sandworm101

Every bad day for Apple-Microsoft is another great day for switching to Linux.

You have choices. Make them.

Try getting things done on such a device in a military context. A thousand acronyms adopted by generals who dont know the internet from a hole in the ground. I saw a Gunnary Seargent scream when he saw his rank acronym (GySgt) get autocorrected on a form to gynocologist (i suspect he hit a suggested word popup). It is bad enough having to deal with the keyboard rejecting capital letters in the middle of a word.

We forget how much thermal energy lives in things like butter and flour. Butter has roughly the same energy by mass as high-grade coal. But who ever sees a truck full of butter as a fire hazard?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel_fire (1999, 39 dead)

>> The fire burned for fifty-three hours and is estimated to have reached a temperature of 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), mainly due to the margarine load in the trailer, equivalent to a 23,000-litre (5,100 imp gal; 6,100 US gal) oil tanker

That isnt cooperation. That is basic market principals in action. Bid and counter bids that whittle down the profit margin based on willingness to risk a win/loss? These are auction principals as old as time. This is reaction rather than cooperation.

There were no flat panels. That was a sales pitch. In reality, a slight curve to a panel adds so much strength that it can be made considerably lighter/cheaper than a flat panel of sufficient strength. Flat panels also tend to dent inwards very easily, which is not a good look for a car. Then there is the issue of thermal expansion. A pre-bent bit of metal will expand in a predictable way. A dead-flat panel could buckle in multiple unexpected ways.

I had a jeep wrangler once. The window was "flat" but not if you looked at its reflection. There was an almost imperceptible but complex curve, no doubt for strength.

Radians? Do any math where Pi is a base number and the errors can cumulate quickly, depending on where you insert the pi approximation.

By "nuclear weapon" most people think of a bomb, but it can also mean the non-bomb portions of nuclear delivery systems such as rocket/missile bodies and aircraft. In times of rising conflict they could "forward-deploy" the warheads from Russia to be mated to rockets and such already in the field. So the peacetime "no nukes in Poland" policy can be true even though "nuclear weapons" were already waiting in bunkers there.

The west did basically the same thing. Not every "nuclear weapon bunker" at every American base actually held warheads.

>> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this

There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.

(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)

>> A calculator does math faster but we don't call it sentient or feel inferior or dismiss the results.

Actually, we do. We do dismiss calculator results. We are all generally aware of a calculator's abilities. We know it has limits. So when a calculator outputs 9999e999999 we know to distrust that result. It was something out of the calculators concept of understanding. So too a calculator's version of Pi. "3.14159265359" is not Pi and every user knows it is an approximation not be used for anything too important or precise. The same approach should apply to LLMs... but their limitations remain nebulous and ever-changing.

>> Guys, if I buy a photo camera

If you buy one camera, you are likely a billion times more likely to buy another. And, you have the disposable income to be in the market.

>> there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines

You are not a whale, but you might be. Most people only buy one washing machine but a few people buy dozens (apartment managers and such). Such people, whales, sometimes buy one as test case. So ya, if you buy one then you are a strong maybe for one day buying many more.

>> A compromised device inside the White House network

A whitehouse network. It isn't like everything done in that building run through a single wifi router. It is likely an unprotected network for personal use with zero connecting to anything important.

It has cameras. Just tell it to retreat to above head height when it sees a person, or motion.

My worry is cats. I know cats that will go to war with such a robot. String, jerky movements, vertical retreat... cats are built to war with such things.

>> don't have to depend on any other software company if they don't want to.

I am rather sure that Google is heavily reliant on Microsoft and Apple to produce the operating systems used on devices that are in turn used to view Google's ads. And Microsoft is heavily reliant on hardware manufacturers (firmware is also software) to make the machines that Windows lives inside. And Apple is reliant upon a thousand and one companies that enable the innumerable mobile networks, which include many layers of non-apple software.

>> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations

Like a lumber mill that buys logs from a logging company? Who subcontracts to individual fallers? Who buy their chainsaws from a chainsaw company, their fuel from a petrochemical company? No business isn't entirely dependent on third parties. That's what it means to exist in a healthy economy.

A "farm-to-table" megacorp that owns everything from the source of every raw material through to the finished product is a nightmare, an entity that needs to be reigned in and broken up. Capitalism is a competitive game, but a game that can never be allowed to end.

GMs also have access to a greater number of memorized situations. Regardless of whether they are conscious of it or not, they have previously analyzed so many moves that they can cut off branches they just know instinctively to be dead ends. Machines could do this, directly reference a massive dataset of precomputed board positions, but that isn't considered a proper chess engine... despite the fact that human GMs do use such techniques.

