I actually predicted a few years ago that computer vision and other robotics (the non-humanoid kind) were at the point where we should be able to recycle a lot more of our trash because of the ability to identify and mechanically decompose heterogenous materials more precisely and it appears that it has been put into practice in China.

std::move doesn't move anything, it just casts to an rvalue reference.

🦔Picnic, a Seattle pizza robotics startup that raised $53 million and partnered with Domino's, just shut down. The company sold its IP to an unnamed buyer and left at least one restaurant owner stuck with $250,000 of useless robots. Zume Pizza did the same thing in 2023 after burning nearly $500 million trying to keep cheese from sliding off pies inside their delivery trucks. Both companies promised one worker could output 100 pizzas an hour with their hardware. My Take Picnic and Zume burned through $550 million combined trying to automate something humans do for $15 an hour. The Seattle restaurant owner stuck with the leftover hardware compared his kitchen to an aquarium of useless machines. That image is funny until you remember the same script is running across Starbucks pulling its AI inventory tool, Waymo pausing eight cities, Microsoft killing Claude Code internally, and Uber blowing through its 2026 AI budget in four months. The mechanism is always the same in every story I've been covering. The demo works in a controlled environment with clean inputs. The deployment fails because real kitchens, real intersections, and real warehouses produce messy inputs the demo never tested. The vendor gets paid through the failure cycle. The buyer eats the cost and quietly retires the product. If a pizza chef can lose $250,000 on a topping robot, the people writing $80 billion capex checks for general purpose AI agents should expect to learn the same lessons at much larger scale. Hedgie🤗

i wonder what my posts would be like if i still drank alcohol. i stopped years ago, not because of health or getting out of control, but because it is stupid to drink alcohol.

If acquiring a resource fails, then it's an error condition that should be returned to the caller. If releasing a successfully acquired resource fails, then it's a bug that should cause an assertion to be triggered.

void xorSwap (int* x, int* y) { if (x != y) { *x ^= *y; *y ^= *x; *x ^= *y; } } One of the most clever and the worst performing methods of swapping 2 numbers. Came across this gem as I attempted to learn prog from scratch, and got some good flashbacks to my second year when I found this trick, worked out a couple examples, and was adamant on using this everywhere I could!

> Enhanced Games launched in 2026 as the first “doped Olympics” > Athletes openly allowed to use steroids, PEDs, anything legal > Founded on the idea that human limits are artificial and drugs unlock the real ceiling > Hunter Armstrong shows up > Two time Olympic gold medalist and former world record holder > Refuses every drug > Sings up as the only “non enhanced” swimmer in his field > Faces a pool full of athletes pumped on steroids > Wins the 50m backstroke anyway > Walks away with $250,000 Dude is absolut chad.

I’ve taken to using a simple interview question with folks. It’s surprising how much people seem to struggle with answering it. Tell me how you would efficiently sum a large array of numbers on a GPU into a single accumulated value. Don’t need to see code, just explain it conceptually in relation to the hardware.

For about ten years, the DVD made Hollywood more money than the movie theater did. A film could flop in cinemas and still turn a tidy profit once it hit the shelf at Best Buy. In 2005, discs sold around $16 billion in the US. Theaters made about half that. That safety net changed the kind of films that got made. Since a strong disc run could cover a box-office miss, studios were willing to bet on smaller, odder movies. A scrappy comedy like Napoleon Dynamite or The Big Lebowski could rake in as much from disc sales as it ever made selling tickets, sometimes more. And the hours of behind-the-scenes extras Jackson misses got made for the same reason: the discs sold well enough to pay for them. Then streaming showed up, and the disc money fell off a cliff. Sales sank more than 80%. By 2018, DVDs were down to barely $2 billion. By 2023, a full half-year of disc sales added up to about $754 million, less than a tenth of the old peak. With the safety net gone, the risky bets stopped. The mid-size movie, the $20 to $60 million film that filled theaters for decades, mostly stopped getting made. Hollywood's big studios put out 204 movies in 2006. By 2010, that was down to 141. The digital version that replaced the disc comes with fine print. When you click "buy" on a movie, you're really just renting it. What you actually get is a license, a permission slip the store can take back. In late 2023, PlayStation warned customers it was about to wipe more than 1,300 shows they had already paid for. It backed off only after signing a fresh deal, and even that one expires in a couple of years. California now has a law, on the books since 2025, that makes stores admit the "buy" button is actually a rental. Jackson's old box sets still sit on a shelf and still play, extras and all. The digital copies most people traded them for can vanish the morning a licensing contract runs out.

At this point I’ve seen some version of the metaphor of AI as gym equipment that works out for you (so you don’t get anything out of the workout) multiple times. And I really think it’s one of the better comparisons out there. It’s simple, familiar, and people really get it.

🤯 This is scary good for something rendering in real time. Selfie-based liveness checks ask for a fixed set of motions: head turn, blink, close approach to the camera. This demo nails all of them, including the part that usually breaks for synthetic faces (skin micro-texture and forehead wrinkles holding up at close range). Without the side-by-side at the bottom, you wouldn't know it's not Will Smith. Source: Incognia

The absolute non-takeoff of VR and AR is probably one of the big upsets in consumer electronics history Pretty much everyone thought this would be huge and it sort of just isn't