It’s also not just winning the majority, but (likely, not all fully-counted yet) winning the majority by a pretty substantial margin.

CPUs in the sense of serial compute speed haven’t really been advancing nearly as quickly for the past 20 years.

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aam9744?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fkagi.com%2F

Over the past 50 years, the miniaturization of semiconductor devices has been at the heart of improvements in computer performance, as was foreseen by physicist Richard Feynman in his 1959 address (1) to the American Physical Society, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” Intel founder Gordon Moore (2) observed a steady rate of miniaturization and predicted (3) that the number of transistors per computer chip would double every 2 years—a cadence, called Moore’s law, that has held up considerably well until recently. Moreover, until about 2004, new transistors were not only smaller, they were also faster and more energy efficient (4), providing computers with ever more speed and storage capacity. Moore’s law has driven economic progress ubiquitously.

Unfortunately, Feynman’s “room at the bottom” is no longer plentiful. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors [(5), p. 36] foresees an end to miniaturization, and Intel [(6), p. 14], a leader in microprocessor technology, has acknowledged an end to the Moore cadence. Indeed, Intel produced its 14-nm technology in 2014, but it stalled on producing its 10-nm technology, due in 2016, until 2019 (7). Although other manufacturers continued to miniaturize—for example, with the Samsung Exynos 9825 (8) and the Apple A13 Bionic (9)—they also failed to meet the Moore cadence. There isn’t much more room at the bottom.

Why is miniaturization stalling? It’s stalling because of fundamental physical limits—the physics of materials changes at atomic levels—and because of the economics of chip manufacturing. Although semiconductor technology may be able to produce transistors as small as 2 nm (20 Å), as a practical matter, miniaturization may end around 5 nm because of diminishing returns (10). And even if semiconductor technologists can push things a little further, the cost of doing so rises precipitously as we approach atomic scales (11, 12).

Few industries see exponential improvements for decades on end. Intel did very well when everyone needed a new CPU every few years because things had improved so incredibly much.

Today, we mostly have to settle for improvements in parallelism, and software that can leverage really large gains there has tended to take the GPU route—simple hardware, but designed around much more parallelism.

As we shall see, the primary advantage of hardware streamlining comes from providing additional chip area for more circuitry to operate in parallel. Thus, the greatest benefit accrues to applications that have ample parallelism. Indeed, the performance of hardware for applications without much parallelism has already stagnated. But there is plenty of parallelism in many emerging application domains, such as machine learning, graphics, video and image processing, sensory computing, and signal processing. Computer architects should be able to design streamlined architectures to provide increasing performance for these and other domains for many years after Moore’s law ends.

Hardware that is customized for an application domain can be much more streamlined and use many fewer transistors, enabling applications to run tens to hundreds of times faster (46). Perhaps the best example today is the graphics-processing unit (GPU) [(41), section 4.4], which contains many parallel “lanes” with streamlined processors specialized to computer graphics. GPUs deliver much more performance on graphics computations, even though their clocks are slower, because they can exploit much more parallelism. GPU logic integrated into laptop microprocessors grew from 15 to 25% of chip area in 2010 to more than 40% by 2017 (see Methods), which shows the importance of GPU accelerators. Moreover, according to the Top 500 website, which tracks high-performance computing technology, only about 10% of supercomputers that were added to the Top 500 list in the year 2012 contained accelerators (often GPUs), but by 2017, that share had grown to 38% (12). Hennessy and Patterson (45) foresee a move from general-purpose toward domain-specific architectures that run small compute-intensive kernels of larger systems for tasks such as object recognition or speech understanding. The key requirement is that the most expensive computations in the application domain have plenty of parallelism and locality.

Nvidia is a leader in GPUs, and people are willing to pay a lot for new GPUs, because those are still improving rapidly. Intel is a leader in CPUs, and CPUs aren’t.

