Oxidation

The co-orbiting telescope Xuntian is a neat idea in terms of on-orbit servicing and upgrade opportunities. Obviously as it's in LEO it can't do the intense JWST-esque ultra-deep-field shots, rather it's a wide-field telescope, a bit more like the Nancy Grace Roman née NRO "Stubby Hubble", but with a 2.5 gigapixel survey camera compared to the NGR's 300 MP, and 5 MP for the venerable Hubble. Hubble, NGR and Xuntian have same-ballpark pixel resolution (mostly diffraction-limited by the comparable mirror diameters): 50 milliarcseconds for Hubble, 110 for Xuntian, so you can think of Xuntian as hundreds of Hubbles operating in parallel on neighbouring sections of sky.

> and 'nothing more'

Also it "follows along" when you commit to the branch. Named pointers that stay put are tags.

Red Mars could be an epic TV series (or a multi-part film). But probably getting a bit geopolitically dated these days unless it does a For All Mankind cold war retro thing. Also I imagine having half the crew being Russian wouldn't fly in terms of media palatability at the moment, nor would an updated crew with more Chinese members.

It doesn't even have to be a local maximum, just higher up some hillside will do (maybe it's even on a different hillside to the one you're on at the moment).

I don't know if that's an issue for music streamers or not (I guess if you allow one person's thumbs downs to affect others too much and there are millions of them... Maybe?)

But also seems like it would be a pretty trivial thing to filter out of the genuine signal for companies that literally exist by processing that data.

How dare they not speak only English on your Internet.

Honestly, I think that if "git lol" was the default log command it would do the most to make things much more obvious to newcomers.

  git log --oneline --graph

And git lola for a gestalt of the repo's recent state:

  git log --oneline --graph --all

I know what you mean (deleting a branch in a remote is a very unintuitive syntax to me at first glance, especially), but these are perhaps not the best examples:

> Why do you create a branch via the "git checkout" command?

That's a shortcut for "git branch (name)", then "git checkout (name)". Or the newer "switch" which is more obvious.

> Why do you delete tags using "git tag -d" but delete stashes using "git stash drop"?

Because the stash is more like a stack, and tags are not, so "drop" without a parameter is a valid and very usual command. Yes, it feels inconsistent, but allowing "git stash -d" without a parameter would probably not be better.

> If you want to blow away local uncommitted changes, you can use "git reset", "git reset --hard" or "git checkout (file)" - which (I think) all do totally different things.

These do all do different things, so that's why they all exist. "git restore (file)" was introduced a few years ago (with "switch", mentioned earlier) to make the last one more obvious, since that's indeed always been an uncomfortable syntax for a core operation.

Git's a very powerful tool, originally aimed at a very complex code base run by experts, and was written very quickly as an emergency replacement for BitWarden. This rushed development and target audience does show through even today, but it's being annealed over time. Nevertheless, it's so good at what it does that it's taken out nearly every other VCS by just existing (ok, and the network effects of GitHub, but they choose it for a reason too).

Why would you want to avoid that? Get paid the GDP of Lithuania for a fairly stodgy messaging platform with a big question mark over how many real users there even are and then getting to look like a genius in comparison to the next guy's run at it sounds like a great deal to me.

Are you sure that wasn't Grimes' ex and the SEC?

It's a heuristic (claims to be probably helpful). You might as well complain that checking string size first as part of an equality check of strings that demonstrably have a very large distribution of sizes is obviously dumb because obviously you can construct same-length strings at will. Breaking rules of thumb is the easiest thing in the world.

I imagine we'll be seeing a few cases setting that precedent in the next 10 years, and it's likely that the kind of "aha I said finger, a thumb isn't a finger, so I win" argument favoured by sovereign citizens, 5-year-olds and techbros who think they're smarter than everyone else will go over as well as it usually does.

Perhaps, but if you told me a vertical farm only worked at a scale above X thousands of square metres due to economies of scale, I'd find that quite plausible. So I can see why an investor might not wonder too hard why the scale is so large. On the other side, the dream-sellers have only until the writing on the wall becomes legible to extract the cash, so they can't mess around doing the HP garage thing for a decade.

Given the actual consistent result, it's still probably on the investors for being credulous marks with a case of techno-FOMO and high on their own supply, but I don't think it's always been necessarily so simple on the face of it to be debunked by a bunch of grouchy Internet contrarians in 31 seconds (though probably, again based on the result, was always debunkable by decent independent due-diligence).

After all, it's not hard to imagine a world where SpaceX is a smoking crater in 2015 and we're all going "well obviously you couldn't have landed a rocket, what did they think would happen?!". Another example: the jury's still out on if Uber's long bet on a pivot into self driving taxis can pay off before they bleed out, and you can find plenty of "obviously..." analyses saying they'd be dead or that they'd be the only transport in town by 2020. Neither of those could start in a niche, they were all-or-nothing. And those greenhouses that did start in a niche would have had huge attrition too, again, at the time, each probably seemed like a good plan to invest the family savings into.

