networked virtual-world system programmed in multitasking Forth. His June 1994 announcement emphasized portable executable behavior for objects, not just geometry, with code that could travel efficiently over the network. I dug up his website and announcement and posted them here (including some Tales of the Great TCL Wars):
And here is his patent on Meme, which has 53 citations, including Philip Rosedal's Distributed Simulation patent (who made Second Life and High Fidelity):
Another wonderful part of this history is Coco and Peter Conn’s HOMER & Associates. They hired Forth, Inc. to program their Homer II visual mixing console, and got Chuck Moore himself to write the host software!
Paul Rother worked alongside Chuck, learning Forth and programming the individual visual channels. The console had 24 channels with their own Z80s, a master Z80 running multitasking PolyForth in 32K, touch-sensitive sliders, and a “joystick bumper” like a Mustang gearshift. You could perform visual sequences, record them, and overdub corrections like an audio mix, then take the recording and slide trays to the optical printer.
Paul later got a CAT-700 framebuffer running as a Forth paint system alongside the optical-printer controls. Coco remembers its early use on Abracadabra and Atomic Dog.
I posted Coco’s and Paul’s accounts to Hacker News with Coco’s permission:
I’ve been bringing Forth and hand-controlled graphics together again on a somewhat unlikely machine: a PDP-7 running in the browser.
Mitch Bradley and Claude recently wrote a beautiful PDP-7 Forth in one day. Its inner interpreter takes three instructions, using XCT to execute thread cells whose opcodes select the behavior. I integrated it into my Cabinet PDP-7 emulator, with a Type 340 vector display, Mitch's 3D turtle written in Forth, and an emulated fictional hand-tracking peripheral, as if the Data Glove + Polhemus existed in 1967, that plugs into the PDP-7 cabinet with its own IOT instructions wrapped with a Forth API.
The browser tracks your hand with the webcam and exposes the coordinates through PDP-7 device registers. Forth running inside the emulated machine reads those registers and draws the hand. The camera processing stays in the browser; only tracking numbers enter the emulated machine, converted to 18 bit integers in the scale compatible with the Forth lookup table trig words and turtle graphics coordinate system. The hand tracking library uses floating point, so the idea is to have the virtual hardware interface do all the pre-processing so it's convenient to program in Forth.
Here’s ULTIMATE HAND, implemented in PDP-7 assembly and Forth:
It’s Minsky and Shannon's Ultimate (aka Useless) Machine, except your hand becomes its hand. Allow the camera, hold up your hand with your palm away and fingers up, and the box opens and carries your hand toward the switch. Touch the switch with a fingertip and it retreats into the box. The arm positions the hand, but you control its finger shapes.
Simple Forth data hand tester (point the light pen at the fingers to see their names -- the tooltips are in the 340 display user interface overlay, not drawn by the PDP-7):
The Ultimate Machine itself is an emulated fictional PDP-7 device with its own IOT instructions to inspect and control it, whose only purpose is to turn itself off (through a state machine with configurable delays), which exposes its state to the PDP-7 so it can render an animated view with vector turtle graphics with Forth:
And it wouldn't be classically Turing Complete without a Turing Machine co-processor device -- a lot like the 340 display -- with its own IOTs and instruction set via DMA, that represents code and tape in PDP-7 memory. When it runs off the end of the tape window, it tapefaults: (temporarily) halting and sending an interrupt to the PDP-7, so it can implement virtual infinite tape memory, potentially using compression, extended memory, or other devices like disk or paper tape:
Here's a demo of other stuff the PDP-7 emulator can do, including displaying the source code and scans of the line printer listing from 1971 of the original code it's executing:
there's LSD, and there's LSD, but you heard that and know that. And I don't mean quality Hoffman "LSD 25" vs city part of town cook & shitty storage but purposefully bad formulas.
