The Kickstarter goal was $53,000, it is over $75,000 now. I'm definitely not an expert, but that sounds like 1% of the money I would expect is needed to manufacture a tablet.

I guess they already make a phone, so maybe I'm wrong, but that's a suspiciously low number in my mind.

The tablet is already manufactured. You can probably buy it off AliExpress today.

Most of the hardware kickstarters you'll find are simple repackaging of AliExpress. For example, there was a walkman with Bluetooth - it already existed in a form you could buy immediately, the Kickstarter was just a slightly modified and rebranded version.

Likewise, this tablet is probably the same thing - they're just going to tell the company to make a few modifications and then ship it. So you're really just getting a cheap tablet resold at higher prices.

Quite a bit of the hardware Kickstarters are really just a curated form of AliExpress.

It is critical to know the inner reasoning in order to determine whether something understands. A parrot can speak but I do not think anyone believes that it understands what it is saying.

If you understand the concepts behind the words rather than the pattern the words make then you can use logical reasoning to determine new information. An AI trained on word patterns cannot do this and so, faced with a new situation has no clue how to respond and is far more likely to get things wrong. This is why ChatGPT performs so poorly on even simple, first-year university physics questions when asked to explain observations or results...and this is with situations that are known and have happened before. Being able to take concepts and using them to logically extrapolate what will happen in different situations is a key hallmark of intelligence and that is something that current AI simply cannot do.

The point _was_ made: "constant rate" means that the rate of expansion remains the same with time. What you are talking about is a _common_ rate of expansion. The summary says that they are considering variations in the rate as a function of position but, by saying that the rate is constant that inplies that it does not vary with time and that is wrong: we know from multiple supernova studies that the expansion is accelerating. This even gave is a new possible "end of the universe" scenario: the "big rip" where in the incredibly distant future if the expansion keeps accelerating then possibly at somepoint the causally connected region of the universe might shrink to the planck scale at which point space-time itself will become impossible although this is all highly hypothetical since we do not understand what is driving the expansion.

Then we would know because while the universe refuses to define a common zero for velocity (velocity is relative), it absolutely does define a common zero acceleration.

It's already known that the expansion seems to be accelerating. Several supernova studies all point to an accelerating expansion likely driven by Dark Energy but, regardless of the cause, we already know the expansion rate is not a constant.

It's kind of like how vulnerable most of the world is to an EMP attack. Think it through. Someone blows off an EMP above North America. It fries everything imaginable, including our electrical grid. We don't have the spares in stock to fix it, and in fact we have to go to China to manufacture them with an ungodly lead time. Meanwhile, the majority of the world's advanced semiconductor production is in Taiwan.

We're all fucked for years. Your new Teslas (or anything made after the early 90s, including ICEs) are bricks. I've been into places that have had a power failure and they literally had to shut down because the retards that they hired as cashiers can't do basic math and check people out.

Thankfully such an attack is extremely difficult because of two things - shielding and the inverse square law.

Even the largest nukes known on the planet, the EMP area is rather small - an EMP large enough to take out everything in North America would basically destroy the globe in which case I think we have bigger problems than our cars being dead.

The other problem is shielding - those metal cans on everything do a really good job at blocking EMPs as well - by orders of magnitude. If an unshielded device can be affected by an EMP at say, 2km, wrapping it metal foil reduces the range to around 2m or so.

So your car's ECU, which generally lives in a very hostile environent is already sealed inside very thick metal boxes designed to keep out lots of electrical noise and other things but also protects it from the EMP. Chances are, if your car dies from an EMP, you won't have much of a car left anyhow.

Also, the most effective protection against an EMP is basically turning it off. With enough warning, it's possible to shut down the electrical grid to protect it.

Of course ,let's also not forget that gas pumps require electricity, so if it ever should come to that kind of scenario, you're still pretty screwed without having to siphon gas endlessly.

The biggest threat to the electrical grid is a CME (coronal mass ejection) because those wobble the Earth's magnetic field, and because power lines are long, those wobbles induce currents in them which can burn out transformers if the protective equipment doesn't react fast enough. But your car will be just fine other than the compass might be slightly messed up.

The 6502 is still available today brand new along with several of its companion chips as well as the 16-bit version.

Though, honestly, I don't see why those chips haven't been long discontinued - the Z80 and 6602 basically should be soft cores these days and implementable in basically a reasonably cheap FPGA able to run at full speed. I know Western Design Center (the current provider of 6502 chips) already sells such a design so you can implement a 6502 core in your product and achieve reasonable integration density.

I don't see many people implementing the 6502 or Z80 as a standalone chip other than retro enthusiasts. If you need a Z80 core, you probably will just have one for your FPGA already or build it into an ASIC.Though, oddly, the 8051 has shown incredible robustness for an embedded controller - they're seemingly everywhere especially in USB applications

Think of something like Linux. When you boot it up, it prints a banner, which contains the version and timestamp and who built the kernel. (Linux 6.7.1 built on date by blah). That's a timestamp - it's handy during development because hey, the version number might stay the same, but the timestamp gives you a rough idea of where to look at what changes it might have. But they're murder on reproducible builds.

Another one is if you're doing parallel builds - the build server may have 20+ cores on it to make builds speedy so you build Linux using all 20 cores. But which cores get which source files is completely random and if you have an Intel performance and efficiency core thing going, the E cores would take longer, and this can affect the link order of the kernel objects. Changing the link order may mean objects are laid out differently in the final binary as well as branch and jump addresses. Especially tricky since the kernel partially links every file first.

