Francisco de Cuellar survived in Sligo, and escaped inland to O'Rourke's Castle where he got refuge and found 70 or so other Spanish survivors. The path he took from the shore inland is marked to this day by signposts and you can follow it yourself. Granted he didn't leave us a Strava trail but roughly speaking we know the way they went.
We know what happened to him in amazing detail because he escaped north, to the Hebrides, through Flanders, Dunkirk and eventually back to Spain where he lived out his days.
O'Rourke was executed by the English for harboring survivors
Someone's already built #1. I've seen the demo, and it had a wow factor, but ultimately I don't think it'll revolutionize games.
Would Skyrim be better if you could talk to ever guard about what they had for breakfast? Would you ever be able to shake the knowledge that it's just an LLM pretending?
I'm not sure how best to put this. I think for me at least, I get the most enjoyment out of discovering my way through a story that somebody else wrote. This is maybe why I don't like multiplayer games as much a single player experiences. I want another human to tell me a story, and I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is. If an LLM is just randomly making it up as it goes, I'm not discovering anything. I'm not hearing a story. Instead, I'm just having a transient conversation with myself.
I guess it's equivalent to the difference between visiting an art gallery, versus watching a computer generate fake paintings. One has human intent behind it and that makes it compelling, the other is soulless and empty
> I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is
To me, this is great too, and it's why I still enjoy reading fiction.
However, having conversational NPCs which can behave in complex ways isn't just about a story any longer, it's about a more accurate simulation. I want to see where the non-deterministic machine(s) can take me. I want to poke and prod and discover new mechanisms. I want to make my own story.
Once I was quite religious. I was discouraged from reading fiction by elders because they said it is a "waste of time" and "basically lies". In this way, whether it was written by a human or a machine is irrelevant if I can't tell the difference. I would have a qualitatively different response if I knew whether a human or bot wrote it, but in the long run I'm not sure it matters in cases where I don't know.
Zuckerbergs ineffectiveness was evident long before the examples mentioned in this article.
He failed to counter the rise of Twitter, failed to combat misinformation during elections, directly contributing to the result of the brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016
Spec driven development can help some, even for brownfield projects. You can have an LLM swallow up your entire project and spit out a spec, and then review that yourself.
For any issue, start a brand new context, point it to the spec, explain the issue and explain if it's a regression.
Also on it might seem like an obvious one, the more test coverage you have, the more your llm can tell if something has broken or if there's been a regression without needing to eat up context.
All of these things can help but there's no perfect solution.
The price does seem steep for something so simple it could be modelled with straws in three minutes, but I don't really understand the rest of the negativity.
Don't we want innovation in renewables? Shouldn't we be encouraging this kind of thing, trying out different designs to the traditional windmills and trying to make something easy to build, scale, install and operate?
Um, yes. 4,900€ for a 1KW device. That's way above market price.
On Amazon, a 1KW wind turbine is $500 to $1000. About half that on Alibaba.
This is a common technology now, with lots of makers. Almost everybody sells a bladed turbine that mounts on top of a pole and has a tailfin to make it pivot in the wind.
What's with this thing? It's at ground level. It's expensive. It's built out of plastic tarps that probably won't survive a storm. The scheme for making it follow the wind looks flaky.
Their "business plan" consists of copies of the business cards of people they met at a trade show.[1]
When I read this article, I was near a little 200W wind turbine at a horse barn. Little five-bladed thing up on a pole, with a tail that makes it follow the wind. It powers a few lights. It's been running for years now with no attention. It's 2026, people. This stuff just works.
If we ignore the price, which is astronomical and silly, then everything else is forgiveable, I think.
Yes it's made from plastic tarp, which makes it lightweight and easy to manufacture or repair. Yes it's got low potential at ground level but that makes it far safer and simpler to install.
This design or a variation of it could be built with PVC pipe and plastic bags and deployed in a field for next to nothing, bringing power to a community that didn't have any.
It's insanity to want to charge near 5k for this, but if this was an open source / free thing we'd all be championing the ingenuity
Based on the website, it looks like their primary strategic advantage is ease of portability / shipping for off grid scenarios.
The fact that it is made of plastic tarps means there's very little specialty material that is needed to repair damage, unlike relatively fragile turbine blades that need a bit more care when shipping, frequent assembling and disassembling and weather, etc.
I'll go on record as saying that I don't think that those advantages come close to making up for the cost, and I'd like to think they plan on bringing the cost down significantly when they grow up... but I'm not really holding my breath there either.
I used to have a custom ISO of Windows XP using Barts PE and a bunch of other tools. It would install a fairly stripped version of the OS that ran really well on old hardware. I probably still have it somewhere, but I still ended up on Windows 10 because most of the software I wanted (games, electron apps) wouldn't work on it anymore.
But I genuinely miss having the ability to take the bloat out before you ever install the OS
The sad truth is Microsoft is so heavily invested in and indebted by AI, advertising and telemetry that the only way Windows lite would ever get the greenlight is if the company tanks, loses billions and pivots away from everything they've been pushing for the last decade.
And then maybe we could get the dream that is Windows lite
Back before LLMs they were stuffing Cortana in there. I don't know if they ever marketed that as AI but it was named after an AI character in a video game
We know what happened to him in amazing detail because he escaped north, to the Hebrides, through Flanders, Dunkirk and eventually back to Spain where he lived out his days.
O'Rourke was executed by the English for harboring survivors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Cuellar