Byzantine Generals Problem
Fun CS problem: Byzantine General’s Problem also called the interactive consistency problem.
The Byzantine general’s problem considers a number of generals who are attacking a fortress. The generals must decide as a group whether to attack or retreat; some may prefer to attack, while others prefer to retreat. The important thing is that all generals agree on a common decision, for a half-hearted attack by a few generals would become a rout, and would be worse than either a coordinated attack or a coordinated retreat. The problem is complicated further by the generals being physically separated and having to send their votes via messengers who may fail to deliver votes or may forge false votes.
Qwen3.8-27b quantized accuracy chart
How bad do the results of using less than full BF16 quantization get? Kaitchup just posted results of his benchmarks for Qwen3.8 27B for quants from different tests – from Q4 to Q1.
Below 95% accuracy recovery, I consider the degradation too large. At that point, you are probably better off using a smaller model at a healthier quantization level rather than forcing a heavily quantized 27B model to fit on your GPU.
Additional discussion here.
Dave’s AI plays Tempest
Tempest Levels 1-96 played by AI
Good resources for monitoring wildfires
Wildfires are a thing. They will be increasing as some areas of the country dry out – and due to over-protective conservation efforts that have led to unhealthy, overforested public lands.
Watch Duty gives live updated maps based on satellite hotspot monitoring. It can sometimes see hotspots that aren’t there due to smoke covering, but nothing is faster and more updated than live satellite data.
Zoom.earth gives you live satellite imagery if you want to see how smoke is blowing and up-to-date images.
Global Economy
Warfare is going drone: cheap to produce, fast to make in quantity, and disposable
Northrop Grumman’s answer was to build something that spends most of its working life parked on the ocean floor with nearly everything switched off. It is called Manta Ray. It can be transported anywhere in the world in five shipping containers, gets bolted together on a dock in two days, swims out by pumping seawater through itself instead of turning a propeller, then anchors to the ocean floor and sleeps there until someone wakes it.
The big problem with drones almost always comes down to the battery – especially underwater where it is nearly freezing. Instead of spinning a propeller, this drone acts like an underwater glider. It pumps seawater in to get heavy and sinks. It then pumps water back out to get light and rise. To move forward, it uses it’s wings convert all that vertical rising and falling into forward motion.
Additionally, to extend mission time, they have also been experimenting with ways to attach to the sea floor and passively collect energy to recharge batteries and extend total mission time.
It’s uncertain how well all the trials went, there’s been no further information since May 2024. The drone the Navy actually keeps ordering in volume is a 10-foot tube called Lionfish.
Cheaper, Faster, Simpler
I made Marble’s Marbles in less than 2 months and in the first month of sales it has a gross of over $30K!
Here is the steam page for the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4137920/Marbles_Marbles and a short video of his Reddit posting.
Again, this seems to echo getting things done fast, simply, and focus on the fun is the way to go.
Story of Priests in Alaska
1 in 4 jobless are long-term unemployed
The hires rate today looks a lot like the hires rate did coming out of the Great Recession. You pretty clearly see that the labor market softened over the years. We saw that payroll employment growth slowed pretty substantially.
Currently one in 4 jobless workers are considered long-term unemployed, meaning they have been looking for work for more than 27 weeks, the highest rate since the pandemic.