Ahh, yes... German cars. If every decent car company does something with 6 parts, the Germans will find a way to make it require 27 parts. All of which are horribly expensive and require specialized tools to install. Or they'll put the timing system at the back of the engine so that a routine service item becomes an engine-out procedure. Garbage cars driven by people who don't know any better.

The space station leak reminds me of an old trick for a leaky cooling system in a car: put pepper into the radiator.

The little flecks of ground pepper get washed around the cooling system and eventually block tiny cracks in the radiator or other places. Putting a raw egg into a *cold* radiator will do the same thing; when the engine gets warm it cooks and blocks the leak. Both of these tricks have saved me on the road, they do work. But they are temporary and you need to thoroughly flush the cooling system after the repair.

I wonder if the Space Station has had the same sort of thing happen - airborne dust blocking a leak?

Yes, the AI-revolution will be hugely different to various "revolutions" that came before and not in a good way.

The industrial revolution saw manufacturing automated -- but the jobs that were eliminated were usually low-skill laboring ones. People could retrain and take on more skilled work with higher pay so the net earnings of the workforce actually increased.

The IT-revolution once again saw relatively unskilled roles automated by computers and once again people could retrain for more skilled rolls that grew due to the productivity improvements that IT systems offered.

However, the AI-age is hugely different.

That's because the roles being displaced are what we already consider to be "skilled" ones. Programmers, artists, writers, musicians, management -- in fact a huge swathe of professional or semi-professional roles will be hugely affected by AI systems. There no *new* jobs being created by AI (other than a handful of people to dust the server racks in the data-centers) so this will mean unemployment will rise.

Rising unemployment means less money in the pockets of the average citizen so the economy as a whole will suffer - despite the vastly improved productivity of AI-enabled companies. Without a market for the products and services that AI-enabled companies make, their revenues and profits will also be negatively impacted, despite that higher productivity.

This downward economic spiral could be even worse than a bursting AI bubble and lead to huge socio-economic problems with massive destabilizing effects.

I'm pretty sure that during the great depression of the 1920s, lots of people were on four, three or even zero day working weeks and that didn't work out too well for them.

With the potential for the Kessler syndrome to kick in any time now, it's an economic necessity for Starlink to do whatever it can to reduce the risk.

As Anton Petrov points out in this video, a Kessler syndrome catastrophe could be just around the corner and the only way to reduce the risk is to reduce the levels of congestion in certain parts of LEO.

In the event of such an event, Starlink would become worthless and SpaceX's stock price would fall through the floor so I guess someone's crunched the numbers and figured that they now have little option but to do everything they can to reduce the possibility.

Sadly, simply placing a work into the "public domain" means nothing these days.

I regularly see YouTube creators who are hit with copyright claims/strikes for using public domain footage from the likes of NASA -- because broadcasters have used that same footage in their own production and YT's content-ID system automatically issues a claim/strike when anyone else uses the same footage.

This wouldn't be a problem if YouTube's appeal process worked -- but it doesn't, it's so badly broken that even big creators like Scott Manley are being hit and having the revenues stolen from their efforts simply because a broadcaster like Channel 4 in the UK has claimed his video for using the very same PD NASA footage that they used in one of their videos.

Copyright is so easy to abuse and misuse that is now almost laughable.

It can't be reversed but it can be mitigated to a degree.

As someone who was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (PD) about five years ago I can tell you that one of the most impactful effects of that disease is *not* the tremors but the sleep disruption. A fairly high percentage of PD suffers go on to develop dementia and I'm pretty sure that this progression is hastened by the fact that sleep is so disrupted and limited.

My mitigation for the effects of sleep deprivation associated with my PD is creatine monohydrate. I've been taking this for several years and it does make a huge difference to my ability to function when sleep deprived as well as with other effects of the disease.

One thing to remember is that sleep naturally occurs in a cycle of about 90 minutes duration so even if you can't get a full 8 hours in one session, if you can accumulate multiple 90-minute sleeps during the day you're a lot better off. Of course that's not practical for someone whose in paid employment but for us older folk it means that catching a nap whenever we can is essential.

I'm nearly 73.

Or, maybe because Palestinians keep on attacking Israelis (and everyone else) in the name of their Pedophile Prophet - peace be upon the illiterate 7th-century caravan robber and warlord - so Israelis rightly have no interest in incorporating them into civil society.

...because the Palestinians were digging the water pipes out of the ground and turning them into makeshift rockets...

...electricity and desalinated water which were both being provided by Israel because the Palestinians are more concerned with appeasing their Pedophile Prophet than with getting their shit together and building power plants and desalination plants...

Gaza is unlivable because of the Gazans. Somalia is unlivable because of the Somalis. All of the Muslim world is unlivable because Islam is an evil ideology. The Jewish people (People of Judea) were established in Israel 6,000 years ago and laid the groundwork for the establishment of Western Civilization, approximately 4,500 years before a self-important warlord and pedophile declared himself to be the messenger of something called allah.

