JoeAltmaier

capability has been advancing faster than raw FLOPS

A bold prediction. Phones have gigabytes today. There are famous laws of growth that put terabytes at just a few years away - perhaps 10 isn't too bad an estimate?

Shelves are fairly spotty in my town. Never saw that before, not in 50 years.

My son programmed a Z80-based instruction set into a Juno probe sensor. Still kicking.

Contrary to that old headline about questions always answerable by no, curiously this one is Yes. Despite 'explanations' that reframe the loss and temporizing that maybe it will probably come back, without evidence.

We didn't need a guide in the 1980's. My first job out of Stanford was a startup called Convergent. Somebody put a wall map of the US up, with pins, Where are you from? Two from LA, one actually from San Jose and so on. And six from Iowa. One of them was my classmate and one a TA from one of my classes at UofI.

None of us knew the others would be there.

Turns out the issue was more, locals getting used to Midwesterners I guess?

Confused: they are 'waiting' if they are in the queue when the queue is polled. What else could 'waiting' mean? How is time involved at all?

I wonder if a microsat could do the elliptical orbit and small nudge technique to leave Earth and enter Mars orbit too? A microsat has very little reaction mass. But it has very little mass altogether - under 100 kilo by definition.

It might be a way to deploy GPS satellites to Mars without a major mission effort?

Who do we alert when Washington is accused of misconduct?

I'd guess the training data would be a combination of baseline personality behaviors (turn-taking conversation, basic social skills, education level) with data specific to an individual. Recordings, letters, perhaps online posts but that's potentially not representative of the person since online is typically 'impersonal' by design.

Some of us may have too little to 'go on' to make a convincing avatar. Others may have biased samples, perhaps from lectures or recordings of performances.

Probably it may require an interview with those than knew them well. There would be memory bias, and the natural tendency to speak kindly of the dead. That might even serve the purpose better - it's a memorial after all, meant to be presentable and maybe not reflect the worst aspects of a personality.

Pockets of frozen technology persist from time to time. As a kid (60 years ago) we had a wooden telephone with a cone on a hook and a speaking horn out the front. A large D battery inside the wooden box. You took down the cone and rattled the switchhook it hung from to get the operator's attention - your light would flash on her switch board. She'd ask, and plug your line into whoever you wanted to talk to.

In the 1960's long past the time that party lines and manual operators were supposed to be extinct. But, rural Iowa.

Curious idea. How about, use an atomic rocket engine and get there in a couple of weeks? Binge on Netflix the whole way.

Lots of innovation in 802.11 and it's ilk.

Early versions had a fairly fatal flaw. They responded to bad reception (reception but failure of checksum etc due to interference) by 'downshifting' e.g. reducing their transmission rate from 10Mbit to lower rates.

This seems rational, but in practice it usually shifted all the way to the minimum (1Mbps!) and got no relief. In fact, packets were 10 to 100 times 'longer' in airtime, congesting the channel so nobody got anything through.

Why did they get no relief? Because frequently the noise was bursty e.g. microwave oven pulse or auto spark plug noise. Going slower meant larger (longer to transmit) packets, which provided a 'bigger target' for the noise to poke a hole in.

A more useful response was to try the fastest rate, a smaller packet which got hit with fewer 'darts' impacting any particular packet.

In comments don't use prepositions (that, it, those) e.g. "It serves those file migration methods". Instead say e.g. "This method is intended to serve methods x,y and z or any method that has set up a migration source and sink".

Largely genetic, though diabetes can contribute to it's appearance.

So are cigarettes and liquor. And pot and on and on.

I understand that caves were used on and off over sapiens history. We must be sure to temper our view of 'cave men' as a normal mode of living. Caves preserve artifacts, to a much greater degree than open ground or forests for instance. It can be appealing to imagine they lived in caves routinely. But we have little data on the frequency of sites outside caves - they've washed and weathered away. A true ratio is hard to come up with.

Oral exams. Quickly evident who knows the material.

Don't want to hire a student that has no facility with the area they are working in.

And yet, claiming support for a feature doesn't tell all. Different implementations can have subtle differences. Knowing the browser and version can allow a client to survive that.

That's one viewpoint. No moral nor ethical foundation; just a personal view.

Soldiers don't use shit. It takes training, preparation, maintenance to use fancy gear. Soldier in theatre are operating on scant sleep, exhaustion, heat etc and have no bandwidth for fussing with tech. Or so my soldier reported from Iraq some years back.

Well, currently 6 Billion active Android phones exist. Not lifetime total: current active. So there's that.

Note that coal is dropping precipitously, which increased the effect.

My son reports a burst of 'Jewish' soldiers when deployed. Because the rabbi had a rather long service period and he let the soldiers sleep on the benches. He still has his camo yarmulke.

Puff piece - just an AI slam with no content, just that number '95%' repeated.

My AI chatbot remembers most everything we've ever talked about. No way is it forgetting much.

Maybe could use to 'stitch together' arbitrary carbon chains? Do chemistry at scale? I see a big future for this.

Lovely ironic paper - positing that all you need to publish is an 'all you need is x' titled paper. Or is it self-referential?

They may refuse to learn multiplication tables (a popular subject if I remember right, reciting them as far as we could, a competition) while memorizing baseball stats.

Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid.

My son went there! Andrew the cello player.