Eberhart seems like he may be falling for the hype himself. He says "What's happening now isn't innovation; it's aspiration masquerading as disruption..."; but fails to note the fairly profound differences in results between the orbital delivery guys and the moonshot guys; and how neatly that maps onto what is aspiration and what isn't.

Putting satellites into orbit is kind of mundane at this point, too common, too obviously useful; but it's sufficiently obviously useful that more or less anyone with nation-state aspirations wants to at least have a program that executes; and civilian and day-to-day operations want someone who executes but cheaper. And that exists. Going to the moon is cool, and it's a nice prestige project for when the gerontocracy needs to show that they still have it just like when they showed the commies what for; but it's unclear exactly what the point is or the stakes are beyond that. The customer presumably would like to actually land something on the moon, at some point, just to say that they did; but what they are buying is mostly aspiration on the cheap: We get to say that we have a lunar program for way less than Apollo money, you do some open-ended tinkering, honor satisfied.

He can talk about 'accountability'; but it seems like it's a fundamentally hard problem to actually sustain a lie about how serious you are, at an institutional level, in the long term. It's not like do-or-die projects are free of losers(especially because circumstances have a nasty habit of thrusting them on people whether they like it or not; rather than giving them the luxury of choosing whether or not to take on those stakes); but they tend to be animated by a sense of genuine urgency. Stuff that is, fundamentally, kind of optional, by contrast, tends to reflect that in bulk. Timmy Rockets may be genuinely more passionate about stir-welding than you've ever been about anything; but, like is cousin who is really passionate social worker, will soon discover that going to the moon and fighting poverty are open-ended projects we do because they sound nice, not because anyone who matters is actually committing to a deadline.

I can think of some niche cases where this might be useful(mostly HHD/SSD wear data; though bad actors have been able to tamper with those values without much difficulty); but overall this seems like throwing an awful lot of identifying data and a whole 'trust me bro' shadow subsystem at a problem that the data is unlikely to actually help all that much with.

This will be very good at fretting if the refurbisher swapped out RAM or mass storage; but it's not like onboard diagnostics are all that good at picking up the difference between a machine that has had a fairly hard life and now has somewhat dodgy ports and a bit of uncomfortable flex vs. one that sat on a dock most of its life and got unplugged only a handful of times; any any issue that the embedded diagnostics can pick up can also be picked up without any special recordkeeping by just running the diagnostics when you receive the device and verifying that it doesn't throw any errors out of the box.

If you've already got the trust me bro shadow subsystem I assume it's relatively cheap to propose having it keep more records; but I'm not really convinced of how much value is being added.

Is there some problem particular to human DNA that they are looking to solve; or is this just an extension of the ongoing work on DNA synthesis(if you are OK with relatively short segments that has come down to being something you can just order, not nearly as exotic as it once was) but being hyped because there's some human cell genetic engineering at the end; rather than just meeting more aggressive targets for achievable lengths?

You say 'involuntary psych hold'; I say 'MAU'!

The paper claims that the photochemistry of the particles is important to the process; allows them to generate free oxygen at the target site when illuminated without the downsides of just shoving hydrogen peroxide into your sinuses and oxidizing things indiscriminately.

I'm unclear on why small magnetic particles are being called 'robots' now; by that logic you could claim that laser printers use nanorobot swarms to produce text; or that paint is actually an aqueous suspension of visual-band signaling nanites; but it sounds like the surface chemistry of the particles is an important part of the process.

If you were using iron you might be able to get similar effects by inductive heating once you delivered them to the target area; you absolutely could destroy cells in the immediate proximity that way; but it would come down to what option is easier to tightly control and, ideally, more discriminating between bacteria and local human cells. I assume that the actually-qualified people chose photochemistry and free oxygen over inductive heating for good reasons; but I don't know how they compare.

It's not that weird. Much of what Steam sells won't run as expected without some amount of 32 bit support(you are much less likely to find that the main game is 32 bit for anything that got a cross platform release with an 8th gen console, since all but the switch had more than 4GB of RAM; but absolutely no promises on every config launcher or random middleware component); and the steam client itself has, thankfully, remained comparatively lightweight. Probably not as light as it could be; but on the speedier end of programs that are basically web browsers with some background extras.

Not being 64 bit is more of an issue in cases where your one program is the only reason an entire 32 bit support environment is being loaded up; but that's very unlikely to be the case on a windows gaming system and fairly unlikely to be the case on a linux gaming one; and is no longer a terribly relevant consideration on MacOS now that Apple just executed all the 32 bit stuff. Maybe more people than I think are running Steam on TV-connected PCs purely as a remote play client?

It's not desperately elegant; and if they were holding off because they viewed it as an actually hard problem you' be a bit worried about either the state of the codebase or the people working on it; but it's hard to make a strong case for a 64 bit steam client being a particularly urgent priority; given the software that you normally use steam to install and run.

I just said wifi 6 because that's what all the stuff on their website was. That's what struck me as weirdly unambitious for someone who is pushing a wiring standard capable of substantially more.

I don't write marketing copy; but if I were emphasizing the superiority of fiber I would have bulked out the list of models with at least a few blatantly 10Gb or higher options; rather than a bunch of random undemanding APs.

What seems very odd about the page of Huawei fiber-to-the-room products is how unambitious they are.

Sure, if you want to do ethernet at nontrivial distances or above 10Gb fiber is where it's at; but why are you selling fiber as the glorious enabling technology for a bunch of wifi 6 APs that will be lucky to actually need 2.5GbE; with 'power over fiber' cabling which presumably means pulling a bunch of copper anyway and is significantly length-limited?

