Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Although, from my two second check just now, Venus is technically considered within the Goldilocks zone for this solar system it is right on the very inner edge of it. This finding differs from Venus in that respect, making it more interesting as a possibility.

All highly speculative of course, but to be fair that's exactly what the article says. Atmosphere detected, everything else speculative.

A poem;-
-------------
I once loved a clanker.
And you might think I'm sick.
But I loved my robot lover.
And its hydraulic jackhammer dick.
It could clean the carpets
And it could heal my soul.
Now all thats left is metal shards
Embedded in my hole.

Not written by AI.

There have been a few musicians that have been trying to redirect the kids away from cassette tape nostalgia to CD nostalgia. The reason is simple, in 2026 its cheaper to burn a CD than it is to manufacture a cassette tape. And CDs are vastly superior (the relative virtues of Vinyl and CD are a little more complicated, though on pure technicalities, CD still wins).

The thing with CDs is a DIY home musician can do the whole manufacturing chain at home. You buy one of those cheap laser screen printer engravers for about $1K. You pick up a CD bulk duplicator second hand off ebay for maybe $200. $100 will buy you more blank CDs than you'll ever sell. You bulk duplicate your album using the CD burner. You screen print the art onto the CDs. Get those cardboard CD sleeves and screen print the art (If you want better detail, grab a colour laser printer from Brother for about $500.)

Oh and that laser engraver screen printer setup will also make you the band shirts, just remember to grab one of those cheap chinese flash dryers to properly cure the ink on the shirt. Too many DIY shirt makers dont realise this.

Then you set up your bandcamp store, and maybe set up a merch desk at your gigs. Last gig I played we sold over $1K of merch.

Buy CDs. Play CDs. CDs are good. Especially CDs from local pub bands. Tapes are trash and sound like trash. VInyl is great but too expensive for a small band to produce at anything resembling a profit.

Eh... theres still a sting in the tail. I suspect these sorts of fines are more about "We want you to fix this" rather than "We want you to bleed for doing this". The thing is, $14 mil aint a drop of piss in the oceans of HPs money supply, but what IS important is that its a court order, and disobeying the court order can turn this from "insignificant financial mosquito bite" to "Oh shit, theres an interpol arrest warrant out for the CEO on criminal contempt charges".

Rule number #1 and #2 of any interaction with the law;- Do not anger the Judge. The second rule is "See rule #1"

Apple's macOS. Apple contributes code and employs some FreeBSD developers.

Its a little more complex. Apple does derive some of FreeBSDs userland and some services. However its a myth that the kernel is a modified FreeBS. Its a modified Mach microkernel, XNU (technically actually a hybrid, like most real world microkernels, that has a small amount of non core kernel in ring zero for performance reasons, that has some services that have FreeBSD derived code in it, namely the network stack, process model and IOKit.

Chinas single timezone is bonkers. If your in Beijing its great, but in those back end industrial cities, you've got the sun rising at 10am and setting at midnight. That would *massively* fuck with your sleep cycle and I half suspect that western regions probably got some of the highest rates of melatonin prescription..... and sleep disorders.... on the planet.

Its space. When it comes to radiation, an X-Ray machine is by far the least of their worries. Astronauts come back from space missions utterly glowing with radiation.

Admittedly the cancer rate amongst astronauts isnt THAT much higher (just under 1/3 of astronaut deaths compared to just over 1/5th of the general population), but this is also a cohort that have mostly been non smoking tea-totaller health conscious non-junk-eating people so its definitely a thing.

Like yeah, over exposure to medical X-Rays is totally a risk factor, but astronauts go into space knowing that space is actively trying to radiate them, freeze them, burn them, pop their lungs, boil their blood and suffocate them. Its a soldiers gambit really.

Grandmas stupid baby photo collection create more positive utility for humans than a petabyte of stupid slop images of crayfish aranged into a jesus face ever will.

Im more wondering if we're gonna start seeing clankers ordering "Victorias secret vacuum cleaners" catalogues getting orders in the mail leading to claude-bots in raincoats atendending seedy industrial machinery video screenings at 2am in the bad part of town.

"grease me daddy."

Honestly, IBM would do well to just stick to their course. This AI thing is due for a pretty severe market adjustment to bring some rationality back into the tech decision makingl, We're already seeing a lot of companies shitting the bed over token costs and realiseing they laying off the entire tech staff would just cost them more. And this flows on.

Or this is wishful thinking on the part of myself, a 50yo whos been feeling a lot less secure about my future job prospects lately if I dont stop rejecting any and every offer to go into management..

Tbh I'm wondering if Trump purchased any intel stock beforehand.

They've had those demos for years , decades even, and they still dont release it. Its not hard to escape the verdict that he's not telling the whole truth on this one.

Meanwhile the chinese EV makers have entire cities where you can literally get in your EV and it'll just drive you there, complete with RF interaction with traffic lights, automated battery replacement systems, the whole kit, in far more insane traffic conditions than the americans will ever have, thanks to vast amounts civilians on bicycles and scooters.

FSD isn't impossible But for whatever reason Tesla just cant seem to get it to work to the level it needs to. While the competition is

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Years back I was interviewing people for a coding position. We went through the standard tech stuff and then did a bit of project to see how they thought. We said (this is circa 2009'ish I think) - imagine you're on a team creating a new phone. You don't have time to test all the functions, so which would be your top two functions to ensure working?

All a bit Kobayashi Maru - obviously you can't release a phone testing only two functions, but we wanted to see what they'd prioritise. The very best answer we received was this one: "I would make sure it has the ability to call emergency services." Their thinking was that this was likely the most critical feature of a phone for both a user, and also for the manufacturer to avoid being sued. Absolutely great answer.

And yet here we are, with the post above. Taking the thinking of this interviewee - the ability to work with emergency services is important for general society, for the user of the vehicle (so they don't get in trouble) and for the manufacture of the vehicle (so they don't get fined/sued/both). Absolutely critical.