And what is allah? God is supposed to be omniscient. So He tells us to call Him yud-hey-vav-hey... but then after meeting the Pedophile Prophet, He changes His mind and wants to be called allah? An omniscient being didn't know in advance what He wants to be called and changes His mind about His own name? This is NOT the God of the Jewish and Christian people.

You're free to believe whatever you want. But when what you believe promotes death for the sake of forcing your beliefs on others, it's time for your ideology to take a long and hard look in the mirror.

This is what Israel is fighting. How to beat your wife - according to Palestinian TV.

There are two kinds of people in the world: there are those who you can negotiate with, and there are those who fly airplanes into buildings. You cannot negotiate with this. You cannot make peace with this. The only thing they understand is being completely and utterly obliterated, and then playing the victim.

I wouldn't wipe my ass with the Palestinian flag. Doing so would be disrespectful to my feces.

Iran has announced the first deployment of its disco-ball drone.

500 people were critically injured during the first clash between the disco-ball drone and Israel's drone defense laser. Officials said "the collateral damage over a wide area was significant and is something we're working to reduce".

the problem isn't that people aren't assembling ddr5 -- the problem is the dram isn't available.

Is there critical information being left out?

Impressive response times -- but is that just for the panel alone? Is it only when in the non-upscaling mode perhaps?

There has to be some degree of overhead (aka latency) involved in AI upscaling so I would be very cautious that they're carefully referring to many key performance metrics when in regular monitor mode and seemingly not clearly stating the effects (if any) of introducing the upscaling.

Of course it's "AI" so it must be good... right? Sigh!

Calling something that's perfectly valid but not physics "physics" and then saying "physicists" should do it.

It's not physics. It's applied physics which is what all the differently named sciences are already. Chemistry, for example, is just applied physics. And so is whatever this guy is trying to rename to physics.

Last year, I bought a pack of Meross smart light bulbs, because NY Times Wirecutter said they were the choice to work with Apple’s HomeKit. The one bulb I installed worked great with Siri, but only for a little while. Once HomeKit could no longer see the device, you had to delete it and re-add it, which meant climbing up to the ceiling fan and removing the globe to get to the bulb to scan the QR code printed on the bulb. After it dropped the third time, I gave up and just use the Meross app to control it. Dimmimn, color, and color temperature are all controllable.

Home Automation has been promised for at least 11 years now (Apple introduced HomeKit in September 2014; not sure when Amazon opened their APIs to third party vendors). And for a lot of people, it doesn’t work better than old-fashioned power switches. Yes, home automation offers new features, you can control them from a distance, or with your voice. But they also have costs, in configuring, and repairing configurations, and obsolescence, that the preceding technology just didn’t have.

People just want to be different and then somehow convince people that it's cool.

I lived in the cassette era. It sucked.

Something else to consider... Donald Trump Jr has millions of dollars in Unusual Machines stock and also has a position on the board. UM is one of the companies that stands to benefit hugely from this ban, as commercial drone users are forced to find alternative sources for their equipment.

Parents like to take care of their children when they can, or so I'm told.

Also, this isn't a ban on imports from potentially enemy states such as China, it's a ban on imports from *all* countries -- including the USA's closest allies. This is pretty clear proof that the reasons behind this ban are purely financial and that Trump's son reaps a significant amount of that benefit through is stock-holding and position on the board of Unusual Machines.

The USA has the best government money can buy I guess.

It's not just drones that are on the covered list -- its crucial parts of drones that also have other uses.

For example -- lithium polymer batteries, brushless DC motors, flight controllers, cameras and sensors as well as other stuff.

For the hobbyist who wants to fly RC planes and go drone-racing this is a disaster. I'm unaware of any (affordable) US-made lithium polymer batteries suitable for these applications and the vast majority of motors, flight controllers and cameras are imported.

This effectively shuts down the hobby because even if US companies eventually start making this stuff it will almost certainly prohibitively expensive -- beyond the reach of most hobbyists.

The reality is that this has far less to do with "national security" than it does ensuring that certain people's pockets get lined with cash. For instance -- how does a brushless motor made in the USA pose less of a security risk than one made in China, Germany or Australia? Likewise a plain, simple lithium-polymer battery without any electronics -- what's the security risk that such a product poses?

The hobby of RC model aircraft and drones was on a count-down to oblivion from the moment the Commerical Drone Alliance convinced politicians to revoke S336, a piece of law that protected the hobby from regulation. The CDA made it very clear that they wanted the skies cleared of pesky hobbyists so they could exploit it for financial gain and now those in power are using the "national security" card to disguise their true agenda. Nobody can complain about a restriction or ban if its saving the lives of American's... right?

75-80% efficient. So 125-133 MWh electricity in, when there's surplus, and you get 100 MWh energy back out, when you need it.