I'm sure that's not because the "conservative narrative" has drifted into alternative "facts" fantasy land. Surely not. It must be some liberal biased conspiracy. It just has to be! The Conservative ethos cannot fail, it can only be failed.

Google sells ones of millions of Pixel phones over their whole lifetime. They're not in the top 5 smartphone manufacturers and I doubt they even crack the top 10. Samsung and Xiaomi sell more of a single model than Google sells of all their Pixel models.

Google's Pixel phones get attention in the tech press because it's Google but they are in no way the market leader for Android phones. Carriers don't give a shit what Google puts in their phones.

That out of the way, who in the shit thought 5G's main use was going to be offloading processing of phones? Unless you've suffered some severe brain damage it's been plainly obvious for a decade and a half smartphones have only been getting more powerful over time. AI coprocessors (read GPGPUs with half and quarter precision floats) are in the same vein of improvements as better CPUs and GPUs. The only thing 5G has done is bring the cellular networking on par with WiFi in terms of performance. This means the network intensive things that used to require WiFi can get more mobile. But no one not suffering from brain damaged assumed that meant phones would somehow get less powerful.

So great article written by someone that apparently woke up from a twenty year coma and doesn't know much of anything about smartphones. The world needs ditch diggers too I guess.

I know you're trolling but if you even just read the summary the identity of the group doing the hacking is APT31. Various hacking concerns get groupings based on their apparent skill level, the tools they use, types of operations they conduct, and particular strategies they use.

If a particular hack is investigated and is found to use tools (including things like C&C servers), strategies, and skill level of a known group there's a high likelihood that group in fact perpetrated the hack.

APT31 has been associated with China from forensic analysis of recovered tools/exploits and their targets. The actual address attacks come from is largely immaterial.

The GP is also right about mutations. The more opportunities the virus has to replicate and spread the more chances of it forming a beneficial (for itself) mutation. If a vaccine reduces infection rates, infection duration, and infection intensity there's simply fewer opportunities for mutations to occur and spread. The vaccine itself doesn't stop mutations, it just reduces the total number of infected cells among the infected population.

Say it takes 50 million infections to generate a new variant of COVID. In an unvaccinated populace with high rates of community spread you can hit that 50 million mark in months and find yourself with two variants. In a vaccinated populace with very low community spread it might take years for a new variant to emerge. The variants per decade numbers are much more manageable than variants per year.

The Dragon is incapable of performing EVA. It doesn't have an airlock and can't be fitted with one. The "trunk" is too small to mount a remote manipulator large enough to work on something the size of Hubble. So Dragon is right out.

Starship could be outfitted for EVA work but they're a couple of years from LEO let alone EVA capable variants.

I don't know why you think the Shuttle was incapable of EVA repairs considering it repaired Hubble twice. The cargo bay not being pressurized is immaterial. The Shuttle matched orbit with Hubble and brought it into the cargo bay with the remote manipulator arm. The RMA was also used as a platform for the astronauts doing the EVA. All of the tools and parts were mounted and stored in the cargo bay.

The airlock, cargo bay, and RMA were some of the Shuttle's most useful features and do not have a replacement on the horizon. The Dragon is a great astronaut taxi and cargo van but it is not the all-purpose utility truck that was the Shuttle. The Starship doesn't have any advertised variants that could do the Shuttle's job.

Musk started off relatively well off, enough for his dad to be able to invest $20k in his first business. He then won the lottery selling out to Compaq. He then won the lottery a second time as part of the PayPal Mafia.

So the take away is being smart is cool and helpful but wealth and luck are as or more important. Musk didn't start a bunch of businesses because he's some super genius everyone should emulate. He got rich enough to start businesses that didn't need to make money right away. He also knows a bunch of other rich people he can get to invest in his companies.

Despite its light weight aerogel insulation would have added too much extra mass to Ingenuity. Even with extra insulation it would have needed component heaters, they might not need to run as long during the night but they'd still be necessary. Ingenuity wouldn't receive enough insolation during the day to get its core temperature high enough to survive during the night.

