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Comment The pendulum swings (Score 1) 75

We went from walled gardens like AOL CompuServe, the WELL, Delphi, etc., to open authorship of websites, and now we are back to a lot of walled gardens, we just call them social media - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all with their own revenue generating enclosures.

I was teaching undergrad and graduate level teachers in 1998 through 2000, and they would almost universally come in demanding that they know how to make a webpage and write HTML. I also had to make sure that they knew what a student experience was like, so we were, at that time, still pretty big on LOGO. They were convinced that LOGO was utter nonsense and a useless toy, and that they had to learn HTML or they would be left as the jetsam of the Internet. A week into HTML, where are syntax errors beget digital avalanches, they were ready to tear their hair out. A week into LOGO and they were just as inspired and happy as the kids they would eventually teach it to. You didnâ(TM)t get a syntax error in LOGO, the console simply asks you to teach it how to do the thing you typed that wasnâ(TM)t in its vocabulary.

Even after we had some of the early foolproof web authoring tools, people realized that the hard part was not necessarily coding, it was making sure you knew what you were going to talk about, how to say it, how to present it, how to have it make sense and how to use the hyperlinking that the web was built for.

Of course, revenue has a lot to do with the overall frustrating Web experience today, to read the first story on my local newspaper site. I have to dismiss no less than five ads and pop-up offers. Iâ(TM)ve never been to the Vegas strip, but I imagine the visual assault of the current web means I really donâ(TM)t need to experience it in person in the physical world. And of course, like operating systems, every major provider wants to make sure you stay in theirs. Itâ(TM)s kind of like how CVS is no longer a pharmacy, they build a separate building that has enough stuff so that you donâ(TM)t even try to shop elsewhere when you go in to get your RX. You grab all the other things you need there so that you wonâ(TM)t go elsewhere. META has adopted this model, they want to make sure that everything you need to get through your day is available in their brand. Google as well. Google is an advertising company that happens to be willing to supply you with some serviceable tools to do other things. Kind of like the car Homer Simpson designs. And Iâ(TM)ll stop now because Iâ(TM)m starting to sound like grandpa Simpson with the onions.

Comment Re: Color me skeptical, (Score 1) 166

This assumes you want a lunar habitat. The original flights to the moon were in an era of exploration, they actually did provide some valid scientific results, and we beat the Russians. Growing up in that era, I cheered space flight like no one else. What was accomplished was nothing short of amazing. We no longer need to beat the Russians, so why? The real value of LEO is earth resource monitoring, possibly some manufacturing. Unmanned space flight is far safer and more reliable than manned. The same goes for Mars. What is the return on investment? We will never colonize any other celestial body to remove any pressure on the Earth. Less than 1000 people have ever flown to space in 60+ years of flights. A quarter of a million people have died in a single day in a disaster, and it never put a dent in the population of the Earth. Both efforts no longer look like breakthroughs, but rather more like flagpole sitting or ego projects. Iâ(TM)m willing to be proven wrong.

Comment Color me skeptical, (Score 4, Insightful) 166

Three years of launches, and they have yet to complete an orbit.
Somehow all in the next calendar year, they expect to regularly orbit, AND orbit a propellant target AND complete propellant transfer AND orbit a stable propellant depot AND perform a dozen or more propellant transfers AND land an unmanned Starship HLS on the moon AND launch 5 Starships to the Mars surface AND land a Starship with a working rover on the moon surface.
His delivery of car functions and price targets have slipped by years.
Is there some reasonableness of the space flight schedule that is inherently more reliable?
I get it, yeah, it is rocket science, but it seems like wishful thinking at best.

Comment Trying to confirm (Score 1) 95

If this craft has completed a full orbit. They refer to reaching orbital velocity or altitude, but I cannot find any reference to completing a full orbit of the earth. Ten launches without completing an orbit seems like a lot for something that is supposed to use 3 or 4 of these things rendezvousing in orbit to get to the moon and back in 2027.

Comment Re: Simple: Vindictive against climate research (Score 4, Informative) 165

Ground truthing (touchy term depending on if you are the ground based or spaced based nerd) is essential in getting a verification on the ground of what the bird sees. Once you have that calibration, the sat data is very reliable. And you cannot be on the ground everywhere, so the sat has greater range. This is an evolution of what the LANDSAT birds have been doing for decades. Source: have been working on earth resource monitoring education / citizen science for 30 years.

Comment But somehow (Score 2) 160

an athlete or a celebrity or a politician can stumble 20 times go down the wrong path for years, and somehow come back and win the big one and be elevated to a pedestal beyond compare. The scientist makes a few mistakes along the way and they and they are vilified.

Comment And by pressing needs (Score 2) 41

He means money.
A search engine now makes money while almost inadvertently supplying useful search results.
See google results for the past year, shopping is now the top tier of results.
Sponsored results too. Gotta ad-incentivize those results.
Since COVID they have also convinced students that they are an operating system.
Used to be people gave up on a search 3 or 4 clicks deep. I believe that number now approaches 1.
Sorry, usually only this cynical *before* breakfast.

Comment It certainly has that capacity (Score 5, Insightful) 196

I gave it two prompts this morning on topics in my field, and it gave me 1000 words each.
Mostly accurate with a few small errors. Since it was my field, I caught them.
If I were a student looking for a fast way out of an assignment, I likely would not know enough to catch them.
And if I were a student looking for a fast way out, I probably would also not bother to do the critical thinking needed to vet the results.
It probably makes low effort learners march in place.
It probably does nothing to people who bank on their own originality and abilities to analyze, evaluate and synthesize.
Seems to have some value in asking here is my work, did I miss anything? And further evaluating.
As you might with a colleague or editor.
But take everything with a grain of salt.

Comment If Lemkin were not a “founder” (Score 5, Insightful) 151

that would 100% be a firing offence.

Honestly, setting an AI you don’t control lose on your production database? Really? That’s just gross incompetence. This is code that a) wasn’t written or reviewed by a human, and b) code that wasn’t even tested on a development copy of the database.

Developers that do things like that are a liability. Unfortunately as “founder” he’ll likely just post something on LinkedIn about learning from his mistakes and “personal growth”, and that will be the end of it. Anyone else would have been shown the door to accelerate their “personal growth”.

Yaz

Comment being first does not always mean being best. (Score 1) 68

They were *late* to make a phone, and look how it turned out.
They were *late* to make a tablet and look how it turned out.
Siri is still more Knowledge Navigator than HAL.
Personally, Iâ(TM)d so far rather be handed a known reference by Siri than the synthetic stuff that pops out at the top of Google these days.
It may turn out to take an Apple amount of time to get everyday AI right. The current headline players still seem to be shaking everything out. Expert systems and machine learning is helping greatly. The rest seems not exactly ready for prime time or for a typical user to depend on.

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