It's not unthinkable, to me at least from the outside, that vertical farming had a chance of being a capital-intensive, high-barrier, high-payoff industry. In that I'd be surprised by it about as much as I was by SpaceX's technical payoff about 7 years ago: "huh, so that does work, crazy".

And all that said, if you're an investor who would rather gamble the money than spend a fraction of the promised returns on due diligence, then thanks for the trickle-down, I suppose. And probably just as well farming isn't about to end up in the hands of Farming Uber even faster than it already is becoming.

Some flavour of "git gc" after your reset is far more likely to crop up and ruin your day, that's true.

As long as you stay on the statistical beaten path (i.e. you're asking about Paris), you will probably be fine, indeed. Probably. Stochastic bugs are always the most fun anyway.

Ask it details about a little-documented event and it'll happily tell you plausible, but utterly false, lies, however.

Apparently the "early 2011 Bougainville earthquake" was magnitude 6.3, at a depth of 21.7km, on the 20th January and caused "widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure in the region, and triggered landslides that blocked roads and hampered rescue efforts".

It was actually on the 7th Feb, a 6.4 and at a depth of 415km. There were "no immediate reports of damage or injuries".

None of this is remotely surprising, considering it's a turbocharged statistical model and it probably ingested a few words about it at most, out of billions and billions, but somewhere along the line from "famous" to "footnote" subjects, it will segue into complete fiction.

A bit like how Blade Runner's rain-soaked neon cybernoir now feels derivative!

Maybe because no matter what I do, I cannot get current streaming sites to recommend music as well as they did back in the Pandora and LastFM days.

And it's not just that I'm pickier and set in my ways, there are songs that I liked that were recommended to me then based on my other songs that I still have in the modern platforms now that haven't ever come up.

Meanwhile I'm skipping songs and thumbs-downing continuously and it won't learn. It just goes round and round the same few silos, none of which are quite right.

That's pretty glib, because when they built large greenhouses, people probably said "the market already solved this for high value goods like tomatoes: buy them from Italy and use a fast clipper to get them here in time".

Vertical farms probably indeed don't work out in the current day where we have sunlight, enough land to use it, and transport. Probably most careful analysis would have shown that, but, for things where the analysis has wide-enough error bars, when money is cheap enough, "the market" shows things don't work by incinerating gobs of investor cash and falling over. In the cheap-money era we just had, it was apparently a worthwhile gamble for some.

And if you're worth billions and get suckered by a chancer with a flashy pitch deck to invest in something that could have trivially been shown to be economically doomed by some random internet-commenter grousing, then honestly you deserved to lose the money.

Wait, you get paid for Internet snark?

Ah yes, the good old "your heuristic doesn't work on my carefully constructed pathological case" observation, wouldn't be the Internet without that.

GP also said "probably". That's how heuristics work.

Hopefully it can put a bullet in it, finally. If anyone can generate infinite bullshit instantly for free, what value is there in being a bullshitter?

It could also be very useful for ESL people: churning out thousands of words of copy can take forever in a second language and can also be absolutely miserable.

> ChatGPT has been a dream come true for people who sell wantrepreneurship materials. I suspect they’re using ChatGPT to generate a lot of the materials, too.

So then it can work, as long as the customer is credulous of a low-effory get rich quick. "You can't cheat an honest man" comes to mind. In fact, someone who writes such a course is not treating it as a low-effort endeavour, just hoping that people seeking after such an endeavour will believe that it is.

I literally just printed on 220gsm card in a laser printer's feed tray today. Worked great.

Before I had a pack of card, I was indeed cutting up manila folders. I only had ugly colours (that's a rule for manila folders, apparently) so it wasn't ideal, but it worked well in a structural sense for what I was up to.

> The real advantage of this is that it also is something my family can easily use.

The opposite of this is why I like i3. Want to use my computer? Good luck: there's no start button and you'll have to guess the chord to open rofi.

Right? B-U-Y is just three letters from a 26-letter alphabet, and yet that's obviously possible to be advice.

> Courts aren't stupid. They understand how human language works.

Quick! make it a smart contract and we can get rid of that defect!

And I thought the Accelerando lobsters and Sheena 5 squid were out there!

Copyright in general is far longer than most people expect. In most of the world it's at least 70 years after the death of the author. Most people will not live to see even their grandparents' generation's work enter the public domain.

I thought getting money to places governments didn't want to get money to was one of the explicit aims of cryptocurrency.

And respect for engineering as a discipline. Tell a German that an engineer came to install your internet cable and they'll look at you like you've grown a second head. Actual quote: "what could be wrong with it that needs an engineer to come out?"

Meanwhile, someone British who heard I studied engineering: "are you going to do TV repair?"