Yeah, they reported overspeed warnings to ATC and very high descent rates (first 10k, then 20k feet per minute), and they had an extreme vertical speed on adsbexchange of over 32k feet/min (which would be 370 mph or 600 km/h), and then 506 knots declining to 241 knots in the horizontal direction. Go fast enough in a dive and a plane will start to break up, like Flight 93 on 9/11 or that recent FlyDubai incident, where the rudder tore off in a dive. While it was too blurry for me to tell—it was moving very quickly—one comment on the dashcam footage of the impact said that looked like the vertical stabilizer or something had come off, and in (Florida governor) DeSantis’s press briefing, he said that there was debris spread all over, which is more likely if the plane starts breaking up before it hits the ground.

EDIT: According to this, a Learjet 60 has a maximum speed of 465 knots.

The VASAviation video that I linked to in this thread has them being warned about extreme precipitation, has another aircraft trying to fly around the weather, has the downed aircraft flying into icing conditions and turbulence, asking ATC for alternate routes, saying that they were handling it, then shortly after reporting that air temperature was -47°C, and telling ATC that they needed to climb (I assume to get out of the weather). The VASAviation channel was commenting on the dangers of icing, and the video title was “Learjet N722BD Crash in Extreme Weather (Ice and Turbulence)”. I’d assume that the root cause was likely ice.

VASAviation has a video up for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5dfFoZ_fuQ

(They do visualizations of aviation incidents using flight data and audio.)

Nate Silver had a post up talking about possible impact. Relevant snippets:

https://www.natesilver.net/p/could-haley-stevens-cost-democrats

Michigan Democrats really need to knock off the infighting

You can watch the Stevens video for yourself, but to me at least, she comes across as fairly petty and vindictive. To be fair, though, so has El-Sayed, who disinvited Stevens from campaign events. There’s not much maturity on display here. If Democrats had to do it over again, maybe they’d have nominated Mallory McMorrow, or begged Gary Peters to run for another term.

AES does have solid support at this point, which helps him, and most voters have already said that they’ve decided

Good news for AES part #1a: he’s actually been expanding his lead over Rogers in recent surveys. Indeed, Michigan has been one of the better positive surprises for Democrats lately in polls that have mostly been fairly flat during the stretch run. Part #1b: he already has almost 50 percent of the vote. In fact, Michigan has among the fewest undecided voters4 of any Senate race at 4.8 percent; the lowest is Maine at 3.5 percent.

Earlier on, when AES and Stevens were fighting each other, AES wasn’t polling so well. This is bad for AES.

Bad news for El-Sayed: look at the trajectory of the polls in that first chart. He was actually trailing Rogers back when he and Stevens were fighting in the summer before the primary was complete. So there’s at least some evidence that voters in Michigan are sensitive to Democratic unity, or the lack thereof.

To summarize my understanding of the impact of endorsements: the political science literature generally says endorsements aren’t that important unless they’re surprising, and this one was surprising. Or at least surprising-ish: tensions between the candidates had already been escalating and, as I wrote above, it hadn’t seemed to hurt El-Sayed in the polls; in fact, he was gaining ground.

The impact is probably limited by the endorsement being so late; this helps AES

There’s also the fact that roughly 1.9 million Michiganders have already voted, which might reflect something like 40 percent of the eventual turnout there, not counting voters whose ballots are in the mail but haven’t been counted yet. Now, generally speaking, undecided voters don’t vote early: rather, committed partisans do. But that blunts the effect, to some degree. It would probably have been worse for El-Sayed if this happened last weekend, in which case there would also have been more time for the story to metastasize in the national media. But now, newsroom resources are stretched thin as everyone prepares for Tuesday.

Silver says that the fact it could give AES an “anti-establishment” image makes the impact of the endorsement harder to predict, as Michigan favors that

El-Sayed has been running against the Democratic establishment in Michigan, a state that has long had a penchant for anti-establishment, outsider candidates. Bernie Sanders won the state in 2016, Jesse Jackson did in 1988, and it was one of John McCain’s few wins against George W. Bush in 2000. Stevens famously became an avatar of the said establishment in a race where a major question was about AIPAC’s heavy spending on behalf of Stevens.