Good insulation also presents an overheating problem. The internal components are all going to generate heat during operation. The insulation is going to trap that heat and likely require an active cooling system to dissipate it.

Using only component heaters with minimal insulation works in both the high internal heat and cold night situation. During operation heat is dissipated by the cold atmosphere and the heaters can kick in if it gets too cold. At night the heaters used stored power to keep everything warm. During the day the solar panel will top off the batteries allowing for a flight, landing, and data uplink. They'll then keep charging to handle the following night.

That's all done with mass that would be required regardless of insulation. If there's enough power to just run heaters at night then extra insulation is a wasted part of the mass budget and presents overheating problems.

The thrust for an engine is a question of the amount of propellant you move out the back. The flow rate of a nuclear rocket taking off from the surface of Mars is the same needed for a chemical rocket. A nuclear rocket would be much heavier and would make less sense for a surface launch system.

If a Mars mission used a nuclear rocket it would be better to leave that in orbit and use the lighter chemical rockets for the surface return part of the mission. A staged chemical rocket returns the payload (astronauts or whatever) to the NTR interplanetary vehicle.

Trying to do a single stage from Mars surface all the way back to Earth would be ridiculous.

None of this involves explicitly telling the Neural Network anything about the essence of cat-ness or dog-ness.

Uh except for the training step where you feed it labeled sample sets. The training is where you "program" dog-ness or cat-ness into the network. The main difference between training and programming is a neural network can find signals (by chance and then reinforcement) that you as a programmer might not have ever identified.

Neural networks are definitely "programmed", it's just different terminology to make them seem like magic.

Don't forget anywhere with public source code repositories. GitHub, SourceForge, even Savannah would end up making groups liable for unmoderated code submitted to those platforms.

I don't think the Mars helicopter has that kind of range but I appreciate the enthusiasm.

The blazing speed jump is the M1 in the low end Macs meeting or beating performance of the higher end Intel Macs. My M1 Mac mini ($800) meets or beats the performance of my i9 16" MBP in most CPU-bound tasks. The only place the MBP wins, and by small margins, are tasks that benefit from lots of threads/processes in flight.

The M1 Macs handily beat their Intel based predecessors in CPU and GPU. The mini and Air beat the previous models by pretty ridiculous margins. If you went from a high end Intel Mac to an M1 you're not going to notice much difference but from a low end Intel Mac to an M1 is huge.

The idea that repealing Section 230 will do anything beneficial is beyond absurd. The only thing it would accomplish is consolidate more communication in silos of companies like Facebook. Typically vague laws are a detriment to citizens, for instance the "indecency" portions of the CDA got struck down because "indecent" and "offensive" were not given definitions in the law. Section 230's vagueness is actually a boon for the citizenry.

While everyone wanted to reference Facebook et al with regard to Section 230, it's really everyone else that really benefits. Because you don't personally own a bunch of Internet infrastructure you have to rely on third parties to host pretty much anything you put online. Neither centrally hosted or peer-to-peer hosted material would be viable without Section 230 protections.

If you want to put up a website, it's either going to be hosted at a service provider or going through a service provider if you try self hosting it. In either case, the ISP is not the publisher of your site, you're just using their infrastructure. Without Section 230 protections no ISP is going to want to do that because they would then be liable for whatever you did with your site. Peer-to-peer hosting isn't safe either, one successful lawsuit against a last-mile ISP would lead to all of them actively blocking upstream services.

This ends up spilling over into any content not generated by the hosting entity. So no more GitHub, mailing lists, help forums, or even wikis. Even product/service ratings on websites will disappear. For all the bad shit that might get removed from the web an untold amount of net positive things will also end up going away.

Importantly on the iPhone if you press the lock button 5 times in succession it goes into emergency mode. It will sound an alarm and call your locale's emergency number. But it also evicts all the decryption keys so TouchID/FaceID will no longer unlock the phone. You need to re-enter your passcode to unlock it.

Even if you cancel the emergency call the keys are evicted and you need to re-enter your passcode. It's been a feature for at least the past three iOS versions, maybe longer.

Trump lost the election, why are we still talking about Donal Trump Jr's scandalous dealings in 2016?