It sounds great to me. I travel regularly for work, and when doing so I work and sleep with no social life. I get as much work done as possible and then I go back to my house and family. I don’t need a big room or anything really, because I’m just there for work. They obviously don’t fit every use case.
I definitely shouldn’t have to pay more for a hotel because other people are claustrophobic. And the fire thing is a red herring, in a modern city there are fire codes and inspections - presumably this is very regulated. You’re almost certainly less safe staying in an unregulated air bnb, people have died in airbnb fires.
I love the idea, I don’t expect people are respectful enough for it to work where I am, I’d be worried about being stuck next to somebody watching videos on their phone at full volume all night.
Also
Choose a cosy London capsule hotel in a shared dorm for a sociable vibe, meet like-minded travellers, and swap stories or book out an entire dorm for a private group adventure.
This is literally the opposite of what I would want. It would be great to see a privacy and rest focused concept for this, which is what I associate the Japanese ones with, a place for exhausted salarymen to get some quick rest, rather than a backpacking hostel. Nothing wrong with the latter if that’s your thing but it’s not going to appeal to anyone over 25.
In 2023 I stayed in a capsule hotel in Bilbao. There I was told at check in that no talking or loudspeakers of any kind is allow in the capsules. That can only be done in the lounge area.
I spent 3 nights and got much better sleep than I would have at a hostel.
> Japanese passengers “are going to get out of the aircraft,” Mr Careen said, while travellers in North America appear most likely to delay evacuating to retrieve their belongings.
I’d speculate that Japanese passengers expect to promptly get their stuff back while North Americans know they are effectively throwing it in the garbage, and so are more tempted to grab a few things.
I don’t think people should grab their bags in an emergency, but it’s amazing to me that airlines act like they can’t even understand why people do. It feels like common sense about a low trust society, and airlines do nothing whatsoever to engender trust otherwise.
Very much agree. I would have no expectation of getting anything back, and people travel with some of their most important items: passports, visas, credit cards, laptops, phones.
Unless I actually think I'm going to die, i.e. if it feels like it's more cautionary, I'd be very tempted to grab my essentials.
Trust is absolutely the thing that needs to be built. Trust that I'm going to be taken care of, trust that I'm not going to have visa issues without any ID, trust that I'm going to be compensated, fast, if I don't get my expensive possessions back.
Even in emergency situations, the idea that the best outcome for passengers is achieved when they leave everything behind does involve placing trust in the crew and the authorities around the situation. If you're in a situation where that trust is no longer there, ignoring rules and going for a bag can make sense, which is one of the reasons why that trust is important.
I'd prefer not to go into extensive detail, but I was once a passenger involved in a shipwreck where I did not trust the crew or the country we were in, and it was a somewhat similar situation of needing to get off the ship immediately, with the implication that everything should be left behind.
Disregarding that and instead grabbing my small backpack with a satellite phone and cell phone, a GPS system and camera, my passport, a jacket, and similar items was, in hindsight, a very good decision. Without that bag, we would have been in a very sketchy situation, entirely under the control of the crew and shipowner, in a corrupt country where the shipowner was well-connected.
Depending on the situation, it's not necessarily a matter of compensation for expensive possessions. Do you have any means of outside communication that isn't controlled by a group that might not have your best interests in mind? Do you have any alternative (eg, communication, documentation, or means of payment) if they decide to make your treatment dependent on what you are willing to sign, or if they decide to simply abandon you, or worse? Even during the emergency itself: is the emergency equipment that is supposed to be there going to be there? Is it going to be functional? Do you trust the crew to actually help you?
With all that said: going for an overhead bag in an emergency on a plane is ridiculous and dangerous; if something is so critical, it would make more sense to have it in a pocket (to be fully compliant), or at least immediately accessible in a small bag.
I keep the really important stuff in a travel wallet. It's about as high as a letter/A4 piece of paper is wide, it holds some money and passports, and I could throw my cell phone in it. The rest of the stuff can be tossed, but that's going with me.
