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Comment The setup looks rickety to me. (Score 1) 29

Given, the Soviet-Russian style of space technology has always been more pragmatic. But this looks rickety and somewhat ghetto-style, like deterioration by neglegt. Or they used chinesium for the structure and it failed before EOL.

However, it could also very well be that they've been using those exact same folding gantries for decades beyond EOL now and the finally simply failed due to wear and tear, no matter how rugged they initially were built.

It's probably a combination of both.

It would be absolutely hilarious if they can repair this russian-Soyuz style with a crew of welders and junk from a scrapyard in two weeks or so, spec-ing be damned. I wouldn't be surprised if exactly that happens. LOL!

Comment AI as a cult (read: religious) leader ... (Score 1) 54

... has to be just about undisputed #1 of nightmare material. Think Warhammer 40k but IRL.Basically the exact opposite of the Ian Banks culture. Imagine a fanatic revengeful god the l00nies can actually talk to and get new mayhem instructions from. Really malicious ones at that.

Yippee, nice times ahead.

No wonder the experts are warning us left, right and center.

Comment Re:Think of the children... (Score 1) 169

>"we've got a new social norm. It's illegal for tech companies to give unsupervised access to social media. Have you been paying attention at all?"

1) It shouldn't be up to the "social media" companies.
2) They have no way of determining if someone is a minor other than to strip ALL people of their privacy.
3) That isn't a "social norm", it is just a law. Big difference.
4) And the "social norm" should be no unrestricted access to the Internet at all, not just so-called "social media." There are MILLIONS of other sites children should not interact with.
5) There is no good definition of "social media", so they are just listing some of the popular ones.

This doesn't solve all the problems, and in the process, it makes new ones that are just as bad- penalizing adults is one of them.

Comment Re:Think of the children... (Score 1) 169

>"So you're saying the restrictions need to be stronger to capture some of that other 99%? Or were you planning on banning phones and computers themselves?"

We are talking about minors. They shouldn't have unsupervised access to unrestricted devices connected to the Internet. I am not saying we ban anything for adults. But children should not have access to things that are dangerous. And that isn't up to companies or government, but to parents and their agents. We need to set a new social norm that it is not OK to just give unrestricted devices to minors. Just like it is not OK to give them unrestricted access to knives, medications, alcohol, strangers, vehicles, junk food, etc. That should NOT involve "ID"'ing everyone for every web site.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 4, Informative) 33

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs.

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

Comment Re:Think of the children... (Score 1) 169

>"Is almost universally not about the children. In this case it's about de-anonymizing the Internet to aid in mass surveillance."

Bingo.

Because the kids will just get their fix on one of the 99.99999999999% of the sites that are NOT being blocked to them.

The problem is that kids SHOULD NOT HAVE UNSUPERVISED ACCESS to devices that can go just anywhere on the Internet in the first place. Or call/message/txt/media to/from any stranger. The devices are the problems. Parents should be parents and give their children restricted devices. Instead, we try to force every human (which means all adults and children) to PROVE who they are before they access popular sites. It is a big business/government wet dream come true.

Comment Re:What next, ban under-16s from installing Firefo (Score 1) 169

Next will be incredibly tight regulation on VPN access and use. Leading up to government-run vpns and a Chinese style great firewall.

This is a authoritarian power grab and once authoritarians start grabbing power they don't stop.

I don't think it's anything that can be stopped because voters are too distracted by the culture war bullshit.

Comment Not for long they don't (Score -1, Troll) 169

The next step is to ban vpns. They will be more tightly regulated than guns.

Not that it matters because human civilization is collapsing but all this think of the children bullshit is just a power grab by authoritarians.

We can't do anything about it because we're too busy worrying about woke trans drag queens forcing us to say happy holidays while playing Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis.

Comment Re: They are objectively wrong (Score 1) 182

The problem is weâ(TM)ve allowed universities to become bloated with do nothing administrators by guaranteeing funding through federally backed loans. This has made an entire generation into lifelong debt slaves while we are missing critical skills for our economy. You can kick and squeal all you like about the value of an education and the value of the university experience, but if one cannot afford to survive due to the costs of those experience they arenâ(TM)t so valuable are they?

Comment Re: In other words... (Score 1) 49

That's the kind of person who came up with this idea. They don't realize how utterly bizarre it sounds to normal people.

Still, even if they're only targeting the top 10% income bracket, that's 30 million American suckers to pull from. There's a type of person who will absolutely hit "subscribe" on a service that dumps a box of random trinkets on them every month, if the ad is good enough.

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