I like them too, family even is an antique book dealer. But.. I am allergic to a lot of old books. And now I need bigger print and more interested in new books with option to find old ones. So even though it has drawbacks, my kindle PaperWhite has some killer features: big text, instant purchase, and kindle unlimited. Big e-ink tablet (Daylight Computer DC-1) is also useful. The AI feature? Haven't seen it yet but people who buy cliff notes or my family member who had to give a talk about a difficult book to a book club recently could make use of the feature.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

The last sentence of the article:

Whether it [the new law] withstands constitutional review will determine how far Germany’s commitment to individual privacy can bend in the name of security.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Silicon wafers are the wrong thing to compare against. The CZT semiconductors are like photodiodes (for other radiation), not what they make the logic out of. It would make more sense to compare with InGaN (for blue LEDs), which plays a similarly specific role in common devices.

PHB1: "We have to do something AI-ish, everyone else is!"

PHB2: "Here's one, have bots compile podcasts from our news articles."

PHB1: "Brilliant! Make it so."

[months later]

PHB2: "Um, the podcast bot has been making silly errors. Should we keep it?"

PHB1: "How is our competition doing with their AI?"

PHB2: "They suck also."

PHB1: "Okay, let's keep it so we can have AI on our brochures and resumes."

The equivalent of all those LLM-spam "books" you see on Amazon.

They are product pumped out with no regard to quality control, dependent on potential consumers mistakenly thinking there's something like fact checking or editing going on because of the name on the tin.

Worse, this is all "hello world" style LLM programming - give it your cute little prompt ("That's where the real engineering goes!"), throw it a couple links to RAG in, and slap an ad on it. There's nothing here a vaguely competent teenager can't build for themself or the robot can't build for them.

That itself is a nested scam - pretending that any of this crap is difficult, that you need your betters at WaPo to write it for you.

And that's just the tool itself - the next problem is Bezos made it clear that anyone with integrity should hit the road, and those folks did. So all the source material may as well be robot poop already, quality-wise.

Sounds like he planned to double his money through some quick investments and then lost it all. Ironically, this would make a great Netflix movie.

I mean, sure, the real estate industry. But I like to imagine high-tech cat burglars using them to plan their heists. More likely someone will turn it in to copware to sell to SWAT teams for planning drug busts.

lost contact...after it passed behind Mars. When it reemerged from behind the planet, the spacecraft never resumed communications.

I toldja, never leave sight of Mommy! Space Ghosts eat little probes like you!

ICE probes Uranus and Myanus

These presenters remind me too much of Mr. Meeseeks.

"Hey, look at me, I'm giving out awards! I don't give a shit what they're for, what's important is that I'm the one giving them out!"

The "luster" was such a thin veneer that it cracked and fell away long ago... years ago, in fact. Now anyone can see through it to its rotten core.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/n...

I worked with a sociopath I'll call "Bill" who we strongly suspect deleted and sabotaged many things. Mayhem had a long history of following Bill, as we asked former colleagues to make sure we were not losing our minds. We learned to back-up and document stuff like crazy to work around it. Bill seemed to have a lot of experience covering his tracks, such as knowing which systems didn't keep logs.

Depends on how many RVs you give the Court.

Trump also uses an auto-pen, he's a hypocrite.