Certainly it could orbit the earth, but the orbit could easily pass through the earth since it does not interact. The reduced gravity from earth while it is below the surface will mean the orbit wonâ(TM)t be an ellipse and i think it would be unstable.

I thought there was an explanation that Theia formed in the same orbit as Earth, each at a Trojan point with the other. This is unstable and eventually they crashed into each other. Is this now considered impossible?

Dig a bit deeper and you can save money by skipping the nuclear-reactor part; just heat the water for your steam turbines with the geothermal heat that's already present down there.

Compared to what was available before, it is quite impressive.

The negative feedback is prompted by the fact that AI is constantly being shoved into every one of our orifices 24/7 by every vaguely tech-related company as if it was the second coming of Jesus. To justify that amount of social pressure, it would indeed have to be quite a bit better than it actually is, and that's why people aren't impressed.

You mean, why does Linus keep agreeing to be interviewed, and then reply to straightforward questions with the obvious answers?

What would you rather he do? Refuse to be interviewed, or maybe make up unexpected answers just to be edgy?

Not a big fan of this, but I'm pretty certain they need that money to actually replace all the working parts of the reactor. Only the concrete shell will be reused. They could probably use the same amount of money to fix reactor 2 the same way, they are just not touching it because of history.

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

... which, to be clear, is a good thing. Working around the compiler is dangerous and a code smell, so it shouldn't be something that is easy to do. It usually indicates that either the compiler's capabilities aren't sufficient to meet your needs (in which case, a better solution would be either a better compiler, or to re-evaluate the wisdom of your approach), or that you are doing something the wrong way and should find a way to do it that works with the compiler, rather than around it, so that you get the benefits of the compiler's co-operation.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz

Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.

Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).

Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.

Yaz

If education was an easy fix, we'd have an educated populace and ClickFix wouldn't be a problem.

The fact is, we live in eternal September. No matter how many people we educate, there's a unending firehose of exploitable n00bs arriving to replace them.

That, or your project gets sidelined. Which is where the danger lies.

I work for a big multinational software company that uses a lot of Open Source Software. We have a security office that audits all of our products several times a year. If any piece of our stack shows any open CVEs we have a fixed amount of time to fix the issue, with the amount of time varying from a few days (for CRITICAL severity issues) to roughly half a year for the lowest severity issues. A lack of a fix for a published CVE isn’t an excuse for not fixing the issue on our end — the software still has a security flaw in it, and the organization is so incredible security averse (thanks in part to having contacts in the defence industry) that they don’t want to risk expensive lawsuits and the loss of reputation if a vulnerability is exploited.

A lot of bigger organizations now work this way. We’ve all seen what has happened to organizations that have had significantly security breaches, and it’s not pretty. Our customers are big corporations and government entities — and if they even sniff a risk there are going to be problems. So if there is an unpatched exploit, we’re expected to either switch to something comparable, or DIY a solution (either replacing the library in question, or potentially patching it ourselves).

If ffmpeg allows known and published vulnerabilities to languish, the risk here is that organizations that use their code will simply stop using it and will look for other solutions. That’s a tough pill for an Open Source Software developer to swallow, especially when they make it as big and important as ffmpeg. You might wind up in a situation where an entity like Google forks your code and takes ownership, and eventually gets everyone to migrate to using their version instead (like what they did with WebKit to Chrome), leaving you sidelines. Or maybe someone else jumps in with a compatible solution that works well enough for enough users that they switch to that instead.

Now in an ideal world, the Google’s of this world would not only submit a CVE but would also submit a patch. Having been an OSS developer myself I’ve always encouraged my staff if they find a bug in a piece of software we use to file a bug report and ideally a patch if they know how to patch the issue correctly — but I know that is hardly universal within our organization, and probably even less so elsewhere.

TL;DR: a lot of OSS success relies on having lots of users, or at least some big and important users. But you risk losing those if you leave CVE’s open for too long, as company policies may require scrapping software with unfixed CVEs. That loss of users and reputation is dangerous for an OSS project — it’s how projects get supplanted, either by a fork or by a new (and similar) project.

Yaz

If you're going to attempt something outrageous that is almost certain to fail, why not a Space Elevator? On the off-chance you do succeed, that would be a hell of a lot more valuable.

A baby in a cradle is the wrong analogy -- a better analogy is an internal organ inside a body. Yes, you can (with advanced technology and at great expense) remove the internal organ from the body and keep it alive externally for some time, but it's going to be unpleasant for everyone involved, and sooner or later the disembodied organ will wither and die, unless it is returned to the environment it was specifically evolved to live within.

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.