Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.

As there are so many wonderful books out there just begging for a motion picture treatment, Hollywood will oblige by... releasing more pointless, vapid remakes.

This is a law that will allow the federal government to take total control of AI forever

No. The tech is already out — this horse is so far out of the barn you'd need a passport and numerous border crossings to even find hoofprints.

Not only is such a law completely unable to regulate GPT/LLM/generative software in the USA's non-commercial software ecosphere, it can have no effect across national borders and you may be absolutely certain that other state actors will simply smile and wave at such ideas (for that matter, you may be certain that the US intelligence apparatus will do the same.)

At home or cloud-based? It is either-or.

Exactly. These marketing twerps no longer know WTF the words they use even mean. If they ever did. Also, using "secure" in the same context with "the cloud"... that's a similar bit of nonsense. When your data leaves your hands, even just crossing the Internet, it's no longer secure. One party can keep a secret. Anything else... can very quickly become not a secret. As we have seen many times. And of course, we should never forget about this.

> MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1.

Running Ventura 13.3.1 here. Perhaps that's it.

Thanks. I'll consider upgrading after I surf the "bugs in Sonoma" stuff.

> There's also the Text Size slider under the Accessibility control panel.

There is no text size slider under accessibility on my machine (4k monitor, M1 Studio Ultra.)

What works, sort of, is to select the desktop then right click (or control left click), select "Show View Options" from the context menu, and then in there, select a text size from the drop down. You can also do this in the context of any finder window.

However, maximum selectable text size is 16pts — which is very small on a 4k display. As an "accessibility" setting, it's laughable. Which is perhaps why it's not under accessibility.

I have been using a free app from the Mac app store, "Loupe", which provides a comprehensive zoom capability much more convenient than Apple's "Zoom." It's not as good as actual reasonable control over system fonts would be, but it's better than being stuck with 16pt fonts.

Based on what evidence? Faith in Musk?

Over one billion miles driven using FSD.

Looking that that graph is should be obvious where it is going, and how soon.

The last I heard about the taxi idea, they mentioned they were considering letting people send out their cars as taxis when not in use, and thus owning a Tesla could actually make you money.

That does depend on true self driving to work but it seems like they are pretty close now.

A fact which renders these trackers completely useless as anti-theft devices

Not really, even if a thief is alerted something is being tracked if they can't find the tracker they will throw out the object they stole... which you can then recover. and also potentially get video evidence from around where it was dumped to ID the thief if they still have something from your backpack...

I have a hidden compartment in my backpack where I often put cash so I very much would be happy to recover even just the empty backpack without contents.

Or if you had an AirTag hidden in a car they might just ditch the car rather than take it to a chop shop, and you can at least find where it was ditched.

Also did you forget "unintentional theft" exists, where for example an airline rather than flying your bags to your destination, takes them elsewhere... and when that happens sometimes they have no clue where the bags are. If you have a tracker, you can tell them what city and facility your bags are in, and even play a sound to help locate them.

AirTags (and the new Android form) are incredibly useful even with tracking detection abilities, you are really missing out on this super cheap insurance and recovery aid.

Got it, thanks - good to know!

I guess since it considers it an "unknown tracker" it would only warn you about it, not feed back to Apple information about that AirTag location.

Didn't see this mentioned in the summary, when support for this launches does this mean Android will also warn you if an AirTag is tracking you? Which would mean it helps with the recognition network being larger for both tracking devices.

Or has Android already supported detecting AirTags tracking?

There is a famous investment quote that goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

If you join in the pack shorting something like this, you open yourself up to the possibility some kind of irrational buying flood comes in and wipes you out.

Remember that these days very few stocks are actually priced according to value, so it doesn't seem like a Trump based stock would be any exception.

I bought an AirPods Pro, received a *case* instead.

Returned by Amazon denied my return since I didn't send back what I had ordered.

Tried to reverse the charge on my Amazon credit card, Amazon denied it and refused to reverse the charge.

So I was just out of luck on that one. However since then I buy pretty much anywhere but Amazon if at all possible, even if I pay more. And I cancelled Prime. In the end I guess it was a cheap way to learn the lesson you cannot trust Amazon in any way.

Is it online somewhere?

I have not shared it with the world, which I think is what you're asking. Nor do I plan to, at least anytime in the near future. This reduces the attack surface and the support loading.

Otherwise, yes, it's online — it's a networking WAN application bringing together people from widely disparate locations.

It'd be like a FOREX trader moving ~$2.25B USD.
Unsure if the impact on FOREX would be as pronounced as it was on BTC, but I bet it'd be something

Only 3 billion USD? Not even a quiver of movement.

Total M2 money supply - 20,783 billion

National debt? Rising at 1 trillion every 100 days, or 100 billion per day.

With so many dollars sloshing around you'd have to go into serious numbers to even have it be felt.