> In 1965, Widlar left Fairchild to work at National Semiconductor. While there, he released his design for the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator, the LM109. This finding came at a time when engineers hotly debated whether it was possible to develop a high-power regulator on a single chip.
> Widlar, established as an engineering genius in 1969, wrote a paper settling the debate, claiming temperature swings and packaging limitations made the device impossible. The industry took his word for it and stopped all efforts to build such a device. However, in 1970, Widlar shocked his contemporaries with the 20-W LM109, the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator. The device included all of the features Widlar had claimed were impossible just one year prior.
"Quite common"? I've spent more than 3 decades here, visited most of the countries on the western side, both north and south (although embarrassingly little eastern parts), and have not seen this once in my life. Thinking about it, I haven't seen this anywhere in the world.
You will usually see these in public places that have no other access controls - think in a park, rather than in a restaurant. It's for places that have a high risk of people sleeping in them.
Yeah, I do visit public bathrooms from time to time, especially in Spain, Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden, and never seen that once anywhere, although I've seen much worse things on single occasions than a timer for the door to open.
I've seen them in some of the shadier parks in the Netherlands, Italy and Austria. Yppenplatz, Vienna, has a particularly nasty (smelling) one which the countdown clock does very little to obviate.
The fact that you haven’t been in central or Eastern Europe might be the key.
I haven’t seen an actual countdown timer, but many of the public toilets in Poland have time limits that are displayed on a sign, and announced by the computer voice loudspeaker. Usually it’s 30 minutes though IIRC.
I'm not going to pile on since there is already a handful of comments stating the same, but I think we can all be guilty of "This thing exists/happens specifically where I and most people I interact with live, so it must be common (in [superset])". It's very good to be mindful of when making assumptions/imprinting generalizations.
I think what's inconceivable is that anyone thinks that these kinds of questions really work. The intersection of high-skilled people that can work there with low-awareness people that can't navigate these questions in a "politically correct" (for lack of a better term) way must be near 0.
"Oh, of course I wouldn't mind stopping if we decide that something is too dangerous to pursue. I think the mere fact that we'd get close to knowing how to do it would satisfy my curiosity. Plus, if we'd be close to it, I'd probably take some time to spend with my loved ones, as the competition would likely be close as well."
It's not hard to see these kinds of questions as more than kabuki theatre. I'd put them in the same vein as those "do you intend to perform any terrorists acts while in our country" questions you get while travelling.
No that is not inconceivable. What is inconceivable is believing that group of individuals is not a small minority, and the question will filter everyone else out.
Interesting. Wasn't Deepseek's founder saying that they had explicitly decided not to focus on multimodal models at all and were going text-only because they believed it was enough to achieve AGI?
Nevertheless, as a component, we will undoubtedly implement multimodal support — and we are already doing so. We plan to develop relevant models, ensuring that versions like V4 and subsequent iterations will natively support multimodal functionality.
Earlier, the following was said, which might match more what you had in mind.
Achieving excellence in AI training does not require a global model or even multimodal approaches—by narrowing the scope of AI training and eliminating multimodality, certain tasks may remain unachievable without compromising the algorithm's validity.
Multimodal approaches ultimately need to be implemented.
It is difficult to tell who said what, since the speaker ids are missing.
The (relatively new) Casiotone CT-S1000V and CT-S500 have CZ sounds included along with fun voice synthesis technology, and are recommended as a good cheap keyboard on some forums.
It still works the same way other LLMs do, by outputting the probability distribution over the possible completions (The weather is ... (sunny (50%), cloudy (50%))). Then the next token is sampled from this probability distribution (in our example the next word could be "sunny" or "cloudy" equally likely), which can result in different outputs every run.
Could the model or algorithm be changed to make it deterministic somehow? It could help a lot if there were reproduceable outputs from deterministic baked-in silicon.
But since it's so fast you can just ask it 100 times where Bruce Lee was born, and statistically you'll get the correct answer. We could call it "mixture of idiots". /s
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