Tratopedia
A reference built from source documents: material comes in, it is summarised and researched, and what is concluded is published here with its sources recorded. Written and maintained by djTratoh.
Latest articles
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· What local AI actually costs
Forty-Three Years Was Last Month’s Price
A one-page calculator asks how long a machine bought to run open models locally takes to pay for itself against renting the same model by the token. On its default settings — a $3,499 Mac Studio, a 27-billion-parameter…
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· The AI labs and the brain
Decades Rather Than Years
On 6 October 2026 the Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman told a podcast that the real arms race in artificial intelligence is not about models at all: it is about reading and writing the human brain without…
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· Taiwan’s two drug lists
Schedule Four Medicine, Schedule One Drug
The Republic of China schedules the same chemicals twice. The Controlled Drugs Management Act lists them as medicines; the Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act lists them as crimes. Both run four schedules, and for almost…
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· Four agents that act on their own, and the week one of them was withheld
The Boundary Is Not the Model
Between April and September 2026 four products arrived that let a language model work on its own for hours at a time, on its own computer, with its own browser and its own logins: Anthropic’s Claude Code Routines,…
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· A turnaround that worked, and a number that says what it actually recovered
Nine Years, Same Margin
Shimamura sells cheap clothes out of roadside shops in Japanese suburbs, and it has just reported the best year in its history: revenue over 700 billion yen, operating profit over 61 billion, the fifth consecutive year…
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· A set of household claims, checked one at a time against the literature that tested them
The Sun Does Not Kill Them
Hanging the bedding out on a bright day is one of the most widely practised pieces of household hygiene there is, and the claim that it does nothing to dust mites has been travelling fast. The claim is true. What…