There are also reports of disruption of nocturnally respiring plant lifecycles.

https://www.bbc.com/future/art...

It's still a problem that will not be solved. I'm gonna be a pessimist about that to the very end. Much like we've KNOWN about anthropogenic climate change, and CO2 temperature forcing for well over 100yrs, and done everything *BUT* actually take reparative steps to correct that problem-- because economic activity and human standard of living increases trump EVERYTHING ELSE-- the same will be true here.

We'll end up on a barren ball of dirt without plants or other lifeforms that aren't kept in botanical gardens at this rate.

You'll get dark skies when humanity stops being a technologically advanced species. Really.

While this is true, such mitigations are just that-- mitigations. The actual source of the light pollution is still the advancement of human standard of living, and increases in economic activity.

Even with devices that 100% aim straight down, the refractive/reflective nature of the road surfaces will beam light back up into the sky. The only way to have black sky, is to have no lights at all.

No amount of nostalgia is going to bring that back. As the population grows, and economic pressures for people to work all hours of the day or night increase, the more light pollution will be produced. Full Stop.

It's essentially "Man Yells at Cloud"-- Crabby Hobby Scientist Edition.

Older people remember when there were significantly fewer people, and when technological profusion was significantly less, with a commensurately large reduction in nighttime light pollution.

They remember being inspired by looking up at the night-time sky, and seeing the stars, and being curious about them.

They are upset and butthurt that looking up now, one sees very little but a diffuse dull grey, or sometimes brown.

Short of murderating everyone in town, or going full luddite on everything that emits light at night, there is no way to regain that which has been lost-- thus, "Man Yells At Cloud".

The best they can do, and what should be done, is for there to be affordable astronomy lodgings way out in BFE, where they can take their happy little amateur astronomer asses, and look through their telescopes without being offended.

Instead, they want to go Marvin the Martian, and use the Illudium 238 explosive space modulator, because their view of venus is obstructed.

Depends on the national forest. Quite a few have natural prominences that would make great vantages for horizon observation. Might be a bit chilly, since there's nothing to stop night-time winds, so bring a jacket- but still doable.

Glad I'm not the only one to be irked by that.

On the other hand, and back to the real subject matter, RE: Light Pollution--

There will still be areas where light pollution will be at a minimum; Areas where people dont want to be, for one reason or another. While this kills the backyard enthusiast with their amateur telescope, such light pollution problems have been things for a very very long time.

Simply "Just outside the suburbs" is not sufficient, because of the sky glow that dominates the horizon from large metropolitan areas. No, you need more "Long road trip to an isolated cabin out in the middle of the national forest, with a 2 to 3 hour drive away from the nearest city" to have good mitigation. (But will still have some sky-glow on the horizon)

No, that is not correct.

https://www.richmondfed.org/pu...

Insisting on a 4 year degree as the proxy for "Wears clean underwear, can read and write, and follow instructions" --*IS*.

The PROBLEM, is that "We will use a 4 year degree as a proxy for being able to be trusted to wear clean underwear and show up to work on time", is that it imposes a lot of logistical burden on the university system, which was never intended to supply that kind of volume.

That logistical burden is what has been driving student tuitions into the stratosphere, which in turn causes the issue with student debts, which in turn is what is driving the anti-college trend.

The "But we've been doing it for DECADES!" mantra, is just "Yes-- Yes you have! This problem has been snowballing FOR DECADES! *IMAGINE THAT!*" writ large.

I am actually eagerly awaiting the "OH NOEZ! NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH 'QUALIFIED APPLICANTS!'" tears, when Gen-Z's anti-college trend fully manifests, and this "But we've been demanding it for decades! WHAA!" shit has the bottom fall out.

They do NOT need a 4 year degree to use a fucking stapler, or collate documents.

This is not true, silvergun.

NYT (paywalled) ran a piece on that. Only in increasingly small and narrow parameters does the debt shell-game get made up for with the higher earnings potential.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0...

The real problem, is demanding 4yr college degree to use a stapler. It has compounding, knock-on effects.

What I am decoding from this is:

Decades of 'I NEED ACCESS TO ALL THE DATA, ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE!' from the csuite, (with resulting attack surface and single point of failure when credentials get stolen. (Not if, when. It's a matter of time before mr big and important csuite guy who's idea of password rotation is to change the last two digits in his password, and who just cant wrap his head around the idea of 'attack surface', to have his credentials stolen through credential re-use, or a phishing attack.) With '*IT* IS WHO'S INCOMPETENT!' (Despite being shown the reality of attack surface, and the needs for actual secure access, which of necessity are 'onerous' to 'ease of access' due to being mutually exclusive concepts, but oh, it's never the csuite's impossible demands at fault, no sir! 'The experts are just wrong, and will be replaced with new experts until we get one that tells us what we want to hear!') And 'IGNORING IT HAS NEVER BEEN A PROBLEM BEFORE!' has reached a critical breaking point, and the csuite is desperate to look for people to throw under that bus.

