Viewing profile — philipkglass

Google may not have written about it in that document, but they're funding what will be the highest storage capacity battery system in the world for a renewable-powered data center…

It's unfortunately worse than coal subsidies. There are direct Federal orders that obsolete coal plants are not allowed to shut down. One example from Washington state: https://www…

Yes, bleach could destroy the complex odoriferous compounds in fish sauce. Ordinary chlorine bleach in liquid form is so dilute that you wouldn't be able to run the process in-plac…

I read the whole series on the Kindle about 10 years ago and the obscure nautical words were not in the Kindle's internal dictionary. It would try to connect to an online service t…

The German THTR-300 reactor operated with air cooling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 But it was admittedly a huge cooling system for a reactor that only produced 750 megaw…

I have an uncle with Parkinson's disease. He has a daughter who's looking after him. But he is a tall man who weighs about 200 pounds and she is a petite woman. She literally doesn…

Google was scanning millions of books before the LLM craze, and they didn't burn them. They partnered with libraries and built their own non-destructive scanning hardware. I'm gues…

I know a lot more about chemistry and physics than I know about biology, so biological risk is still at least a "maybe" reason to be worried about model safety for me. I don't worr…

It was a front page story here on HN back in December 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991

The biggest problem is the infectious nature of restrictions that start narrowly. Fable is too touchy about helping people with biology and chemistry problems. It was initially rel…

I wouldn't object to a government advisory body that tests models for safety so that users can make informed decisions. I would object to a government body that runs safety tests o…

That's a good example, but I'm unsettled by Anthropic's growing refusals in the areas of chemistry and biology. If they think that scientific assistant models should be as unhelpfu…

How much biogas per year would a site need to produce to justify installing a unit? How much on-site labor is needed to run it?

The reaction N2 + 3 H2 => 2 NH3 is thermodynamically spontaneously but kinetically forbidden by the strength of the N-N bond. That's why the key breakthrough of the Haber-Bosch pro…

We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia by now if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammon…

The only chemical inputs a Haber-Bosch plant needs are nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrogen always comes from air and in this plant the hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The plant a…

California also limited body armor ownership in the wake of that shootout, though a court decision invalidated the law in 2009: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-dec-20-…

I set Cloudflare up a couple of months ago specifically to block bot traffic. It didn't do anything for me. Dumb bots were still hitting every special link on my wiki fast enough t…

It looks like Connecticut first enacted body armor regulations in 1998, the year after the North Hollywood police shootout with a pair of heavily armed and armored men: https://en.…

I need to process a modest amount of imagery (about 25 million images, and growing) for NSFW content and general captioning/description. About 5% of it contains nudity or partial n…

I don't use any open-weights models for coding, but I use them heavily for document categorization and extraction. At millions-of-documents scale even the smallest models from Open…

In November of 2025, I would have said that Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model together with their Claude Code harness was the first and only system where a well-specified software feature…

That varies by jurisdiction. In the United States, copying the phone book (or otherwise copying facts from someone else's collection) has been legal since 1991: https://en.wikipedi…