Keep an eye out for one - the long ones are not easy to find, and the company that made mine is out of business. Example: https://www.leatherology.com/products/zip-around-travel-wall... (no knowledge about the company or the product, just what I found with a quick search).
I see your point, I do agree that it's best to go into any situation assuming good faith. The problem is that the airline industry and those sorts of big corporations have already proven that they do not generally act in good faith (at least in the countries I have experience with – UK, AU, US). They have already lost the trust and the responsibility is on them to rebuild it.
While I agree the airlines are untrustworthy, when passengers are evacuating a plane, the airline industry, the CEO, etc. are not there. It's just the passengers, and it's up to the people there to create trust.
The idea that it's ok to risk life and limb for possessions, because the airline hasn't been trustworthy, seems to me to be part of the trend of absurd victimhood and its omnipresent flip side, lack of personal responsibility. If I risk life and limb for posssessions, that's on me and me only.
> speculate that Japanese passengers expect to promptly get their stuff back while North Americans know they are effectively throwing it in the garbage, and so are more tempted to grab a few things
If this behaviour were isolated, this hypothesis would make sense. Given it exists in a broader context of Japanese altruism, I’d say it’s just a fitness advantage to having a high-trust, rule-following society.
Also, in Japan do you sometimes have trouble getting a social security card and/or birth certificate to the point of being completely unable to do so the way you do here?
I was a bit surprised by this take, because I never questioned you would get the luggage back if it survived. Having looked into it more I was pleasantly surprised that even in cases where the airplane was severely damaged luggage was returned.
If you remember the "Miracle on the Hudson", they actually carefully dried everything and couriered it back to the owners. Far beyond what I would expect.
The crash in question was in January of that year, and this article in May is talking about passengers “starting” to get items back. Important items that I'm forced to go without for six months may as well be lost. Could you make it six months without using your ID for anything?
i would bet you they would still not grab bags even if they had no credible reason to think they would get it back.a significant minority of Americans are quite selfish/individualistic
It’s enterprise software so product managers don’t decide anything. They’re just an automaton charged with implementing whatever complied with the RFP terms that were written by the vendor to wire the procurement. It’s basically a problem with central planning, there’s no easy fix but giving people agency is a big part of it instead of ramming some enterprise crap that was designed to sell to “leaders” or committees down their throats.
Meta’s campaign to corrupt the meaning of Open Source was unfortunately very successful and now most people associate releasing the weights with open source.
Actually it is more like all big corps campaigns that have successfully moved away from anything GPL as much as possible, while pushing for business friendly licenses.
Linux kernel and GCC are probably the only thing left they tolerate, and even then, it is less relevant in the cloud, with containers powered by type 1 hypervisors.
Given that it's under scrutiny for regulatory bypass, it's not a purchase and is being reviewed as circumventing those very rules. Might not even happen.
I know, I'm joking: Trump likes Nvidia, but maybe he'll bump the Chinese tax to 30% to approve this deal? In a way I hope he pulls something like that, to punish Huang for his boot shining manipulations.
It's gratifying. I used to tilt at windmills on HN about this and people would be telling me with absolute condescension how the ship had sailed regarding the definition of Open Source, relegating my own life's work to anachronism.
People slowly waking up to how daft and hypecycle misusing a term was all along has been amazing.
I think exactly like this. If I created a tool and it were used for free by billion dollar corporations to enrich themselves, I would consider it a personal loss.
The GPL is still the answer. Corporate lawyers still avoid it at all costs. The simple requirement that any derivative works bear the same license has always been the key to sustaining the movement, and the whole push toward permissive licensing has been driven by the companies that want to leech.
so it wasn't a new campaign, it is at best re-appropriating the term open source in the software community in a way communities outside of software have always been using it, in a way that predates software at all, exists in parallel to the software community, and continues to exist now
In 30 years in tech, I have never once heard anyone use the term "Open Source" to refer to anything other than FOSS.
I have also never once heard anyone use the term FOSS outside of the written form.
So the opposite of what you said, I guess.
