Most thoughtful fiction I have seen that depicted space-faring humans in the solar system has pretty much taken it for granted that the all the objects in the solar system out to the Heliopause were in the navigation data bases of all the ships. Much like the navigation charts for oceans we have had for centuries. In either case it is a risk to navigate without it.

So this must be the the first step of getting that. There is no way humans are going to do it. It has to be automated like this but just on a much large scale.

If you are such an incompetent driver that you don't know when and when not to use the touchscreen in the car then you don't qualify for a drivers license to begin with. I don't care if you have been driving for decades. If this is your mental state you are just too stupid and too unable to adapt to be trusted.

My Model Y has all critical driving functions available without my hands leaving the steering wheel. Wipers, lights, turn signals, and a few non-critical functions like speaker volume. And for cases where I need to take my eyes off the road for a few seconds there is Autopilot which is perfectly safe if you have a modicum of understanding the conditions in which it is safe.

Maybe it is time for car "type rating" qualifiers to the drivers licenses like they have for heavy aircraft.

So just what customer has a 7TB+ uplink to their systems?

This reads a lot like a Cloudflare promo stunt.

Isn't that the company that was regarded as a law firm with a silicon foundry?

Guess it pays well. I have a friend retired from TI about a decade back. Money, they have.

After the 2024 election somebody got the idea to ask middle school students how they would have voted. The majority were for Trump, to the surprise (dismay?) of the journalists compiling the report.

As it turns out, the aggregate reason for this result is that Harris "dissed" Joe Rogan where Trump cozied up to him.

That's just one example of what I wrote about. Do you think the "adults" that voted Trump were doing any better with critical thinking about their news sources?

The loudest loudmouth is the source of truth. That's what this means. This is how you get this sequence:

Time for an election.

Candidate A: hardworking successful and respected prosecutor, Senator, and Vice President. Exemplary record of promoting health care, voting rights, and reducing gun violence and crime. Full understanding and adherence to the rule of law. Well educated. Articulate as a court officer should be.

Candidate B: Convicted felon of over 30 counts, with indictments for around 50 more. Impeached twice for betraying the country and his oath of office. A known sex offender. Party to over 3500 lawsuits in private business (that would be about one a week over 30 years). Known con-man and grifter, surrounded by like minded cronies. Tells so many lies a national newspaper tried to count them all and eventually just gave up. Shows no deep comprehension of any subject matter without his name embedded in it. Ran a campaign based on retribution and weaponizing the government for political purposes. That turns out to be one of the few things he didn't lie about.

Voting public, steeped in social media: Of Course Candidate B! Candidate A laughs funny. Candidate B is a Man's Man who Tells It Like It Is! He's going to hurt the people I want to hurt. And look how f**king mad those snooty liberals are. Look at this meme I could die laughing.

And there you have it. I realize that I am probably going to be moderated Troll for this post because they will think the above is a political rant and not a recitation of objective fact. Or, more likely, they will pretend because they don't like those facts. So this will be a demonstration of how social media works.

Anyone care to predict the time window where AI-powered humanoid bots start eliminating jobs for sex workers?

Java is one of those languages I used to use a lot but don't anymore because I shifted to a new orbit. So it is hard for me to work up a dudgeon over Oracle making money on it.

Having now been steeped in 2-3 eventful years of AI coding, what I think is these kinds of deals/services are going to die out. If I had a code base in Java and I didn't want to pay license for it, I would just have Claude or some even-better-at-coding LLM model simply rewrite the project, module by module, into C++ or Rust or some other language that wouldn't have these issues. And probably work better.

Every month the coding models just get better and better. At not too long ago they were good for mostly writing regex expressions. Now they eat entire multi-language projects with 7-deep function calls at the application layer and end up knowing more about it than any one person who actually wrote the project. And can fix things just as easy. And do refactoring that you never before had time and resources for. And document it.

A half-century ago when I was submitting job decks on Hollerith cards this was a science fiction dream. Now it is a reality.

And at the same time what was a reality will then become a dream: charging fees for a language platform like Java.

Notice what their last choice is. Also note that the only thing they will stop making in China is stuff that they would sell in the U.S.

What do you think the odds are that the entire HP senior management votes straight Republican.

Does anyone recall this is the government agency that refused to declare that fraud had any role in deciding the 2020 election?

In fact, asserted the opposite of that.

And now Trump is in control again. What would you expect?

That is a common misconception about quantum computing. One that I shared until I started learning more about it. No, it doesn't do everything all at once in parallel.

Here is an excellent video that, if you are willing to part with about 30 minutes in time, will make you 10 billion percent better informed than you are now, or I was. I really think everyone with these question should watch this.

My experience with Intel goes back decades -- back to when Andy Grove was running the place. It was always thus.

They would always be looking for a way to expand their business -- who wouldn't when they were at the top of the game -- and of course they would "invest" in embedded computing and networking products. With the exception of the Ethernet adapter chip, one by one their products would only do middling in the market, not make that much money, then they would deprecate/cancel/end-of-life the product with no replacement. In this case they are selling it off.

Inevitably their management would make a statement about "returning to our core competency" and this year seems no different. At the end of the day those products you designed on their chips ended up with no future. Deal.

The products themselves weren't bad -- and the network adapter chip managed to achieve dominance -- but Intel never seemed to know how to make a business out of it. Much of that I suspect was software. Software support for chips is expensive to maintain. They knew how to deal with Microsoft and other software sources basically followed along that path, pumping up the market for their x86-based chips. But that duopoly has fallen apart and they know it. Of course they will try to reclaim the CPU business but I just don't see how. Doing what Apple has done with the M series of chips or Nvidia has done is not something you just pivot to.

And AMD has hit their stride. Intel will survive but I don't see a path to market dominance they once had.

As far as I'm concerned they might as well resurrect edlin. I won't be using it.

Coding tests in the interview process will become meaningless (they already were but that's a different topic), and most likely dropped forever.

And yet we not only elected a president who is a convicted felon, his party which calls itself the responsible adults in the room lets him do pretty much whatever he wants.

So how are you going to avoid buying that?