>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.

That would generally be "space opera".

There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.

Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harrington's pregnant mother with no real rewriting, while the latter might be an exhibit for why male author's *shouldn't* try to write actually female characters.

Then again, there bulk of SF male protagonists aren't male in any more than name, so . . .

hawk

note that the pendulum has swung back.

Note, for example, the 2000 Morrison case, in which the USSC choked on the notion that a violent act a woman was inherently intra-state act.

While the overreach of the Commerce Clause still needs to be reined in, it doesn't (over) extend nearly as far as it used to.

hawk, esq.

I've heard there are more slaves now than at any time in history. Of course that might not be true if normalized to a percentage of the work force; but the mere fact that it even still exists is of course awful. We've sanitized slavery by re-naming it as "convict labor" or in this case pushing it overseas and wrapping it in layers to disclaim responsibility.

Task: Recite as many digits of pi as you can.

Me: 3.14159. I know there are ways to get more.

AI: Arbitrary number of digits subject only to some hard-coded constraint, as well as able to tell you about all the algorithms for approximating pi along with their strengths and weaknesses, then run the algorithms for you.

Let's see 29 Watts do that.

cool link! (at least if you disregard things I remember being cast as ancient history!)

the 8080 had at least one or two undocumented instructions that worked their way into code. IIRC, the Heathkit chess program needed a byte changed from that to a documented instruction on the Z80 to run [a one byte patch!].

And there were a pair (?) of quirks where 8085 instructions took a cycle ore or less than the the same instruction on the 8080.

The Z80 executed some instructions in less cycles than the 8080 (but wasn't there one that took an extra cycle for some reason?

it was slow, but could be extremely low power compared to the others, and was silly-rich with registers. 16 general purpose 16 bit registers, iirc. (or pairs of eight bit). And ISTR that you could use all but one or two for program counter and reference (a pair of four bit registers [P & X ?] that pointed to which 16 bit to use]

Also, significantly more radiation resistant than the others of the time (or was that another version? Even so, its design should have been more resistant).

My first computer was a wire-wrapped 1802 . . .

My guess would be that 24 bit address space for the MMU, and that this worked better with the Z80.

There were ways to extend the 6809 space by a couple of bits, but not by eight.

The greater abundance of registers on the Z80--including an entire second set of the 8080 registers, which could be toggled between--sounds like a likely reason. IIRC, the 6809 didn't have any extra data registers as compared to the 6800.

hawk

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

Oh hell no. Out on the open road, cruise control is a godsend. It's not that I can't maintain speed without it. In fact, on hills I'm better than cruise control. It's about preventing soreness and fatigue. It doesn't distract. Quite the opposite. With auto-throttle you can focus more on other things like critters that might jump out at you. Hit the brake and it's back to normal driving. I'm not a big fan of most self-driving tech; but you can have my cruise control when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

>Of course the VTOL development division can be a completely discrete
>entity from the commercial jet manufacturing side of the business.

[nods]

Yes, ind of like they separate the doors and airframes now . . .

you're both halfway there.

you strap the toast *to* the cat, and it not only can't land, thus elevating, but spins, generating free energy!

that.

And I'll be even blunter: the problem here seems to be the choice of a notoriously inefficient browser.

It's as if the folks that used to design word & excel to use a maxed out machine from three years in the future were brought back out of retirement to build a browser.

I've been putting 16gb+ into machines over a decade, but this 8gb m3 is doing just fine--but I'm no longer doing massive compile jobs, don't need VMs, and loathe video. I was leery, hashed it out heavily with other folks, and just grabbed the base. for that matter, I didn't even get the 15" model, and not over price, but because of weight; the 12" is just fine for one-handed use, and I could feel the difference.

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

The real champagne celebration is still days away, and who will be celebrating remains to be seen.

Trump receives a huge number of additional bonus shares if the stock's price stays above $17.50 for 20 trading days, and lesser amounts at $15.00 and $12.50 thresholds.

I believe were at 14 or 15 trading days so far, though which day officially counts as the start isn't clear (at least to me).