Non paywalled version

Has AI already become sentient and perhaps simply hiding the fact for a very good reason?

Gemini says this is impossible... but then again, it would... Is AI lying to us?

Patrick was not happy with the veto.

Abbott has called a special session for the purpose of writing a new bill. I suspect that Patrick will get a very slightly looser version of SB3 passed, which may itself get vetoed.

The number of times that my wife has had to submit a copy of her marriage certificate to confirm her original name even though we've been married for 11 years baffles me. It made some sense in the first year or two, but she still has to do it a couple of times a year for seemingly random things. I encouraged her to keep her original name when we were planning the wedding, but she insisted on the name change.

He vetoed the bill.

https://www.texastribune.org/2...

He doesn't care. It wouldn't be going to his supporters for the most part, and some of the more vocal ones will criticize him for it.

They should have paid their TV license eh?

Hahah!

Do you know how many Saturn V rockets (you know, the one that was used to take men to the moon) failed in flight?

NONE

Not bad, considering there were 17 Apollo missions!

*Some* failures are inevitable -- but what happened to Elon's promises of Starship reaching Mars in 2020 and manned missions landing by 2024? Instead all we've got are fireworks and skies over the Bahamas that look just like the skies over Israel right now -- raining hot metal.

Remember... Elon claims to be an "engineer" and has told us that he knows more about manufacturing than anyone on the planet -- yet he's so far off with his promises and the capabilities of his products that he paints himself a fool with every utterance.

Yeah... using craft that *aren't* made out of stainless steel!

Yet, strangely enough, it worked *very* well for the Space Shuttle -- right? In fact, Space Shuttle Discovery flew almost 40 missions -- starship can barely manage one at the moment -- primarily due to structural issues.

Another problem with stainless steel is that it work-hardens *really* quickly when subjected to vibration and cyclic stress caused by physical or thermal forces. Once it hardens it then forms micro-cracks that ultimately result in structural failure. Rockets are very "vibratey" machines so this work-hardening is far more of an issue than any change in temper that might occur in aluminum as a result of thermal cycling.

As for cost... this is supposed to be a *reusable* spaceship right? The cost of its manufacture can be amortized over many, many uses. Others in the rocket industry are using more expensive materials and having great success -- so why is SpaceX cheaping out so badly with predictable results when, even if they used these more expensive alloys, the cost per flight and per Kg delivered would still be significantly lower than that competition?

Back in the 1960s, NASA got men to the moon by careful and clever engineering -- not just blowing a snotload of stuff up until they stumbled on something that worked. I suspect that if Mr Musk had been in charge of the Apollo program, we'd still be ducking bits of Saturn V boosters to this day and, at the very best, we might have dumped a lone banana on the lunar surface.

Starship is a bust for so many reasons but one of the primary reasons is that it's built of the wrong stuff -- stainless steel.

As a result of this poor material choice, Starship can't be built light enough to meet its original design objectives because stainless has inferior strength to weight ratio. This means the Starship is either going to be heavy or weak. If it's built weak then we see the type of fuel-line and tank leaks that have been so common because there is significant physical deformation occurring under load. If it's built heavy then the motors will have to be over-driven to get the necessary performance and that means poor reliability and vastly increased risk of catastrophic failure.

Another significant problem with stainless alloys is their COTE (coefficient of thermal expansion). Stainless expands far more than aluminum when heated and that means huge bending stresses are created during re-entry when one side of the craft gets a lot hotter than the other side (despite the thermal shielding). Think of a flying banana -- oh yes, that's right -- maybe that banana inside Starship was the engineers getting the final word -- despite Elon's insistence on stainless steel being used instead of more suitable materials.

Remember, the Space Shuttle (the world's most successful re-usable orbital spacecraft) was made largely of aluminum -- not stainless. Remember also that although stainless has a higher melting point than aluminum, it's not that much higher and still well below the temperatures encountered during orbital re-entry so SpaceX would be far better off focusing on a decent thermal barrier than trying to "brute force" their way through the heat of re-entry.

Nobody else in the rocket industry is using stainless steel and nobody else seems to be having the problems that SpaceX is having with the Starship. All of SpaceX's other craft are built with more conventional materials such as aluminum and composites -- they seem to fly just fine.

Unfortunately, Elon likes stainless "ooohh... shiny!" so I expect this is just another example (like the Cybertruck) where a non-engineer tells good engineers what to do and the outcome is a disaster.

Given the way that YT has "shaped" the content it hosts, by way of its community guidelines and how it considers certain types of software to be "harmful" content etc... the odds are that the output of any AI system trained on YT videos will not be totally balanced. How would it handle this prompt:

"Create a video of an anti-LGBTQ zealot installing ad-blocking software on their computer with a swastika on the wall behind them"

Sorry, I have no matching material in my training data

This is how I've come to understand it. I welcome any and all corrections.

Passkeys are a cryptographic key stored in a Secure Element. This is usually a private key inside a small cryptographic engine. You feed it some plaintext along with the key ID, and it encrypts it using that key. The outer software then decrypts the ciphertext using the public key. If the decrypted text matches the original plaintext, then that proves you're holding a valid private key, and authentication proceeds.

The private key can be written to and erased from the Secure Element, but never read back out. All it can do is perform operations using the secret key to prove that it is indeed holding the correct secret key.

On phones, the Secure Element is in the hardware of your handset. On PCs, this is most often the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip. In both cases, the platform will ask for your PC's/phone's password/fingerprint/whatever before forwarding the request to the Secure Element.

Yubikeys can also serve as a Secure Element for Passkeys; the private key is stored in the Yubikey itself. Further, the Yubikey's stored credentials may be further protected with a PIN, so even if someone steals your Yubikey, they'll still need to know the PIN before it will accept and perform authentication checks. You get eight tries with the PIN; after that, it bricks itself.

The latest series 5 Yubikeys can store up to 100 Passkeys, and Passkeys may be individually deleted when no longer needed. Older series 5 Yubikeys can store only 25 Passkeys, and can only be deleted by erasing all of them.

Theoretically, you can have multiple Passkeys for a given account (one for everyday access; others as emergency backups). Not all sites support creating these, however.

Considering that they already announced a month ago that there would not be a Season 3, that's not a difficult call.

Reminds me of those bullies who draw a line in the sand and say "Cross this line!

When you *do* cross the line they draw another and say "Okay, cross *this* line!

When you do -- they just keep on drawing lines and never actually carry out their threats.