I don't see why landing near the moon's south pole is any more challenging than landing at 40 degrees south latitude, as Surveyor 7 did--in an ejecta field from the crater Tycho. The chosen landing site for Odysseus was visible from Earth, unlike the site the Chinese chose a year or two ago--on the far side.

Size: a hydrogen bomb is not very large, I would guess much less than ten feet. And I would guess that the fusion takes place in a much smaller part of that bomb. Of course with all the energy out--far more at a fraction of a second than you would want from a fusion reactor--the resulting explosion expands to take up all the room available...

First, a statistical approach to chaos (which is what instability is) actually makes sense. It's not like you can work with accurate numbers in some kind of formula, the data points would be too vast (as the article says). Instead, recognize and classify the instability by matching what you "see" with known patterns (which is sort of what ordinary AI vision tools do), and apply a correction based on the type and (presumably) orientation of the recognized pattern.

The only alternative would be to send Maxwell Smart in to CONTROL the KAOS.

"20 years": how original of you! Not.

@xack, I'm not doubting you, but how did you find out? Are you a speaker of Cebuano? (although even then I doubt you read six million articles...)

I already tried that: I asked CoPilot how I could turn it off in Windows 11. CoPilot told me I can't, it's "integrated" into the operating system. I believe that's what they told the EU about Internet Explorer years ago; the EU didn't buy it, IIRC.

There's a scene in The Beverly Hillbillies (the TV show, not the movie) where Jethro is tasked with writing an essay of 100 words. He reads it out loud, and it ends with the words "And that is". Someone--maybe the teacher--asks "That is what?" to which Jethro replies "That is 100 words!"

Which just proves that Jethro Clampett is (was?) smarter than these AI tools, despite the fact that his father said "If brains was lard, that boy wouldn't have enough to grease a skillet." Because unlike ChatGPT, Jethro could count.

Animals visually comprehend images. And neither with animals nor with humans is "translation" necessary. Perhaps you mean language?

"It's much closer to how your brain works." That's debatable. We don't, for example, learn our first (or second...) language by throwing massive amounts of data at our brain.

"We're on the right track and we know how to keep improving them." Remains to be seen.

I don't think that word "tokens" means what you think.

There are several ways to tokenize sentences in languages like English, that use spaces and/or punctuation to separate words. One is to tokenize based on whitespace. In that case, the sentence

        John, Bill, and Mary went to the store.

has 8 tokens, which happens to be the same as the number of words. But the first token is "John," (with the comma, i.e. not a word as we usually think of words). Another way is to tokenize on whitespace and punctuation, in which case that sentence has 11 tokens (the extra tokens are the two commas and the final period). And another way is to tokenize on whitespace and then throw away punctuation tokens, in which case we're back to 8 tokens for that sentence, the first of which is "John" (no comma).

There are complications, like the apostrophe in "won't" or "John's", hyphens, and so forth. Other languages with alphabetic writing systems (or abjads, like Arabic and Hebrew) have other issues. And while Vietnamese uses an alphabetic writing system, it doesn't really break at word boundaries. But by and large, tokenization works ok, and gives you something resembling words.

There are languages with other writing systems where tokenization becomes more difficult, like Chinese (there are no delimiters between words in written Chinese, except where the characters come on either side of a sentence break, numeral, etc.).

Perhaps what you're thinking of is character N-grams, i.e. overlapping sequences of N characters. In that case, the sentence has 3-grams that include "#Bi", "Bil", "ill", "il#" etc. (I'm using the '#' to represent a white space character. Things get a little more complicated if you're doing PDFs, where the spaces between words are not really characters, but I digress.) If you're using N-grams, it would indeed be difficult (not impossible) to count the words in a text.

I see a lot of dual-use buildings: stores on the first floor, apartments or condos on the remaining floors. Yes, this must require special zoning, but that's not impossible. And while not everyone wants to live that way, some see the convenience of having restaurants, bars, fitness centers, and similar services within walking distance. I grant your comment about plumbing and electrical hookups, but I wouldn't think that would be an impossible retro-fit. (But then I'm not an engineer, at least not that kind.)

An example (ok, anecdote). We had a county council issue (the majority gerrymandered the county districts so two council members they didn't like would have to run against each other). That made it into the local newspaper, and the result of that and other factors was that the gerrymandering majority is no longer a majority. But now that newspaper is gone.

Now we have an issue in the city, where a developer wants to turn nearly the last remaining greenspace into expensive high density housing, violating all kinds of things including the city's ostensible long-term, plan. It got into the remaining newspaper, which comes out once a month. So far it hasn't attracted much interest, and with a month between issues things can get out of hand before people realize it.

Social media is of course a way to attract attention, but my sense is that it's too fragmented and sparse to help. Whereas every household got a copy of the old (ad supported) newspaper.

"...they can be told to go do one and all they can say is 'yes sir'". Slightly different in the Navy: "Yes sir" is one of the three answers to a *question* (the other two being "No sir" and "I do not know sir, but I will find out sir"). The answer to an order is "Aye-aye sir!"

But yes to your point.

I have had an iPhone 11 Pro, and now own an iPhone 12 Pro. Both overheated during the summer. Now that the weather (and more importantly, the inside of our house) has cooled down about 10 degrees, I don't seem to be having the problem. That said, I'd be surprised if other iPhones (at least the more recent models) don't also overheat.

One thing I have that contributes to the heating problem is a case. I feel my phone needs the protection, but maybe that's wrong--maybe just a screen protector (which I also have) would suffice. But the phone is so slick that I feel like I'm going to drop it without the case (I just took the case off to see, and yes, it's just plain slippery). I *think* a case that was nothing more than the rim around the edges--an open back--would make it feel much more secure, and contribute far less to overheating. I may just cut the back out of an old case and see how I like that.

Case makers, if you're listening...

Meet me. I have an iPhone, which mostly works fine (except for overheating...). My wife has an Android, and I provide tech support for her. And yes--just like you--I have wasted (she wouldn't call it that) time looking for solutions to problems on her Android phone.

As far as my iPhone needing "all the special cables and dongles", I need exactly one.