The fun one to get is filesystem layouts. When you traverse a directory, you often get files in the order the files were created in the directory. If your build system does parallel builds, the order the files are created may no longer be deterministic because as the code is built, it's placed int he output directories randomly. When the filesystem image is built, it's often done by pointing the tool at a directory, so the tool enters the directory and then traverses it creating the image as it encounters files and directories. If the build system puts files and directories in a non-deterministic order you can often get files added randomly which can mess up the image. COmpression and encryption compound the problem. (Most tools use calls like opendir() and readdir() to get through the directory tree so the file order they add to the final image is dependent on the order they were created in the directory). This is the hardest to solve, but it can be done if the tool sorts the files first in alphabetical order before processing, thus ensuring files are processed in a deterministic order.

The biggest non-determinism is that, usually. But especially since it can be caused by parallel builds so even if you start with exactly the same files, the final arrangement can vary. If you're unpacking 20 tarballs in parallel it just creates chaos.

Of course, the easiest way is to make it deterministic and only allow one build to proceed at a time, but that means what takes 20 minutes to builds completely now takes hours. And even then you might get some randomization because the disk cache might cause a file to be written ahead of another

I suspect that for anything that still needs it you can use an FPGA implementation of the Z80.

The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.

There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.

So we need to look for alternative explanations.

The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)

Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.

The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.

The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.

The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.

When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.

And the problem is that women often don't know they can enter these fields.

There are tons of women who want to enter trades. However, all they see are men everywhere - and thus society has set up a stigma that "girls can't code" or "girls can't be electricians".

The assumption is "girls aren't interested" is about as true as saying "boys don't cry". It's a sexism thing - girls play with Barbie, boys play with GI Joe. Heaven forbid you have a boy who's interested in Barbie, or a girl who wants Transformers.

In fact, many trades have "girls do trades" type events where the whole purpose is to show that yes, if you want to sling a hammer, or do electrical work, or plumbing, or whatever, you can. Often there's no role model to say "yes, you can!" in a family context, so plenty of people make the assumption that no, you might like to work on the computer and have a great time at it, but only boys code, so go and be a nurse instead".

I'm sure there's probably a huge dichotomy of people who are in unhappy careers because it "fit the stereotype" rather than actually exploring options in what they are more interested in. I know people who did computer science in university because they didn't know what to do, so their parents said to do computer science as it was popular. I'm sure you all know how that usually turns out

And the reason I think it's cultural? Other cultures have often no such qualms. I've seen lots of women from Indian, Chinese, or Eastern European backgrounds. They were encouraged to do the sciences and they pursued them Also, take a look at advertising for video games prior to the videogame crash - you'll find it's often done as a family activity with both a son and a daughter enjoying what little game there is. But afterwards, it's purely something the boys do. And it has something to do with Nintendo - because in order to sell the NES, Nintendo couldn't market it as a "video game" as that was poison. So they marketed it as a toy (aided by Robby). But if you do that, you need to pick - does it go in the boys section or the girls - heaven forbid a toy might actually be interesting to both sexes.

All I can say is that the race to the bottom to cut salaries on IT workers can't end in anything good.

You just have to look at other industries. You know, like say, manufacturing. Most things are made outside the US, because it's cheaper to make stuff there because pay is lower.

The same forces that pushed manufacturing overseas is the same forces pushing IT salaries lower.

>"Also there the issue of let's say I want to port my giant CAD app to Linux? Which distro? Which installer package? There's a lot of variables with that."

Yes, but it is not that difficult to overcome. Porting/coding it is mostly a single investment/code base and will essentially work on any Linux. The packaging of it is easy, in comparison. You just have to follow some reasonable practices of using conservatively-available libraries, or include your own. Probably target a generic deb and rpm for the major distros, and also flatpak. I have used numerous commercial Linux packages for decades and they figured it out :)

Porting is fairly easy. You port to the Linux most people will use.

If it's a CAD program and you expect people to use it in a corporate environment, you go RHEL and be done with it. Hell, the company is probably already paying thousands of dollars for support anyways (aka subscription) so using a commercial Linux isn't really too unusual.

If you were a little lower end and your package is used by people ancillary to the job, then you might target a more mainstream Linux, like Ubuntu. And let what3ever that uses be what you support.

That's all you really have to support. Everyone else using something different can figure it out for themselves. Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Debian, etc., those users are experienced in Linux so let them figure out how to get it working.

Heck, if your application is that damn important, people will find a way. If it means having to have a whole new computer just for your application, so be it. Computers are cheap these days.

Perhaps not but I've a lot of experience using "AI" (although I prefer the term machine learning) for analysis it can and does do stupid things from time to time. In my case that results in some obviously wrong physics results but my code is not in control of a state-of-the-art, fully armed fighter jet.

Exactly how would this apply given that they were protesting _at_ the employer's premises and disrupting other employees who were trying to work there? It seems very reasonable to me that if you turn up at your place of employment and use your access to that place to disrupt the normal business of your employer by staging a sit-in that you should get fired for doing so.

After all, if these people really believed in what they were protesting then the honourable thing to do would be to resign from Google first, like government ministers do when they have a strong moral or ethical objections to the actions of the government of which they are part. Yes, it's a tough decision to make with financial repercussions but if you are not willing to do that then what you have is a preference not a strong moral objection.