Then again, El-Sayed barely won that primary in what nearly was a massively wrong call by the polls. He’s frankly one of the weirder candidates we’ve seen in recent years: quite charismatic and very bro-y. But also he’s someone who can really get his back up instead of turning the other cheek. As someone who can be a bit confrontational myself, I sort of admire it in a weird way, but there’s a reason I’d never run for United States Senate. I don’t think there’s clear evidence on how this plays with voters; it would have been clearer if he’d won the primary by more.

Silver’s guess, based on some estimation and his model, is that this has maybe a 5% chance of causing the Michigan Senate seat to go Republican when it otherwise would have gone Democratic, and maybe a 1% chance of turning control of the Senate Republican when it would have otherwise gone Democratic.

So let’s say the Stevens endorsement of Rogers reduces El-Sayed’s margin by 1 percentage point. If he’d been on track to win by 4 percent, now he’ll win by 3 instead, for instance. Or, if he was going to squeak by with an 0.5-percent victory, now he’ll lose by 0.5 points.

That 1-point swing is just an educated guess, and might be toward the higher side of my prior. Again: not many undecideds in Michigan, many people have already voted, the story might read positively for some voters, and many purported “game-changers” prove to be nothing of the sort. Weigh that against the fact that El-Sayed’s numbers did seem to suffer during the heat of the primary campaign in the summer. Let’s just stick with 1 percent.

How often, in FLIPR, did El-Sayed win Michigan by 1 point or less? In Saturday’s simulations, about 5 percent of the time. Again, AES does have some cushion in the polls. But if the polls are off, they might be so off that he was bound to lose anyway. It’s not quite that Rogers has to hit the bullseye, but it’s a pretty narrow target.

Next question: how often, in FLIPR’s simulations, did El-Sayed beat Rogers by less than 1 point and Democrats finish with exactly 51 Senate seats? In other words, a narrow win in Michigan that decided control of the Senate? That happened in 316 of our 40,000 simulations. So about 1 percent of the time, if you round up slightly.

(All of this is fairly linear, by the way. If you think the endorsement will hurt El-Sayed by half-a-point, the chances that it flips Michigan against him go down to about 2.5 percent, and the odds that it flips the Senate to 0.5 percent.)

So there’s a chance, indeed, that Haley Stevens just cost Democrats the Senate. It’s just not particularly high, unless your estimate of the endorsement’s importance is higher than mine.

https://bocanewsnow.com/2026/11/01/plane-crash-in-palm-beach-county/

Public tracking data seemingly vanished from airplane tracking services within 30 minutes of the crash.

Seems fine to me on adsbexchange.

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a9ab17&lat=26.518&lon=-80.281&zoom=10.8&showTrace=2026-11-01&trackLabels=

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Toledo_train_collision

I would expect that the Democrats are going to be holding quite a few Congressional investigations in the next two years and that he is going to have to be answering quite a few questions in front of Congress for them.

If sail-based drones become a major thing, brings back sail, a line chart of registered sail-powered vessels for the past couple hundred years is gonna look amusing.

A number of people who haven’t run into sampling before often intuitively think that a sample size needs to be some given proportion of the population size, but it does not.

Sampling doesn’t work by relying on checking a large proportion of a population and relying on the fact that it’s impossible for the sample to deviate by more than a given amount from the population, since so much of the population has been covered.

Sampling works by relying on the fact that it becomes extremely statistically unlikely for a randomly-chosen sample to deviate dramatically from the larger population once one reaches a (relatively small) number of absolute samples. Most sample sizes you’ll see in random polling or similar are maybe 1k or 2k. Doesn’t matter what the population size is (or, it does matter a tiny bit, but the benefit of covering a large portion of the population becomes extremely small very quickly as one’s sample size grows).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

To put it this way, say you had an Olympic swimming pool full of randomly-mixed red and yellow jellybeans. If you picked 100 with your eyes shut, and none of them were red, you could say that it’s very unlikely that there are very many red jellybeans in the pool. That would be true regardless of whether you had one Olympic swimming pool or whether you had so many pools that you had a whole ocean of jellybeans.

