polemic

from autogenlib.antigravity

As a joke, that doesn't feel quite so far-fetched these days. (https://xkcd.com/353/)

Never really understood why people like Tom Clancy, it's not as if it's enjoyable to read about a bunch of mililtary hardware. At least with Dan Brown you've got a load of interesting mysteries and locations to get off on.

(more seriously: I think both authors understand their markets and are savvy about delivering what they want, critics be damned)

Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic.

It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.

Countries with functional and affordable healthcare didn't there with startups and less regulation.

Yup - in NZ the infrastrucutre and the provider were separated as part of the nation-wide fibre-to-the-door rollout.

I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.

Suspicously easy.

A very similar thing happened here in New Zealand where we tracked right with fairly dire and predictable consequences, from a left-wing government that was shouldering the blame for a whole lot of macroeconomic issues they had little control over.

It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.

We're forking Flutter. This is why.

Cripes I wish people would explain who "we" is. "Flutter Foundation"? Which is "Flock" but not "Flutter"?

To get an inert object through the atmostphere and do real damage it has to be very large. That's a very inefficient way to use mass that you've boosted to orbit, even if it's relatively cheap to get there. So any weaponary they put up there will likely look fairly conventional. The speed of deployment and difficult of intercept would be the game-changer.

My favourite is PAHU! https://pahu.maori.nz/ - a lorem ipsum generator in te reo Māori.

Seems a stretch to call it open source.

Messenger Kids was a pragmatic effort by Meta to improve safety on the Messenger platform. It works well, and it looks to me like Instagram Teen accounts is a similar effort. You can bemoan the effects of social media or whether teens should be there but the teens are there, so credit to Meta for making a serious investment.

Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.

My younger ones use Messenger Kids and it gives me some confidence that Meta has thought about the problem and have solutions that actually work for all parties.

Python developers agree. See PEP 668 – Marking Python base environments as “externally managed” – https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/

ICE31 in the air right now https://www.flightradar24.com/ICE31/36b2c5d5

one big disadvantage of using point clouds for perception is that they are not colored

That depends entirely on the capture device.

Yes well, inflation (actually: devaluation) isn't in the [immediate] interests of the currency holder. Terrible if you just want to speculate, which is 99% of the crypto market.

I'm no economist, but inflation should reflect an increse in growth and productivity. The fact that these coins don't tend to consistently devalue might say something about how useful they are for doing the job of a real currency.

They aren't "hype" technologies - but it does seem badly framed. If it were to say "the team uses version control, CI frameworks, agile tracking tools then they might be agile" it would make more sense. That would be especially useful if , say, much of their existing softare is delivered once a month via zip files on an ftp server.

That is one of the possibilities that are highlighted in the abstract, Amoung other theories, including that lonely individuals seek friendship within conspiracy communities. Humans are very good at post-hoc rationalisation.

In the wise words of Patsy, "it's only a model".

The real world is resistent to clean abstractions and abstractions are distressingly subject to change. What made your row unique today is quite likely to become non-unique in the days/months/years to come.

Always use surrogate keys. Your future self will thank you.

The simplicity of interstellar travel really depends on how you define it.

Constructing a ship of sufficient redundancy / self-repair capability that can carry embryonic life to another star seems like something we could achieve. The engineering problems seem hard but quantifiable, and the resources required are likely available. If humanity decided tomorrow that we needed to put "a human" on another planet, I think it could be done (sent) within a lifetime. (surviving there, another matter)

OTOH the scale of resources that would need to be deployed to begin construction of a Dyson sphere would seem to be immense, let alone the systems required to harness it for anything useful.

Inefficiency in public infrastructure works might be a cost of a much higher degree of personal and political freedoms.

Apparent efficiencies in public infrastructure works might be short-lived in a centrally directed economy and/or hides deep inefficiences elsewhere in the system.

(It might also be that 1960s stucco houses are preferable to dense apartment living for many people, and that Op misses the forest for the trees in the wider context of why and for whom anything is built anywhere).

I'm not in the USA or China though. Take with grains of salt.

There's a whole wiki page for this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_transports_of_heads_of_sta...

Here in New Zealand there is a military transport option but it's always breaking down and, by all accounts, nowhere near as comfortable as a commercial carrier.

Not just the new ones - it's a very scandinavian lutheran trend. Tapiloa Church for e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@60.1783778,24.8091179,3a,75y,15...

However there's also the church in the rock which is absolutely stunning and worth a visit. https://www.temppeliaukionkirkko.fi/en/index/nimi.html#

Notable that this was python behaviour until Py3.

Reminds me of an excellent conference talk I went to once - landslip modellers in BC, Canada spend a lot of time trying to prevent slips from damanging the railways that wind throught the mountainous terrain.

There was a lot of research into statistical models of slips – in particular boudler movement and how they break up – which didn't really work.

It turned out that game engines with good dynamic object desctruction are pretty good at modelling them, and they were able to get much better results using the game engine vs statistical models.

I ran into this today while searching for a way to merge channels in Slack. A google search turned up this result https://www.process.st/how-to/merge-channels-in-slack/ which describes an in-app method that does not exist.

That entire website should be banned from Google.

This is – fairly obviously – the US working to maintain it's primacy in the control over technology (broadly) and social media (specifically).

It's certainly convenient that various security and privacy concerns align, but as many comments here point out, they don't stand up to much scrutiny, and they certainly don't warrant this level of policy response.

I wonder if anyone has modelled the energy impact of users flocking to alternate platforms as popular websites are shutdown. Seems ripe for abuse and unintended consequences.

Unproven - but yes like I say - a new type of compression

Meh, AI doesn't break information theory. The relationship between the prompt size to the "similarity" of the result will be such that it doesn't beat traditional compression techniques.

At best we might consider it a new type of lossy (or... replacey?) compression. Of course if storage / RAM / bandwidth keeps increasing, this is quite likely the least energy efficient technique available.