You also seem to be saying that the term "open source" existed before software did, so I feel compelled to ask: what do you think "source" stands for in "open source"?
people need to re-evaluate their relationship with open source instead of as a synonym for FOSS, because it clearly doesn't mean that regardless of the colloquialism
and FOSS has an adjective and noun for a reason, its older than the colloquialism
The OSI definition and "open source purity" is designed by big tech to erode any value layer open source companies could use to threaten them.
New movements like "fair source", which is a form of source available + free use + expiring copyright is the ideal license. It's effectively unlimited use for customers and users, but has a baked in "non-compete" preventing low effort third parties from coming in and eating the market of managed services established by the authors.
We need to kill open source purity. Especially if we want to erode the hyperscalers that aren't even giving away the magic parts or valuable parts of their kingdoms.
Open source purity is a socialist dream while we're still living under the Empire. And it prevents the formation of a salient that can punch through. It's a very low suboptima.
I don't see any reason why you would want fair source authors to go "OSI" open other than taking their revenue stream as your own. The license bakes in contingencies in case the authors go out of business to open the license up for community ownership. That's good enough.
If these businesses were OSI open, the businessss become unsustainable and impossible to scale into something formidable that could chip away at entirely closed hyperscalers.
How is it not progress? You have full access to the code, you can use it yourself however you'd like, and the copyrights expire.
They just ask you not to compete with them for a few years.
How is that any way comparable to AWS?
Perfect truly is the enemy of good.
In this case, perfect murders good and locks you in the dungeon of eternal bad so you can think endlessly about perfect. It also stabs any good that comes along while crying about perfect.
When something has an 30 TOPS NPU, what are the implications? Do NPUs like this have some common backend that ggml/llama.cpp targets? Is it proprietary and only works for some specific software? Does it have access to all the system RAM and at what bandwidth?
I know the concept has been around for a while but no idea if it actually means anything. I assume that people are targeting ones in common devices like Apple, but what about here?
Ignorant of this NPU, but in my experience, you're expected to use some cursed stack of proprietary tools/runtimes/SDKs/etc and no, it will not play nicely with anything you want it to unless you write the support yourself.
The specific NPU doesn't seem to be mentioned in TFA, but my guess is that the blessed way to deal with it is the Neon SDK: https://www.arm.com/technologies/neon
I've not found Neon to be fun or easy to use, and I frequently see devices ignoring the NPU and inferring on CPU because it's easier. Maybe you get lucky and someone has made a backend for something specific you want, but it's not common.
TFA does directly mention the NPU "Arm-China Zhouyi: 30 TOPS (Dedicated)"
"you cannot simply use standard versions of PyTorch or TensorFlow out of the box. You must use the NeuralONE AI SDK."
Neon is a SIMD instruction set for the CPU, not a separate accelerator. It doesn't need an SDK to use, it's supported by compiler intrinsics and assembly language in any modern ARM compiler.
30 TOPS NPU is the almost-useful minimum for a device, but as we've seen that even microsoft couldn't come up with anything useful to do with it in the AI laptops. This has all but disappeared, they are pushing the cloud licensing over local AI now
Can't speak to this specific NPU but these kind of accelerators are really made more for more general ML things like machine vision etc. For example while people have made the (6 TOPS) NPU in the (similar board) RK3588 work with llama.cpp it isn't super useful because of the RAM constraints. I believe it has some sort of 32-bit memory addressing limit, so you can never give it more than 3 or 4 GB for example. So for LLMs, not all that useful.
It needs specific support, and for example llama.cpp would have support for some of them. But that comes with limitations in how much RAM they can allocate. But when they work, you see a flat CPU usage and the NPU does everything for inference.
Intuitively it wouldn’t be surprising that there’s some symbiosis going on somewhere and that there would be beneficial parasites. In reality I have no idea.
I didn’t really understand the other thread, nor did I know who Rob Pike is. Based on this, it looks like he got an automated email from a harmless experiment and had a hissy fit about it?