Sampling doesn’t provide a hard guarantee, but probabilistic ones. Yes, technically, it’s possible for you to get 100 yellows in a row, even if the the pool is 50% red and 50% yellow. But the chance of that happening would only be about 0.5¹⁰⁰, or 1 in 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376; staggeringly unlikely.

If you picked a thousand jellybeans at random, and got 1000 yellows, it’d be about 1 in 10,715,086,071,862,673,209,484,250,490,600,018,105,614,048,117,055,336,074,437,503,883,703,510,511,249,361,224,931,983,788,156,958,581,275,946,729,175,531,468,251,871,452,856,923,140,435,984,577,574,698,574,803,934,567,774,824,230,985,421,074,605,062,371,141,877,954,182,153,046,474,983,581,941,267,398,767,559,165,543,946,077,062,914,571,196,477,686,542,167,660,429,831,652,624,386,837,205,668,069,376. If your Threadiverse client truncates this, it’s 302 digits long.

That’s true even though in both cases, the jellybeans you picked, the sample size, is a vanishingly tiny proportion of the total jellybeans in the pool, the population size.

Vintage clothing can certainly be in fashion, has been in the past in not-so-recent years in the US.

thinks

I’d guess that one indicator as to whether it’s fashion or economics driving it might be whether the clothing is visibly and obviously from an earlier period, probably many years earlier (like…the wearer wants to highlight that they are wearing vintage clothing) or whether people are mostly buying stuff that is pretty recent and looks similar to current stuff (to make it non-obvious).

EDIT: I was gonna guess that it might be EU de minimis changes. The US did so as well, and I understand that it had a similar effect on Temu. Reading the article, it does reference them before talking about used stuff.

With de minimis exemptions, a foreign retailer that sells and ships directly low-value packages can avoid tariffs. The idea behind the exemption is that you don’t want to have very high transaction costs. But…it also disadvantages the pair of traditional bulk importers and domestic retailers, who do have to pay tariffs.

If it is de minimis ending, I’d expect that it is the economic side driving it, but that it wouldn’t indicate a recession, as it’s indicating a reduction in supply of new goods at a given price, not demand.

I don’t think that Trump is going to get an AUMF for it. His own party didn’t give him one with a trifecta in place. I saw quotes from multiple clearly-unhappy Republican legislators talking about how it’d be very difficult for Trump to get one, given that he didn’t consult with them prior to kicking this off.

I mean, I wouldn’t give Trump one either, certainly not with Hegseth as SecDef.

And if the Republicans aren’t going to give him one, then I’d say that the chances of the Democrats doing so are considerably less.

Thing is, though, I think that that’s more likely to extend it. Like, the American military rolling in in force would end the situation, but if that doesn’t happen…shrugs Iran doesn’t have much reason to stop. I don’t know who else would go in and use force.

Uber spent a decade telling cities that protecting taxi drivers was anti innovation. Now that robotaxis threaten its own business, suddenly limits on new competitors sound reasonable.

Uber has also been working on and I’m pretty sure has been operating robotaxis.

My impression is that human drivers were probably going to be a temporary situation for them as they built out their system, which would provide a strategically-advantageous position relative to competing robotaxi operators for them to do the transition to robotaxis.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber

The company has launched or is in the process of launching robotaxi services in several cities worldwide in partnership with operators, software designers, and car manufacturers including Lucid Motors, Nuro, Baidu, Pony.ai, Avride, Nissan, Rivian, Zoox, Stellantis, Wayve, and Nvidia (to use the Nvidia Drive software).[3][4][5][6]

I don’t understand what a hub would buy you, aside from letting you connect multiple devices and maybe power concurrently. You can just use a USB-C cable and connect the phone to a laptop and have the same effect. If you can’t do input to the phone, though, and it isn’t already set up for data transfer, I don’t think that a USB-C connection to a PC is going to help.

I don’t use Google or Apple accounts myself, but my understanding is that if they have one and the phone is linked to it, there’s some level of backup to the cloud that can occur. If that’s happened, it might be that linking another phone to the account will work. I’ve no experience here, but might be something to look into.

