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procflora

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Isn't this basically how more modern "chatty" CLIs use stderr? Put all the nice progress bars and emojis behind `if isatty(2)`? I thought so anyway, but I'll admit I've never actually looked at what npm, uv, etc. do.

Man, that project is such bait for my particular sensibilities but just looking at the copy about not sharing your data and only sharing weights has me feeling very disappointed in the project already. I would want a project like this to not elide fact that sharing your weight updates probably effectively means sharing your data too.

It's true, but to be honest the MinGW-built stuff that ships with git for Windows has been enough since WSL took off.

Earthquake early warning systems are a top 10 peak human achievement in my book. No joke, I tear up watching videos of Japan's EEW system alerting people of possible danger just in time.

There are streamers who's whole thing is watching these alerts and setting up bobbleheads and glasses of water and stuff to show the shaking. It's so so so cool. Look at what we can do for each other you guys :')

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imH-ZyXwX5Q

My understanding is that even that small amount is more than the Apollo crews had. It's all a bit of a marketing line anyway. We can see a good portion of the "far side" from Earth due to the Moon's libration.

Still, it's true that parts of the far side are still unseen by human eyes (if you consider pitch black landscape to be "unseen" which I think is fair given the lack of any significant illumination as you point out).

This article is plagued by several almost-truths, and gets a lot mixed up.

The thing that is happening for the first time on this mission is humans personally observing much of the far side in daylight. For the Apollo missions the far side was mostly dark because they wanted a high sun angle at the landing site on the near side. Many uncrewed orbiting cameras and even a recent Chinese lander & rover have taken photos of the far side.

It also states that these will be images "from the surface" of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it's true that this O2O technology could be used for high bandwidth livestreams from the surface on future missions, if this test works well.

I don't even think this O2O system will be used for live video during Artemis II. This and several other similar articles all appear to reference a NASA press release that is about the technology in general. The mission-specific NASA reference I found[1] says they will transmit a pre-recorded video "in the lunar vicinity" at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a "livestream" is just misstated.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/a2-reference...

A simple web we own 5 months ago

The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to.

The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.

Yes, while I was reading the article I couldn't help but think about notaries public. Seems like something like that would be government's go-to for this if they weren't quite so overfed on tech industry contributions that lead them down the path of AI solutions.

I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it ticks a lot boxes for the state.

Direct link to the NASA report: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/nasa-report-...

Reading between the lines of the summary a bit, it sure sounds like NASA program leadership was essentially doing pro bono PR for ol' pal Boeing at the expense of crew safety to placate Boeing's feeling of SpaceX being NASA's new favorite. Followed by Boeing again falling on the sea of sharp daggers held by their army of subcontractors.

That said, the announcement of this mishap reclassification does have a certain fleeting, bias-shaped odor, given Isaacman's proximity to Musk.

It's inter-organizational disfunction. Always more plausible than any conspiracy.

https://apnews.com/article/faa-el-paso-texas-air-space-close...

Pentagon wanted to test the new laser but didn't give FAA enough information to assure safety of the NAS and civilian aviation (when, where, effects, etc.) so they felt forced to pull the big TFR lever. They fired the laser of at who knows what and then FAA lifted the TFR.

The broadcast nature of it is something that I missed just last night. I was walking past several bars as the Seahawks won a big football game, but of course each spot was on a different stream delay so instead of one full-throated simultaneous cheer echoing across the neighborhood it was three or four quieter, distinct cheers spread over 20-30 seconds. Not really a big deal but still, it felt like a lesser experience to this aging millennial.

Yep, and I'll add: the first reader is the first maintainer. When that is turned over to an LLM agent the organization's leadership had better be prepared to entertain rewrites (reprompts?) of significant portions of LLM-generated code on a regular basis. The call of the rewrite isn't new of course, but it'll be far more alluring since LLMs are at their most "productive" and least destructive when working from a clean slate.

From what I've heard (FWIW), Airbus released a version of the software for one of the flight computers that removed SEU protections (hence grounding affected models until they could be downgraded to the previous version).

There was still hardware redundancy though. Operation of the plane's elevator switched to a secondary computer. Presumably it was also running the same vulnerable software, but they diverted and landed early in part to minimize this risk.

So not just redundancy but layers of redundancy.

GPT-5.2 7 months ago

G, the gravitational constant is (as far as we know) universal. I don't think this is what they meant, but the use of "across the universe" in the parent comment is confusing.

g, the net acceleration from gravity and the Earth's rotation is what is 9.8m/s² at the surface, on average. It varies slightly with location and altitude (less than 1% for anywhere on the surface IIRC), so "it's 9.8 everywhere" is the model that's wrong but good enough a lot of the time.

To take many exposures of the same scene and average the pixel values with the corresponding pixels from all the exposures. This increases the SNR and dynamic range, but naturally doesn't work very well if your subject isn't static. It doesn't increase the resolution of the image though.

For the 16mm movie cameras in this case, they probably selected frames from rigidly mounted cameras with little subject motion to get a good result out of it. Glenn strapped in tight in his tiny cockpit probably provided them with a decent number of frames they could stack without introducing much motion blur. In fact, you can see a bit of blurring at the end of one of the white straps center frame in that shot: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/03b-G...

It's a pretty common technique in astrophotography. Here's a page that goes into some more detail in that context: https://clarkvision.com/articles/image-stacking-methods/

I'm no expert either, I just think they look neat. But from what I know it's primarily the nearby star or star cluster illuminating them, so yes it'd be distinct. Also there are mixed emission and reflection nebulae so technically I suppose they reflect some of the light from the emissive portions, though I'm sure it's a tiny contribution.

Great example!

Another historical example I find myself thinking about is the huge number of objects that moved into a disposable category in the last century or so. What used to be built entirely by skilled hands is now the prerogative of the machine and thus a certain base level of maintainability is no longer guaranteed in even the worst-designed widget.

Yes, AI will mean more software is "written" than before, but more will be thrown away too. The allure of the re-write is nothing new, but now we'll do it not because we think we can do it better the second time, but because the original is too broken to keep using and starting over is just so much cheaper.

Soon at CRUD App HQ (if not already): "Last year's pg_dump is this year's prompt."