I also don't understand the reaction. The AI Village seems to be based on a flawed understanding of LLMs and what they are capable of but at least it is an open project and useful as knowledge gathering. Annoying spam emails are about what I would expect, but it is useful as an earnest demonstration of their effectiveness. I can understand anger at the direction of the tech in general, and there is something grotesque about the emails, but I can find much more disturbing spam if I go check my inbox. It seems like an overreaction.
It doesn't matter who is on the receiving end of this. What matters is if this type of behavior is acceptable or not. Describing it as a "harmless experiment" and the reaction as a "hissy fit" shows a lack of critical thinking and empathy on your part.
Where does this "AI uses water" meme come from? It's being shared with increasing hysteria, but data centres don't burn water, or whatever the meme says. They use electricity and cooling systems.
It's mostly not a real issue. I think it's holding firm because it's novel - saying "data centers use a lot of electricity" isn't a new message, so it doesn't resonate with people. "Did you know they're using millions of liters of water too!" is a more interesting message.
People are also very bad at evaluating if millions of liters of water is a lot or not.
I don't care about the supposed ecological consequences of AI. If we need more water, we build more desalination plants. If we need more electricity, we build more nuclear reactors.
This is purely a technological problem and not a moral one.
Clean water is a public good, it is required for basic human survival. It is needed to grow crops to feed people. Both of these uses depend on fairly cheap water, in many many places the supply of sufficiently cheap water is already constrained. This is causing a shortage for both basic human needs, and agriculture.
Who will pay for the desalination plant construction? Who will pay for the operation?
If the AI companies are ready to pay the full marginal cost of this "new water", and not free-load on the already insufficient supply needed for more important uses, then fine. But I very much doubt that is what will happen.
https://www.thedalles.org/news_detail_T4_R180.php - "The fees paid by Google have funded essential upgrades to our water systems, ensuring reliable service and addressing the City's growing needs. Additionally, Google continues to pay for its water use and contributes to infrastructure projects that exceed the requirements of its facilities."
https://commerce.idaho.gov/press-releases/meta-announces-kun... - "As part of the company’s commitment to Kuna, Meta is investing approximately $50 million in a new water and sewer system for the city. Infrastructure will be constructed by Meta and dedicated to the City of Kuna to own and operate."
For desalination, the important part is paying the ongoing cost. The opex is much higher, and it's not fair to just average that into the supply for everyone to pay.
Are any data centers using desalinated water? I thought that was a shockingly expensive and hence very rare process.
(I asked ChatGPT and it said that some of the Gulf state data centers do.)
They do use treated (aka drinking) water, but that's a relatively inexpensive process which should be easily covered by the extra cash they shovel into their water systems on an annual basis.
Read the comment I replied to, they proposed that since desalination is possible, there can be no meaningful shortage of water.
And yes, many places have plenty of water. After some Capex improvements to the local system, a datacenter is often net-helpful, as they spread the fixed cost of the water system cost out over more gallons delivered.
But many places don't have lots of water to spare.
There were people before “ai” in other industries who were like “I don’t care about ecological consequences of my actions”. We as society have turned them into law-abiding citizens. You will be there too. Don’t worry. Time will come. You will be regulated. Same as cryptocurrencies, chemical, oil and gas, …
If you were capable of time travel and you could go to the past and convince world government of the evil oil and gas industries, and that their expansion should be prevented, would you have done it? Would you have prevented the technological and sociatal advances that came from oil and gas to avoid their ecological consequences?
If you answer yes, I don't think we can agree on anything. If you answer no, I think you are a hypocrite.
In which sense is it regulated? Are they regulated in any way that matters for this discussion? Have their ecological consequences been avoided by regulation? The oil and gas industries continue to be the biggest culprits of climate change, and that cannot be changed by law.
If data centers were "regulated" would that make you happy? Even if those data centers continued to use the same amount of electricity and the same amount of water?
I definitely shouldn’t have to pay more for a hotel because other people are claustrophobic. And the fire thing is a red herring, in a modern city there are fire codes and inspections - presumably this is very regulated. You’re almost certainly less safe staying in an unregulated air bnb, people have died in airbnb fires.
See https://montrealgazette.com/news/owner-of-old-montreal-build... for example
reply