Some phones can use an external USB-C display. I don’t know whether you might be able to plug a USB-C touch display into the phone, authenticate, and enable developer mode or use a file transfer app or whatever with that.

As some comments here have pointed out, it’s probably more like data that goes into the training corpus.

I’d also suggest that some demand won’t be from AI companies, but rather from other consumers of data storage, even if a boom in AI-driven spending is at the root of things. Like, maybe your ideal storage medium is SSD, but AI-related demand has driven prices up to 5x what they were earlier. Okay, so some users get priced out and fall back to rotational drives, because those are good enough for their use case. Prices on those go up by 2x. Well, the next fallback for some of those users who get priced out, who maybe used hard drives to store backups, say, is gonna be magnetic tape storage.

The October 14 Consumer Price Index showed that overall, prices for goods and services across the United States have risen 3.7 percent over the last 12 months, exacerbated by massive increases in energy costs. Gasoline shot up a punishing 34.2 percent and fuel oil (primarily used by consumers in residential heating) has skyrocketed 74.2 percent, driven in large part by oil and gas trade disruptions stemming from the United States and Israel’s war in Iran.

“That paints a dreary picture for Americans struggling with high costs, who likely won’t feel any relief at the pump in the near future — especially as more potential military action looms [in Iran],” Business Insider reported on Monday.

It’s a pretty cheerful picture if one’s primary concern is carbon dioxide emissions.

There are three ways that carbon dioxide emissions come down:

1. Voluntary limiting of use. I am pretty confident that this isn’t going to be a dominant factor, based on how people have acted en masse thus far.

2. Government rationing or similar restrictions on access to fossil fuel. I don’t think that this is terribly politically likely.

3. Price increases on fossil fuels. This is what’s been happening.

Now, I don’t know for how long those price increases will persist. But if you want less carbon dioxide emissions, you basically want one of #1, #2, or #3 to happen, and I think that #3 is probably going to be the most-realistically-plausible scenario.

“Reddit is the last platform to provide basically unfettered logged-out access, and that’s largely because of me. I’ve been holding that line,” Huffman said. “I think users will probably go through the same understanding that I have, which is that it’s a sign of the times. It’s an evolution of how these platforms work.”

Listens with interest from the Threadiverse, which has many instances that provide logged-out access.

“This is almost certainly the largest theft of any kind in history,” said Tom Robinson, chief scientist at crypto consultancy Elliptic.

If it’s North Korea, and if they get to make use of it, it’d be over 1/6th of their GDP, which is pretty bonkers.

There was that massive bank fraud case in Moldova a few years back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Moldovan_bank_fraud_scandal

In 2014, $1 billion disappeared from three Moldovan banks: Banca de Economii, Unibank and Banca Socială.[3] This bank fraud was a coordinated effort involving all three banks working together to extract as much loan finance as possible from the banks without any obvious business rationale. Ilan Șor, a Moldovan businessman, together with Vladimir Plahotniuc and Serghei Iaralov “masterminded” the scam. Șor was chairman of the board at Banca de Economii (Savings Bank, BEM) up to 28 November 2014.[4]

Funds worth $1 billion were transferred to the United Kingdom and Hong Kong shell companies used to conceal the real owners of assets,[3][5] then deposited into Latvian bank accounts under the names of various foreigners.

The total loss from the scheme was equivalent to 12% of Moldova’s GDP.[6]

A carousel borrowing scheme was applied, loans at one bank were paid off with loans from another. The massive expansion of bank lending was funded with heavy borrowing from Russian companies.

That’d be a larger relative impact than the bank fraud was on Moldova (albeit on the receiving side, not the stolen-from side).

Yeah, I thought that Starfield was fine as a game. There are some things I dislike about it, but that’s also true of all their past games too. I had plenty of good hours in it.

That being said, relative to its time, it wasn’t as impactful as the mainline Fallout games.

I sat down to try to figure out the people who were really upset about it, because it’s rare for my opinion to diverge that much from many people. There were a couple “groups”:

• Some people apparently expected it to be a space combat flight sim and were really disappointed in that. On one hand, I get how one could feel that way if one had that expectation. On the hand, I have a hard time figuring out how someone winds up with that expectation. I saw someone disparaging calling it “Skyrim in space”, which…was kind of what I was expecting, but clearly not what they did. I do think that there’s a market for space opera combat flight sims, as evidenced by the amount of money that people have thrown at Star Citizen.

