I'm convinced someone is trying to sell GPS chips to astronomers and city officials. Might as well sell blockchain technology too!

That technology would be frowned upon at most telescope facilities. More optical surfaces for light to pass through. No one wants light accumulation to be cut by half or whatever the duty cycle might be. For some types of observations, fine, but for deep sky long exposure work, it's a no go.

The light spreads out too far. Also, small towns that used to be dark-ish have grown and added lights. Very hard to find dark sky outside Antarctica or the Sahara Desert.

For what frequency range of flickering? The lights could be made to blink just a bit faster. Though, the whole scheme is still a bad idea for other reasons.

Smooth the timing of zero crossing by using PLLs with slow control loops. Maybe a Kalman filter could go before it - those are good at picking signals out of time-varying noise.

Yes, makes sense. If we want a higher blink rate, say 300 Hz, we can use PLLs to create the signal synchronized to the zero crossings of the 50/60Hz power. Add a knob to tweak the phase to account for imperfections, time delays, light propagation delays, in the system.

Maybe the people pushing this scheme own stock in GPS chip makers? I don't see how GPS would be useful anyway, unless someone invents walking robot streetlamps.

Bad idea! Reduces the light accumulated by the sensor, and reduces efficiency of the light sources. No problem if observing the Moon, Jupiter, etc but big frustration for anyone looking at faint objects or using a narrow band filter. Plus having something extra in the light path? No thanks! Not must the Sometimes you need as much illumination as possible over an area. Running at 50% duty cycle, or whatever that's not around 90% to 100%, puts a limit on that. Also, the rapid blinking, which we have enough of anyway, could have unintended consequences. What if a few outdoor lights are replaced with this new scheme but many more aren't and never are? Yet one more source of EMI, though we already have plenty so what the heck.

Better solution: better shielding, which shouldn't be difficult. Why haven't we been already using reflectors and covers to maximize light downward and minimize light upward? Make all lighting as bright as it truly needs to be but no brighter. Especially watch brightness limits where ground surfaces and structures are white or light colored. Use small-scale lighting along paths and places not really needing light from high up. Don't use lighting where it's not needed at all.

The way photographers and filmmakers control light in a studio is the opposite of the way outdoor lighting is done, it seems. Maybe photographers could teach a thing or two to architects, landscapers and street engineers?

I hope "68-Mile" refers to length not diameter.

With Elon and his big ego, such details need to be made clear.

Agree. I have found books on sales and knowing salespeople in real life more helpful than any junk on resume writing or job hunting tips. Awareness of what the customer-to-be is thinking. In an interview, you're there to help them with business, with making or fixing or running something.

To many of us, before learning the basics of sales, we think the company it there to help us with our careers. Nope!

I remember the first book on sales I read. Joe Girard, How to Sell Practically Anything or something like that. Stuff that made sense. That was say back in the early 1980s, days when I was young and foolish, but somewhat less foolish thanks to that book. There are of course today plenty of fine sales books, and plenty of bad ones too. But nothing beats having a relative, someone in your circle of friends, someone you are casually familiar with, who works sales/marketing.

I still can't sell a bowl of warm beef with gravy to a dog, but at least I approach interviewing differently the last decade or so than I did back in the 1980s/1990s, increasing my "batting average" a bit.

Yewww! Taleo! A tool of the Devil, I say!

It was some years ago, but I made it a personal policy to instantly abandon any job prospect as soon as Taleo came up during the process.

AI written essay may be detectable, but when the AI incorporates the results of AI detectors in its cost function, it'll be a mess. And more AI will come up with better measures to classify AI writings from genuine Human writings.

But would it matter? For the next obvious big thing to do is to have AI readers. Who has time to read all that stuff? Have a robot summarize it.

Once we have both ends of the literature pipeline totally AI-ized, no Human will ever write anything, or ever read anything. It's all bit drivel being shoved around bit drivel generators and bit drivel consumers, all the bit drivel passing whatever lofty tests other AI comes up with.

As long as there's AI to keep my rent paid and car insurance paid up, I'll be at the beach. Who is up for volleyball?