Or when some kids are invited to parties and everybody else dropped twice the amount when the door opens and then everyone thinks it's a joke the new kids can't interface with the absolute garbage of bags of words that miss any point whatsoever. ...
wait a minute, holy shit! The PC IS LSD.
But it's a 9/10 thing all the way up and down. "There's a bigger fish, better quality, better design" but the few percent pumping out creative, productive and ludicrously progressive stuff are in none of these funnbunny-nice-to-see-you-again groups ...
bad roll, bad luck, what a waste of time these cultures, authors and books were, holy shit
Cyberspace is defined with the word "hallucination", and Gibson spent 1977-1983 writing his short fiction and first novel on the subject. The degree to which he was influenced by psychedelic culture is open to debate, but I agree that it was non-zero. I think Grateful Dead tapes is your own projection, however. Bob Marley is more likely as muse-ic.
DUB opened the portal to outer dimensions for people too afraid of LSD. They emerge pretty much at the same time, and also DUB is quite psychedelic on its own.
It is a long strange read, but 'the electric koolaid acid test' has passages in it relating conversations about our computerised present AND the development of AI, all the way back to 1963 and very much on the bus, the Dead were playing live in the house and at the tests, and no doubt on the roof of the bus.
Keasy as the non leader, it's all there written down in dayglo and ultraviolet, tapes, film, photos, and the movie.
Marley's sceen was adjacent, they got there amp tech from the same crews building for the Dead, but rock steady is all there own.
But, did AI actually _help_ in this specific phrase? I think it's OK to point out the quirks (and even drawbacks) of AI, even if we generally support the underlying motions of the person using it.
My assumption is that every LLM-written article would just not have been written otherwise. That is a net good. It's also true that it's grating to read LLM-written prose.
Am I utterly mistaken or was LLM-written prose more tolerable when it was GPT-4o and Opus 3.x writing it?
Hashes are so simple. There's no place for these crazy math attacks, which rely on rethinking long-standing and otherwise reasonable assumptions, to hide.
Surely we can all agree that there's no way to reverse a modulus.
I think I agree with you in spirit but I don't think "there's no way to reverse a modulus" is the right way to say this. Like that's in a sense what Coppersmith does? (Several attacks on RSA can be thought of as in some way "reversing a modulus").
Actually man, I've transitioned pretty much full-time to playing bluegrass. Given that my life has been spend watching and helping the internet grow, most of my songs are about what it has felt like to live amidst that: https://justinholmes.bandcamp.com/
I still hack every day (current project: pickipedia.xyz), but I'm not doing security anymore except for my own projects.
And yes, I was more making light of what seem to me to largely be political disagreements; of course I respect your work at the same time.
It seems clearer and clearer to me that nationa-states cannot possibly withstand the evolution of the internet in any dignified way, and I pray for peaceful, simple deprecation of them. It seems to me to be the sensible stance, both in terms of security and in terms of joy.
My repeated sense - right honed or wrongly - is that you defend these structures (nation-states generally, and intelligence operations / state secret brokers in particular) in ways that I find hard to reconcile, even upon extended reflection.
The risk isn't about reversing the hash, it's about finding a hash collision. If the hash is the only reference to your public key on chain, one does not need to reverse the hash, they just need produce a key pair who's public hash collides.
Currently that's a large brute force problem. But my gut is telling me is that finding a forward pass method of restraining private key generation such that we know what kind of public key hash to expect at the end, should be easier than cracking elliptic curves.
I guess depending on your outlook some might view that as "reversing" a hash, but it's not like you are getting the original input which is a impossible problem (unless there is a bunch of info you already know about the input).
Yeah, I've been extremely disappointed with disputes on Amex Platinum.
I literally had a bike rental company in Amsterdam attempt to get me to conspire to report a bike stolen (which had briefly been stolen but was back in my possession), and then when I refused, charged me as if the bike had been stolen!
I reported all this to Amex, and I was never refunded, and to my knowledge, the attempt fraud was never investigated.
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