• I found one comment on Reddit about someone on YouTube who had a really good hour-long review listing all of the problems. IIRC, “Synthetic Man” was the reviewer. I went and watched it. There were a couple of complaints. One was around the fact that he liked killing a lot of people in Fallout and was upset that Starfield had a lot more major plot people marked essential, to avoid breaking plotlines. Okay, I don’t personally go around killing a lot of major plot characters, but I guess if someone did, it could be frustrating, feel like you’re “on rails”. He felt that Fallout’s world was unique, had an unusual world, whereas Starfield was “generic sci-fi” a lot like the present day. Okay, I guess I could see that, though I have also seen a lot of people criticize the world-building in the later Fallout games as being just a nod to concepts introduced in the first two, that the real world-building happened there. But most of his complaints were kinda of the hard-right variety. Like, he was pissed that women were in authority positions (“of course the President is a woman”). He was angry that there were a lot of non-white people doing things lile running the military, and that there were so many of them. Now, okay, that was kinda distasteful to me, and I was thinking about commenting how you’d expect that in a society with more population movement and such, but it did sorta make me think more deeply about why people liked the Fallout series. Fallout—I believe that the name is something of a pun, refers not just to the radioacrive fallout, but to the social fallout, what a post-apocalyptic society would look like—is kinda a prepper fantasy. Like, society breaks down, and most people die, and the people who come out on top are those who are armed and have the will to change the world. I think that a lot of the appeal of prepping is maybe because it lets people fantasize about a world where there’s a social reset, and the things that make people important or influential in the current world go away and they’re a lot more prominent or relatively better off. And I think that maybe applies to a lot of different things. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”—you can believe that things that you find unjust in the current world don’t matter. People die and there’s an afterlife and all the unrighteous are punished and the believers—you—are the ones on top. I think that a lot of the appeal of many things is enabling a fantasy like that. But, okay, to stay on track…from that perspective, Fallout was really appealing to some people because it created a fantasy world that they liked imagining themselves in. Starfield didn’t—it imagined a more-or-less progressive extension of our current world. One of the cardinal sins I think a media series can do is to try to change up its demographic. Liie, once you build a userbase, you want to make games that appeal to that userbase. It could be that the creators of the series had, perhaps unintentionally, built a world that had a lot of appeal to a demographic, and then unintentionally shifted it.

• Some people I saw didn’t like the procedurally-generated aspect of it. I think that the procedural aspect, which clearly soaked up a lot of resources, didn’t buy much gameplay. You had infinite planet surface, but no real reson to venture our over it. I think that for games to benefit from procedural generation, the way roguelikes and roguelites do, they really need to have the generated content change the way one plays. The only real “game” aspect to the terrain was finding an outpost location with multiple resources, which isn’t very interesting, or very rarely needing to traverse some more-difficult terrain. That is, the terrain was mostly just cosmetic. I think that what was needed was for the terrain to matter a lot more to gameplay. Maybe enemes act differently around it or utilize it or player abilities are tied to it so that it affects combat. Flip side is, though…while I don’t think that the terrain generation bought much, disn’t create much gameplay, I don’t see as how it hurt things much either. Not much reason to go on a trek through infinite terrain, but not as if you needed to, either.

• The main plot wasn’t great. Yeah, I do agree there. Bethesda had a history of dramatic openings, like Skyrim or Fallout 4. By comparison, Starfield had an underwhelming intro. The main questline was maybe one of the more-uninteresting questlines (though I remember people who didn’t like the main Fallout 4 questline too). I think that Bethesda heard that people liked exploring, by which they meant they liked walking around a handcrafted map full of handcrafted plot, and interpreted it as “I want exploration thematically”, which they didn’t. On the other hand, I don’t really think that the main questline was really the core appeal of Fallout or Elder Scrolls games either, so…shrugs.