Hard pass. They can call me to help secure their clusterfucks when they learn their lesson, and are willing to engage in best practices.

We can discuss the pros and cons of keeping huge, concentrated stockpiles of user information, and its supposed financial value, AFTER we cut outside access to it from insecure networks (and they learn what an insecure network actually is, and why.)

Until then, they NEED to be hacked, then sued, until they come to their senses.

Not exactly.

It is possible that the CPU_CHECK was bypassed on win11 install (you can do that with Rufus when creating USB bootable install media).

Microsoft insists that you need at least Gen8 Intel silicon (forget what family for AMD).

Aside from pipeline improvements, nothing new (security featureset wise) was added to Gen8 vs Gen7 (I have a laptop with Gen7 intel silicon), that I am aware of. As such, a lot of devices with Gen7 silicon have been coaxed into running win11, with no real issues. (again, because there is nothing particularly deal-breaking about doing so. that I am aware of, or that anyone who has done this has reported.)

This is just Microsoft being real butthurt about people doing that, and turned the thumbscrews by hard checking the identity string of the processor against a cutoff value.

As far as I know, there is not truly security-related reason for doing this, and quite likely, not even a performance reason for doing this. If somebody was trying to run on Gen6 or older silicon, yeah-- there were security extensions additions to the newer processors that such old ones would not have, and it would make sense to deny them, but I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that the Gen8 minspec's being "wholly artificial" is what's at fault here.

Sorry AC, but at the risk of sounding like an elitist ass--

Your lack of a robust education is not my problem; In this amazing and information dense era, you practically have to go out of your way to avoid information. I learned about helminths (parasitic roundworms) quite accidentally.

I've known about their use in experimental therapies for such conditions for several years now, and every time the news comes up, I make note of it. The clinical term for such therapies is "Hemlinthic therapy", since it works by adding helminths to a human host, specifically to get a ready and inexpensive supply of biologic (a class of drugs that are produced by a living organism-- usually extremely expensive to get, talking millions of dollars a year to keep prescribed) immunoregulators (drugs that regulate immune system response).

See for instance, this man:
https://www.propublica.org/art...

There is evidence to suggest that having a few helminths in his digestive tract could save this man a fortune in medical costs, with a minimum of life upset from having them; easily made up for just by eating a bit more.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...

The issue at hand, is that there is an uphill battle in gaining support for the more widespread use of helminths as a serious treatment option, due to the outstanding issues if prejudice against the treatment, because "They are PARASITES!"

Nevermind that by definition, once they start conferring a benefit to the host (which in this case, they most certainly would), they stop being "Parasites" and become "Symbiotes".

The more you know. (Star flies over.)

Helminths also secrete a cornucopia of bioregulatory hormones (to prevent the host's immune system from going bonkers on them) which have been shown to do a wide amount of positive effects for human health, not limited to such things as moderating inflammatory bowel disease, moderating asthma in extreme sufferers, moderating allergies in extreme sufferers, and a bunch of others.

the issue, is that "they are parasitic worms" has stuck since the 19th century, when it was vogue as an idea to eradicate all germs, and all parasites.

Treating them as potentially valuable endosymbionts instead might be therapeutic, which is where helminthic therapy (such as this one) comes into play.

The idea with the addendum, is that if a tool that could easily produce human-readable code (and not just raw disassembly, with obtuse and difficult to tease out structure of "what it's doing"), it would make many hardware vendors "Very Upset."

See for instance, nVidia, and their binary blob drivers, or Broadcom with their binary blob radio firmware.

Being able to generate human-readable code using an AI assistive tool (assuming it's worth a shit-- which is a whole other ball of wax), means also being able to easily produce human-readable documentation about a binary blob, and what it's doing.

That means trade secrets and other things that are obfuscated inside such a blob could be revealed and disseminated quickly.

Hence the note about reaching for C&Ds.

(Additionally, this toolkit would make a lot of closed source software vendors shit solid gold bricks, and reach impulsively for their lawyers and cease-and-desist orders, like Catholics reaching for a crucifix when they catch even the faintest hint of something 'satanic')

Since compilers strip out "unnecessary" data, like comments, or the names of variables (because they mean nothing to a computer), recovery of all that missing, and often essential metadata has long been a niggly, prickly, and pernicious obstacle with disassembling binary or object code back into assembler, (and in some cases, back into "something that resembles C")

Short of having some kind of AI that "knows" about commonly used interfaces/libraries, and which can identify the compiled code's disassembly and pair it up, there is no easy way to revert it back to something genuinely human-readable.

Even then, there's situations where the code never really was "human readable", such as hand-assembled performance-focused code, where attempting this kind of operation on it will seriously degrade its value-- or software that real-time modifies itself in memory (like SecuRom)

I wish DARPA all the luck in the world, but this is something that people have been wanting to do for aaaaages.