Ankaios

Apple's behavior regarding ads is especially annoying to me. I deeply dislike that they allow Uber and Lyft to advertise via iOS notifications. Apple should inflict massive penalties on them for that anti-user behavior. Apple also advertises their own TV shows through notifications, which I view as an even worse breach of etiquette.

On top of all that, I avoid the iOS app store as much as possible because it's an advertising-infested mess. I'm sure I'd have more apps on the phone if I trusted the app store more.

Europe and Japan are great at the former, the latter no chance.

Europe and Japan should be totally capable of producing super inexpensive batteries. They just don't, at the moment.

If you have Republican senators or a Republican House rep, call their offices and tell them what you think of this.

Here's a proposal for an amendment restricting the pardon power: https://cohen.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congress...

Here's the proposed text:

SECTION 1. The President shall not have the power to grant pardons and reprieves to—

  (1) the President’s self;

  (2) any person, up to a third degree relation, of the President, or a spouse thereof;

  (3) any current or former member of the President’s administration;

  (4) any person who worked on the President’s presidential campaign as a paid employee;

  (5) any person or entity for an offense that was motivated by a direct and significant personal or pecuniary interest of any of the foregoing persons; or

  (6) any person or entity for an offense that was at the direction of, or in coordination with, the President.

SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

~200,000 m/s is unfathomably fast.

It's about 110,000 fathoms per second.

Here's the Nature article that the university press release links to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08234-x

Turns out the Google AI's 15-day forecasts are for the weather in Mountain View.

Which I can forecast 15 days out, too.

Well, I guess now democracy dies in anticipation of darkness.

They're currently discussing how difficult it was to design a credit card reader for the Robotaxi that would reliably fail whenever it detects cash in the passenger's wallet.

Non-software-developer humans often use things called "lamps" to illuminate spaces at night. Unfortunately, illumination inhibits effective nighttime coding.

Is "Moon Policy" anywhere near the ballot box? Particularly for senators?

It is in Huntsville.

I suggest you read up on former Senator Richard Shelby.

I guess it's time for someone to start selling token tokens.

Why is science reporting such irredeemable clickbaity trash? Not just from the mainstream media with commercial motive, from whom I naturally expect trash, but also from nonprofit universities of all places.

Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?

University science-by-press-release drives me crazy, too. My guess has been that the intended audience is alums that might be enticed to donate more.

NASA's current and near-future science missions: https://smd-cms.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/smd-flee...

A lot of bookstores and restaurants do more good than harm, and we tax them.

But can it get down to the Titanic?

Yep.

Getting back up to the surface might be a challenge, though.

The world's first non-repairable car. Minor fault, major accident, or inevitably-degraded battery? No problem!, just throw it away and buy the latest model, like you would with a phone or tablet! You wanted an upgrade anyway, didn't you?

No big deal. Just buy the AppleCar AppleCare plan.

So far as I can find the last time Congress bothered to pass a budget was 2016 with the prior one in 2010.

The last time Congress passed a budget was for last fiscal year (FY 2023):

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2617

It was about three months late, but they passed it. This year's is currently at least about four months late, and the federal government is currently operating under a continuing resolution that will expire in March. However, full-year continuing resolutions are rare: the budget bills are usually passed, but passed late.

Eh, I cut Forbes some slack. It's easy to accidentally swap the purchase value with the current value.

Wikipedia claims the plant generated 16 TW h of energy in 2019. At $6 billion for five years of generation, that corresponds to about 8 cents per kilowatt hour. That's not great, but it doesn't seem like highway robbery to me. Seems reasonable to keep using the plant while building up solar and storage capacity.

Maybe the astrophysicists will even be able to get our timeline back on track after the LHC screwed everything up.

To fix the timeline, we just need to build a bigger accelerator.

Sincerely,

Your friends at Fermilab^WGoogle

The Nature paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06602-7, and

A corresponding "News and Views" piece: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03101-7

Maybe it's just me, but I think the name "Firefox" is fun and endearing, while "Mozilla" is ugly and ponderous. I say this as someone that has been on the Web since Mosaic and almost entirely used Netscape-heritage browsers since then. Let the Mozilla name go, and embrace Firefox.

When I visited Arecibo [...], the intern giving me a tour told me that Arecibo was essentially the main way we had to detect asteroids that might hit earth.

Arecibo wasn't used for detecting asteroids—it was used to characterize asteroids that were detected by other means. Arecibo observed asteroids via radar. The power necessary for a radar observation goes up very quickly with distance to the target (proportional to distance to the fourth power), so radar would generally be a poor choice for hunting for asteroids.

In the grand scheme of things, this type of mission wouldn't cost that much, but so far, nobody has made the decision that making sure Earth doesn't get hit by an asteroid is worth an investment of a few hundred million dollars.

Late last year, NASA approved development of NEO Surveyor, an infrared telescope that will search for near-Earth objects from Sun-Earth L1. NASA estimates that it will launch in 2028 and cost $1.2 billion.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-confirms-neo-surveyor-for-2028-la...

There have been many studies about what could be done to deal with asteroids that are on track to impact earth and the simple answer is 'nothing'.

The National Academies report that you link to down-thread did not state that nothing can be done. They discuss multiple options, and they discuss which options would be most effective given different amounts of warning lead time. Figure 5.5 (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/12842/chapter/7#85) is a great high-level view of the option space.

A real message to take away from the "Mitigation" section of that report is that it's important to identify dangerous objects as early as possible.

Nobody's going to want to watch two hours of Snake Plissken searching around town for the President, only to find him sitting in a coffee shop eating avocado toast.

The humans are probably constrained by things like “reality” and “what their business has done in it” while GPT-4 could make up anything it wanted.

You clearly know different founders than I do.

I love fountain pens, and I have many good ones. However, I now prefer Uniball Signo gel pens to any of my fountain pens.

What sorts of tax policies might preferentially disincentivize home buying by investment funds?