Ya, when we specifically ask for hallucinated data we call it _inferred_ data. As I want "good" pictures, I give the system permission to add/remove/infer/hallucinate whatever data it can to achieve a "good" image. Very soon we will all look like supermodels... at least in photos.

Not everyone is a socmed influencer. Some of us want to take pictures that match reality.

Lol. The author seems to think that people only deserve privacy when in color. Faces are blocked in the original color image but not in the black-and-white depth image.

>> what does using an LLM do that ublock doesn’t

It burns through tokens/electricity.

In all seriousness, far too many people think "throw AI at it" will solve every tech problem. AI remains inefficient, power hungry and mercurial. Replacing an adblocker or firewall with a constantly-running AI is as efficient and useful as rocket motors on a car.

Nope. Speed doesnt contribute to crater depth. Faster makes a wider crater, not a deeper one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth

When the object is near supersonic spèeds (throught the various materials) even the strenght of the materials becomes very secondary. A meteor made of sand makes the same crater as one made of stone.

Distantly. The all wore makeup at work.

These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.

Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit. An exchange or index that promotes IPOs of unprofitable companies diminishes its reputation, and the reputation of all other stocks it indexes.

Anthropic is free to continue selling shares privately. They can setup a website and take cc payments if the care so much.

Marion Morrison was a definitive male role model.

>> Same reason we used to read Euclid in class and make students demonstrate countless proofs.

Key phrase: "Read Euclid". American schools do not read about math. They are taught to do math. They do not read anything written by the people who created it. They are not given context. They are given set problems and taught how to solve them using prescribed methods. More often than not, this results in lackluster understanding.

I did an AP course at school where we had to write a paper on a subject. Not a problem set. Not a proof. An actual paper about a mathematical concept. I did mine on the mathematics behind various methods for counting cards.

But that isn't coffin corner. The "coffin" is a part of a flight envelope where departure results in near-certain horrible outcomes (ie too fast and wings fall off coupled with too slow and the resulting stall also rips the wings off). A lear or any other business jet is designed specifically to avoid any such things. It should stall, but not in any lethal way. And a lear is small enough that no storm should do things like rip bits off the aircraft. A thunderstorm will toss it around like a tennis ball in a washing machine, but wings/tails should not separate from the aircraft.

The fuel would not have contributed to the crater. Fuel does not explode, not at the speed needed to form a crater. It requires oxygen. No matter how much fuel was present, there was not enough oxygen in the immediate vicinity of the crash to burn that much fuel.

The fact that there was a fire long after the impact shows the fuel was not burnt in the crash. Fuel hung around long enough to still be burning at least several seconds afterwards, long after the crater was formed. That is why it wasn't a missile. Missiles use high explosives (propellants and warheads) which burn up all at once to generally leave a non-burning crater.

Some back-of-napkin math yields a crater depth of a little under a meter ... which is in the ballpark of images.

aircraft (1.5m radius cylinder x 18m long) at 6700kg = 51.54 kg/m3 aircraft density... over ~1,500kg/m3 average soil density x aircraft 18m length = 0.63m

=.63m / 2-foot penetration below ground level... which is what the pictures show.

Soil is dense. Aircraft are marshmallows compared to soil.

It wasn't coffin corner. This was a Lear at reasonable altitudes, not a U2 at the edge of space. The death spiral suggest a loss of control authority. It is conceivable that one wing severely iced to the point of unrecoverable asymmetric lift but I think it was something more the icing. It might have lost part of its wing, or the controls on one wing locked into an unrecoverable position.

In the pictures, the flaps appear present but not extended. If they had been extended they would have ripped away at that speed. And they would not have been able to lower them after the overspeed began. I think the answer is in the control system. One or more control surfaces were doing something other than commanded.

Some images seem to indicate a loss/absence of the horizontal stabilizer, but it is hard to tell AI from real these days.

Well ya, nothing on earth moves that fast, but the speed of power/signal in a grid is a speed described using direct reference to c, as opposed to the frequency of AC current which is measurable in frequencies we can actually appreciate with our own ears/eyes. They are in different leagues.

I see many two-way trips, especially in the north. Some are "December 2025" with one reading followed by "January 2026" with a consistently different reading between trip sets. It looks like someone driving to/from grandma's house for Christmas.

The distinctly different readings on each leg of the trip suggests a rather unscientific methodology, radiation stable to the detector rather than a measurement of background. Maybe someone picked up some banana bread at grandma's for the drive home?

>> explain why this was apparently so difficult to find out?

Likely because the source of the noise was a class of energy providers that themselves react to fluctuation in the grid. Electricity may travel at the speed of light but all the little switches and transistors that connect/disconnect suppliers do not. It would have been noise within noise.

>> will encrypt the data before it's written to disk

The people buying much of these "hardware encryption" products do so because they believe it removes the need for software encryption to/from the device.