bdamm

Do you have kids?

Tractor props have the benefit of creating an airstream over the wings which lets you generate lift at lower speeds - this is why leading-edge props are so interesting. Pushers can’t use that bonus feature of the airstream.

I'm pretty excited for the hybrid airplane. Use battery charge to get up to altitude. Hybrid power during cruise and top off the battery with the leftover power. Far less power requirements, far less fuel use, better climb performance, and can use the most efficient engine rather than hugely inefficient but power dense turbines. And as a bonus, put the prop power anywhere you want. Designs that distribute props across the leading endge, or right on the leading edge of the rudder, are exciting.

What an age to witness.

This is the true reason for watermarking by LLMs. So they don't get mad LLM disease by digesting their own product.

Kind of arrogant no? Linux kernel development mailing lists are producing something immensely valuable with a much clearer impact on economic indicators than your average scientific paper. Comparing them is hard, but it's patently absurd to say there's nothing being produced compared to scientific papers.

Retrocompomorphism

Indeed, it's just that since truth is both stranger than and has caught up with fiction, the grounds from which Laws of Robotics emerged is so much more fertile and more urgent now.

It's absolutely clear that the 3-LoR is never going to apply universally. Asimov also never imagined an AI being independent from a robot per se, nor did he imagine we'd all have an AI portal in our pockets. I'm not sure he imagined the universality of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, either. I'd love to read what he would write knowing about these possiblities now.

Oh how I wish Asimov could be alive to witness today's actual AIs and the cavalier attitude towards his "3 rules". If there is any author doing good work along these lines, actually good writing and not the smoking trash that is 99% of content being published on pulp these days, I'd love to read them.

Debatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate.

Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.

* The NSA has backdoored core routers of the Internet, to gather traffic and metadata. The metadata is not superficial, but since the Internet is no longer decentralized, the useful surface for spying has moved into the applicaiton domains. This is what I mean by "The Internet". * And FISA warrants do allow large-scale spying. * Not only is Facebook explicitly a mass surveillance (and mass influence) device, but there are multiple vectors into it for law enforcement.

Would Ring be considered a mass surveillance apparatus? Accuweather? Facebook? Google? The Internet?

Personally I agree with the desire for more traffic enforcement, even if it means I personally would suffer because frankly I like driving fast. But as a cyclist who also likes riding fast, and a parent to likes giving freedom to children, safer roads would be great.

The problem is that these systems, always and without fail, come with government and police overreach and then the "guilty unless proven innocent" paradigm creeps in, which we have already seen happen with flock. You have police using the technology to spy on their lovers and friends of their wives and husbands, and you have political campaigns finding ways to spy on their opponents, and activists getting special attention from prosecutors, etc. Which always happs, but with totalitarianism is an absolute train wreck for an open, fair, and power-balanced government.

If this work has an implication for cryptography they might want to be anonymous for any number of reasons.

I always thought the Powerwall was undersized, especially when you compare to the cost and capacity of a fixed-mount generator.

It was never clear to me who showed up first, but I used Delphi first and then tried Visual Basic and was like "Oh! It's here too!"

My electric mower has lasted longer than the gasoline mower before it, which literally had plastic valves inside the carbeurtator.

Passkeys on my iPhone works awesome.

Too bad for Yubikey. I don't need them any more.

Just the other day I was creating an ID on a government web site, which offered a list of security questions such as "Title of your favorite movie" or "Someone that you admired as a child" and the answer was not allowed to have any spaces.

Just absurd.

Deep dusk will be quite a disco ball.

Because their economy is almost exclusively oil? Quite a few countries of the world would qualify if that's the case.

"A modern passenger car" varies widely depending on what locale the reader is in. A passenger car in Jakarta is not at all the same as a passenger car in Los Angeles.

Can we just use Kilograms?

Why do you think that a platform with so many customers as to be industry defining, with dozens of interface options, with a massive feature set, with a global footprint and basically flawless uptime requirements, could be kept running by two guys?

If that was good business then presumably the brand could have done it at some point during their long slow decline?

Expect an error but this will depend on the brand.

"Smudging" is a common trick. Just dab some face oil on the lens, just enough so it can't get detail but not so much that the system can tell there's a covering.

Because the "other side" is busy trying to anthropomorphise AI into solving the trolly problem, while being mostly clueless about the actual problems.

They'll show up after the fact and whinge endlessly about how they should have been involved.

How? Training and operating models seems to naturally focus on those willing to invest quite significantly in these operations.

It's remarkable how often I hear about brilliant products being released by asshole personalities who were hard to work with, but still stayed engaged.

The other two extremes tend not to produce much of interest; the committee of people pleasers who have nothing passionate to argue about, and the group of absolute psychopaths, don't ever seem to be the origin story for industry-changing products.

Which just goes to show that technical chops and business chops are entirely unrelated. I think John Carmack did alright anyway.

Actually yes. Pretty much most credit cards are in fact JavaCards.

Weird but true, and quite obscure.

Well, Oracle may have done fine, but IIRC open sourcing the JDK was Sun's very penultimate move on its deathbed. Oracle inherited the license to the trademark, but the actual JDK was already free.