NASA and the US government don't have exclusive rights to going to the moon. If the US government somehow ban them from launching they could just as easily launch from a different country out of the reach of the US.

From Google's FAQ

Will Android Debug Bridge (ADB) install work without registration? As a developer, you are free to install apps without verification with ADB. This is designed to support developers' need to develop, test apps that are not intended or not yet ready to distribute to the wider consumer population.

Obviously, ADB can't distinguish the cases of (a) an app developer who just wrote an app using ADB to install an APK on their device for testing and (b) any random person using ADB to install an APK on their device for whatever reason they like. This means that random people can use ADB to install APKs from unverified developers.

Well, if that were the point of the system, you'd be right, but it's not. The point of the system is to make it hard for malware authors to distribute malware to large numbers of users without getting quickly shut down. This system doesn't "scan apps" at all... Android just won't install downloaded APKs that don't have a Google-provided signature on them, but it will install ADB-installed APKs without a Google-provided signature because app developers need to be able to build and test apps without having to send every version off to a Google server for signing.

I don't know about more explanatory power, but here's another theory for you: Consciousness doesn't really exist, at least not as far as we know. What we perceive as our own consciousness is just a result of the effort of one part of our brain to generate explanations for the results of computations by another part of our brain. The process of generating explanations requires a little bit of recursive analysis that looks like introspection and self-awareness, except that nearly all of what it's allegedly introspecting is actually completely opaque to the computation that generates the explanations. Note also that there needn't be any actual correlation between the generated explanations and the computation that is being explained (there's actually pretty good empirical evidence that our explanatory systems are just as good at explaining something we actually disagree with as something we decided, BTW).

Now, why did we evolve such an explanation engine? Because it was adaptive for a communal species, of course, especially when coupled with another ability that co-evolved with it: Rich, detailed communication (speech, and more). We developed the explanation engine so we could use the explanations to convince others in our community that our unexplained computation results (decisions, actions, etc.) are better than theirs. This development was both communally adaptive, because battling explanation engines (people arguing with each other) actually result in the construction of better joint computations, enabling the community to make better collective decisions and thrive, and individually adaptive because the better explainer is able to get their way more often and increase their status within the community.

So, within this theory, your questions are all pretty easily answered: (1) Consciousness is just an illusion that arises from the layered structure of our brains, which are, indeed, purely physical objects, though incredibly sophisticated. (2) This apparent consciousness and the logic circuitry that underpins/enables it closely matches evolutionary adaptiveness because it is actually an evolutionary process: The explanatory engine operates by generating, testing and selecting postulates, just as evolution operates by generating, testing and selection genotypes. (3) Consciousness is illusory so the question of where to draw the line doesn't make sense, but you can also clearly see that rocks don't have anything that might appear to be consciousness because are no computational processes going on in them. Cities might, however, especially when you note that human cities contain institutions that both compute (make decisions) and attempt to explain those computations, but we'd really need a much more precise definition of "consciousness" to attempt to answer this question. Such a definition is impossible, however, because consciousness is just an illusion anyway.

From the summary:

In its blog post, F-Droid warns about the impact on users and Android app developers. "You, the creator, can no longer develop an app and share it directly with your friends, family, and community without first seeking Google's approval,"

You can still develop an app and share it directly with whoever you want without registering, you just have to convince them to use ADB to install it, rather than clicking a link on a web site or downloading from an app store (like F-Droid). This adds a lot of friction and requires your potential users to trust you quite a bit more, because it feels like they're taking a bigger risk, even though there isn't any actual difference in risk. I expect that we'll start to see apps packaged with ADB for a "single-click install" from a Windows machine, to reduce the friction as far as possible. Users would still have to do the dance to enable developer options, enable USB, then tap "accept" on the ADB key popup, though an installer could (and probably will) walk them though that.

Also, although I don't think details are available yet, Google says there will be an option for "limited distribution accounts" which don't require any fee or ID verification, but can only distribute their apps to a limited number of devices. For people who just want to share with friends and family, this should cover them.

Food was a significantly larger percentage of disposable income in the 60s and 70s. And, as I mentioned before, that steady decline in the money spent in food was actually offset to a large degree by an increase in eating out (or ordering in). If we still ate at home as much as we used to, the drop would be even larger.

You can cancel the manned Mars trip now, it won't unlock a real-world Xbox achievement.

Banning this type of filling from being used in the first place is also a good idea, but banning the cremation of these fillings is more effective and important. If they just ban these fillings from being put in, then the problem will persist unabated until at least after the death of the last person who already has one.

I suspect they're a lot more careful with the corpses of people who have nuclear-powered pacemakers etc...