There are, absolutely, circumstances where having fiber runs would be invaluable; it just seems like "a wifi AP in every room so the signal doesn't suck!" is basically the least fiber-relevant use case going.

Aside from the usual caveats about being 'on the cusp of', rather than having actually delivered; how revolutionary would '100 deepseeks' be?

I enjoyed watching Altman squirm at least as much as anyone, possibly more; but that didn't change the fact that deepseek developed an unexpectedly cheap way to do something that, so far, an entire industry is busy losing money on because the reality has had a desperately bad time living up to the hype.

If some of these 'deepseeks' end up delivering on things that matter more that could be an item of some interest; but if it's all doing questionably useful things somewhat more cheaply than the VC whisperers it should be hilarious to watch but not desperately relevant.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.

I'm curious how you peel off marketing at a company that is really playing two, perhaps three, entirely different games of it in parallel; some of which are actually closely aligned with real techical work.

There's the consumer facing stuff; 'intel inside' stickers and sponsoring overclocking influencers and whatnot. Probably aligns with some poking at engine and middleware vendors to make sure that the characteristics Intel adds to their chips are catered to, whether that be new instructions or not behaving pathologically on heterogeneous cores; but it's not obvious that terribly close coordination would be needed; and (while I sincerely doubt that Accenture will end up being good value) it's easiest to imagine a more weakly coupled consumer marketing effort off doing its thing.

The marketing to low-information institutional buyers (like the now-infamous slide deck about "hey howdy purchasing managers; did you know that sometimes Core i3 is newer and better even though Ryzen 5 has bigger number; which seem unpossible?) is presumably also viable to farm out in its most basic form; but presumably requires some fairly detailed(and potentially contentious, since those have their own interests to look after) coordination with the PC OEMs unless they just want it to be some slightly goofy talking points for dealing with people who buy computers the same way they buy commodity reagents and paper towels.

The marketing to higher-information institutional customers seems like it would lean heavily technical pretty quickly. There's some lightweight stuff aimed at IT director Bob who remembers when he 'knew computers' hands on 30 years ago and continues to read about it at a high-ish level in industry trade magazines and whitepapers; but it fairly quickly gets somewhat meatier in terms of the OEM and ISV assisting/cajoling required to ensure that the vague sense that nobody ever got fired for specifying Intel, the compatible and validated high performance solution for your critical business requirements, remains at least reasonably true; and gets straight into inserting real engineers to talk to other people's real engineers in order to get what you want from emerging OCP specs; ensure that QAT and AES-NI and such are considered relevant to networking performance, that telcos with vRAN problems actually consider AVX to be a part of the solution; and so on. Maybe you can peel off the part that's just faff and vibes for IT Director Bob; but it seems like people would notice if Intel's OCP people were replaced by random Accenture dudes.

Finally you've got the relationship with the OEMs; which definitely has some pure marketing stuff(like the various 'incentives' for advertising OEM systems if they were intel based); but in large part(especially if Intel actually wants to make money, not just discount their way into volume) relies on some largely technical things being true: "we can supply the complete, mature, solution for a thin-and-light from consumer to enterprise; while AMD is busy trying to munge shit together with Mediatek and ASMedia and Realtek" is a simple enough marketing message; but its continued viability can only be sustained by charisma for so long: it has to actually bet true that your CPU/iGPU is at least acceptable enough to not scuttle sales; that your CNVio2 wifi saves money, or is at least a wash, vs. the competitor's m.2 PCIe while being as good or better; that an intel i219 or i225 will be dead reliable and allow AMT enablement for the corporate buyers while AMD is messing around with Realtek's DASH firmware; that the OEM will get actual engineering support if Intel Smart Sound Technology isn't or if they need to deal with some ACPI fuckery that is ruining battery life. It's not like there would be no marketing people involved in spreading the message; but that seems like something more or less wholly inseparable(without drastic damage) from internal, relatively core, technical teams.

Obviously, in a trivial sense, you can always farm something out in the sense of paying someone else to pay people to do things rather than just paying those same people to do those same things directly; but unless your payroll and HR departments are fucked up beyond words you are unlikely to save money by just adding that sort of intermediary; so presumably they have something more in mind. I'm just not sure how it is supposed to work.

If you are just doing low-information vibes marketing that seems pretty readily farmed out; but that's also the sort of thing that is(or ought to be) comparatively cheap; while the more valuable and compelling marketing messages pretty quickly move to being direct technical commitments in a way that seems like it would be an awkward jump if your marketing is external but your engineering remains internal.

Just one point: "free love" actually has a historical definition. It means that sexual activity should not be regulated by governments. That would also, technically, include the right to practice celibacy.

They will have to increase the price eventually as demand for transport overall rises. The point of the pricing is to deter driving enough that the street network operates within its capacity limits; if driving becomes more desirable than status quo ante, they aren't charging enough and will have to raise prices to keep demand manageable.

Think of it this way: either way, traffic will reach some equilibrium. The question is, what is the limiting factor? If using the road is free, then the limiting factor is traffic congestion. If you widen some congested streets, the limiting factor is *still* congestion, so eventually a new equilibrium is found which features traffic jams with even more cars.

The only way to build your way out of this limit, is to add *so* much capacity to the street network that it far outstrips any conceivable demand. This works in a number of US cities, but they're small and have an extensive grid-based street network with few natural barriers like rivers. There is simply no way to retrofit such a street architecture into a city of 8.5 million people where land costs six million dollars an acre.

So imposing use fees is really is the only way to alleviate traffic for a major city like New York or London. This raises economic fairness issues, for sure, but if you want fairness, you can have everyone suffer, or you can provide everyone with better transportation alternatives, but not necessarily the same ones. Yes, the wealthy will be subsidizing the poor, but they themselves will also get rewards well worth the price.