ikebanasoc.bsky.social
@ikebanasoc.bsky.social
Apparently GM had the know-how of processing rare-earth metals but squandered it all. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/b...
Inside China’s Six-Decade Campaign to Dominate Rare Earths
www.nytimes.com
January 1, 2026 at 5:50 PM
Reposted
some good climate/energy news:

* 96% of new US power capacity was carbon-free in 2024 (56 gigawatts!)

* 2025 included the first month ever when 51% of power on the U.S. grid was carbon-free

* The golbal trend is overwhelming: The world is now investing more $ in clean energy than fossil fuels
December 26, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted
Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens, but how? | Discussion
Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens, but how? | ngrok blog
A far more detailed explanation of prompt caching than anyone asked for.
ngrok.com
December 19, 2025 at 5:40 AM
How much goodwill has Invesco destroyed by bombarding everyone relentlessly for the upcoming QQQ shareholder vote?
December 8, 2025 at 8:39 PM
European hotels can learn to do air conditioning properly from American hotels but American hotels can learn to adopt the heated towel radiator in bathroom (you get a perfectly dry towel every time you go back to use it).
November 28, 2025 at 7:44 AM
Reposted
HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops' CPUs | Discussion
HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs
HEVC licensing gets more expensive in January.
arstechnica.com
November 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted
CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns | Discussion
Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with 'suspicious' travel patterns
The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious.
apnews.com
November 20, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Credit where it’s due: USPS accidentally put a package of mine on hold. I file a service request online using just the tracking number. Within the next business day, they resolve it promptly and the lady from local post office left a voicemail apologizing!
November 15, 2025 at 10:05 PM
I can see banning single-use plastic bottles completely but what is the point of this except to annoy everyone? It has the same effect as those GDPR-compliant “Allow cookies” pop-ups.
November 2, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Reposted
Wrote up my first impressions of ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI's new browser - I remain unconvinced by the entire category of "browser agents", the security and privacy challenges still feel insurmountable to me simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/21/...
Introducing ChatGPT Atlas
Last year OpenAI hired Chrome engineer Darin Fisher, which sparked speculation they might have their own browser in the pipeline. Today it arrived. ChatGPT Atlas is a Mac-only web browser …
simonwillison.net
October 21, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted
I am living for the sumo wrestlers having fun playing tourists while preparing for the sumo tournament in London
October 18, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Good overview of how the current employer-based health insurance system came into place in the USA after WWII due to an attempt by the government to control inflation by freezing wages. But they allowed a loophole - pensions and healthcare were exempt.
open.substack.com/pub/notborin...
Thatch
Curing American healthcare through incentives and choice
open.substack.com
October 6, 2025 at 12:21 AM
This is weird. I have a brand-new Win11 laptop (Intel Core Ultra 7 258V). It has a 1TB SK Hynix PC801 NVMe SSD. The spec sheet says the SSD can do 1+ million write IOPS. But if I run a disk benchmark, I only get 80k 4KB write IOPS. Seq write speed is good.
www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/sk...
September 28, 2025 at 2:36 AM
I have the setting in iOS 18.6.2 to retain messages only for 30 days and yet iOS doesn’t seem to clean up old messages for months. This bug has been there in iOS for a while now.

The workaround is to change the setting and then change it back to 30 days and it will GC older messages instantly.
August 27, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Japan should allow American cars to be sold there with no new safety certification and no tariffs and in return be able to sell Japanese ‘kei cars’ in USA. GM & Ford will quickly realize how popular ‘kei trucks’ are with American consumers. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/b...
Does Japan Want American Cars? Trump’s Push to Open Foreign Markets Faces Test.
www.nytimes.com
August 6, 2025 at 1:16 AM
All this talk of AGI being very near meanwhile Ring notifies me for the 10th time in a day about “person detected” and it’s just the plants moving in the wind.
July 24, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Paper from JetBrain folks describing how they shipped a local model for single-line code completion in their Python IDE that's based on GPT-2.

arxiv.org/abs/2405.087...
Full Line Code Completion: Bringing AI to Desktop
In recent years, several industrial solutions for the problem of multi-token code completion appeared, each making a great advance in the area but mostly focusing on cloud-based runtime and avoiding w...
arxiv.org
July 18, 2025 at 1:50 AM
All of this talk about AGI, but when is your agentic AI going to be able to file my taxes for me? It should be able to automatically download all my tax forms from banks/brokerages and W-2s and generate the return. I pay my accountant $1k for this service every year.
July 18, 2025 at 1:23 AM
How Republicans Supersized Silicon Valley’s Favorite Tax Break www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/u...
How Republicans Supersized Silicon Valley’s Favorite Tax Break
www.nytimes.com
July 17, 2025 at 3:28 AM
Reposted
The New York Times wants your private ChatGPT history – even the deleted parts | Discussion
The New York Times wants your private ChatGPT history — even the parts you’ve deleted 
Today it’s ChatGPT. Tomorrow it could be your cleared browser history or your location data. The precedent is terrifying.
thehill.com
July 8, 2025 at 8:40 AM