Yep, once upon a time it was hard to get enough food to get fat, especially with all of the exercise that was required just to live. People didn't change, the environment did. I'm not sure why you think it's now a moral failing not to exercise the personal responsibility that was previously unnecessary. Why not just accept GLP-1 agonists as part of the new environment?

No, it has to do with food -- good, bad and indifferent -- getting far cheaper and more abundant. Americans spend a much smaller percentage of their income on food than they did, even in spite of the fact that we eat restaurant-prepared food far, far more often than we used to.

Yes, the availability of cheap, convenient, tasty and empty calories is a bad thing, and its cost has fallen faster than fresh food, but all food is much, much cheaper than it was when America was much slimmer. It's also relevant that Americans are more sedentary because transportation is cheaper and more work and entertainment activities are sedentary.

And with this you undercut your whole argument. Grades provide a way of sorting the student body by ability, whether said student body is composed of elite students or low-middling students (like my alma mater). As long as people want to know who the best of the best are -- and they do -- it's in the best interests of Harvard and the students to sort them effectively.

Note that the fact that Harvard Law has renamed A, B, C and D/E as High Honors, Honors, Pass and Fail, doesn't change that they are still giving those grades. My guess is that they did this renaming because rampant grade inflation everywhere has made people believe that A is good, B is bad and C is awful, and by renaming they enable professors to give C's without the stigma. It's a way to fight the grade inflation problem -- give new labels to the grades to shake off the negative connotations of the lower of the old labels.

Perhaps the rest of Harvard should do the same, and then their professors could go back to applying proper grading curves, so most students will get C, er, Pass.

Of course, unless the school can convince the students that hard grading is a feature, not a bug, this will just produce a renaming treadmill. Everyone will start thinking that only losers get anything less than High Honors, so they'll push professors to give mostly High Honors, so High Honors will lose its meaning and another round of renaming will be needed.

As long as the government isn't in full control of the degrees in question... it's a bad solution to a worse problem.

We're living in a world where old diseases are coming back because we couldn't shut down anti-vax talk as quickly as the asshole who started it all to discredit vaccines in production so he could sell his own and get rich. He took a big hit because he had something to take away... the greedy fools who followed did not.

You shouldn't be able to give medical advice - even if you slap "for entertainment purposes only" on your message - unless you have a medical degree that is relevant to the kind of advice you're giving. Because the alternative is, apparently, the return of polio.

Yes, the late 1800s-1920s was peak late stage capitalism, but the threat of communism made it change its ways and play nice for like 30-40 years, but then people were successfully indoctrinated into letting capitalism run amok by successive waves of red scares and the USSR collapsed, and now here we are again. Every time capitalism survives a brush with its late-stage phase, it means we will suffer through another one, but with more automation, surveillance and means of control.

Blackhats like to host proxies for their traffic in Azure and AWS for the same reason.

The problem is when an answer is long and involves nuance, and that doesn't work in debates.

The problem with not engaging, however, is that if you don't engage with an issue, you'll just get endlessly sniped on it. And the alternative approach - embrace the opposite side's positions to shut them up - also doesn't work, because you get the worst of both worlds (you tick off your side, while not winning over votes from the opposite side). It's a strategic error to run from difficult conversations.

A lot of people misunderstand the market for the DGX Spark.

If you want to run a small model at home, or create a LoRA for a tiny model, you don't want to do it on this - you want to do it on gaming GPUs.

If you want to create a large foundation model, or run commercial inference, you don't want to do it on this - you want to do this on high-end AI servers.

This fits the middle ground between these two things. It gives you a far larger memory than you can get on gaming GPUs (allowing you to do inference on / tune / train much larger models, esp. when you combine two Sparks). It sacrifices some memory bandwidth and FLOPs and costs somewhat more, but it lets you do things that you simply can't do in any meaningful way on gaming GPUs, that you'd normally have to buy / rent big expensive servers to do.

The closest current alternative is Mac Studio M2 or M3 Ultras. You get better bandwidth on the macs, but way worse TOPS. The balance of these factors depends greatly on what sort of application you're running, but in most cases they'll be in the ballpark of each other. For example, one $7,5k Mac M3 Ultra with 256GB is said to run Qwen 3 235B GGUF at 16 tok/s, while two linked $4,2k DGX Sparks with the same total 256GB are said to do it at 12 tok/s, with similar quantization. Your mileage may vary depending on what you're doing.

Either way, you're not going to be training a big foundation model or serving commercial inference on either, at least not economically. But if you want something that can work with large models at home, these are the sort of solutions that you want. The Spark is the sort of system that you train your toy and small models on before renting out a cluster for a YOLO run, or to run inference a large open model for your personal or office internal use.