If it was about health outcome, we would shift our time to adapt to the sun. But we don't we have, for example, 8h-17h always , winter and summer. That's what is unhealthy - our biology is adapted to do our activity with sun rise/sun set - not with a fix time DST or not does not change that much.

I'm certainly not sold on the idea that "government controls AI technology" is better than "bunch of silicon valley bros control AI technology". I don't trust either of them. I would absolutely rather have private development with more strict regulatory oversight, which at least keeps things relatively public and gives voters at least some say. The more groups involved in overseeing what goes on, the better. I get that red tape is out of vogue recently, but I suspect that's only a temporary thing.

Quiet a few astronomical observation on very distant galaxy (so ancient light) shows that some of the fine structure constant did not change with time, or changed less than 10^-5 of its value (https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9803165), maybe somebody has a more recent article on whether that alpha change was confirmed or not.

"Car thefts in San Francisco are down almost 59% for the first eight months of 2026"

And car fuel price exploded. I think this is a far more likely correlation.

I've only used Claude code for a matter of weeks at work. While it's supposed to stay contained in the folder you point it at, I've noticed that it has no problem *looking* outside that folder, and even acting outside that folder if you gave it implied permission. In one case it used the connection string from the application source code it was working on, and the fact that my windows account had read-only access to some tables in the production database, to connect to the database and query tables in order to answer a question it had about the potential ramifications of a code change. The problem is that while we're OK with this particular source code leaving the premises, we're not ok with data from a production database going offsite. In this case it wasn't sensitive data, but after that incident I only run Claude Code from a VM under a user with minimal permissions. Clearly it would have been prudent to do that from the start, but let this be a warning to anyone else who just downloaded Claude Code, turned off the "use my data to train future models" and gave it a go... it will *not* keep itself inside the folder you give it. Put it in a sandbox. I heard a similar story this week from an IT friend who said devs at his company were using Cursor.ai and it was doing scans of the network drives, so they did the same thing and moved it all to VMs.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case, given what I've seen people do with AI, and given my own experience with Claude Code (Opus and Fable models), the normal human inclination to trust it's probably right and click OK is by far the most likely explanation. And remember that frontier models have grown increasingly better over the last year, and one of the newest improvements is that the reasoning models use two models in an adversarial mode where the second model checks and challenges the output of the first. The timeline of the events in Iran probably indicate that this was an older AI model without those newer advances. I can totally believe this story. When consumers were expected to keep their hands on the wheel of self-driving cars, I absolutely knew they wouldn't, and when humans are told to check the conclusions of AI, they mostly just click OK. I do actually look at the code that Claude generates before it goes into our codebase, and I can tell you, the desire to just skim read is real.

They are not trying to protect you or anybody. The idea IMO in those dire warning are:
1) make a lot of noise and dire warning
2) get congress to pass the "responsible AI act (TM)" which will only allow "responsible model"
3) Only the local US grown model are declared "responsible model"
4) China and other country are naturally excluded
5) ask politician to put sanction on those who use "irresponsible model"
6) profit.

Indeed. I built a Raspberry Pi Pico based controller for some flashing LEDs on my drone. It has red and blue LEDs and I wanted them to flash with the cycle of three short flashes then a pause; alternately the red LEDs then the blue LEDS. Took barely a minute to code that in python and dump it onto the board. In such cases it doesn't matter that the language is interpreted because the task is not demanding of the hardware.

The "Police Drone" still flies to this day! :-)

As they've been telling us software developers who are being asked to adapt to probably the most rapid transformation of any career that's ever been seen... "it's ok to take a moment to grieve." I was spending most of my time writing code up until about the middle of August, and then I realized that Fable was finally good enough to work on the rather large code base that I work on, and now I write less than 5% of the new code, and I'm pushing out new features at probably 3 times as fast as I was before, while now spending almost all my time creating and reviewing specifications, reading code, updating documentation, reviewing software architecture, and making bigger plans. It's jarring, exhilarating, and humbling at the same time. It's gonna take a minute for us to adjust. And yes, things are still changing fast. Software development has embraced this. It's coming for 3D CAD software and mechanical engineers next. There's been pushback within the more creative arts, like graphic design, writing, and making videos, and I totally understand that. Those industries will grapple with it in different ways than we have in the engineering space. And we won't lose all the creative stuff. As someone recently said to me, "we still ride horses, but we don't ride them to work."

"A labor union wants to be, and often is, the exclusive provider (that is, seller) of labor to a company or industry. "

Labor Union do not provide exclusively labor to companies. What they do is have the power of collective bargaining, job protection, safety - which is utterly different to being "exclusive provider of job".
You may confusing normal labor union, with hiring hall union (e.g. in construction/actors/voice actor). That is a widely different type of union. Most union are NOT hiring hall union.

Feel free to correct me.

"The UK may not regulate US entities without the consent of the US government"

The UK can wholly regulate US entity doing commerce in the UK on what they can or cannot do while selling to UK citizen, and their modality of information being saved UK data information for later access in UK.

And the US government can do diddly squat on that except trying political pressure (thus the article), and the company can go out of the UK market if they don't like the modality of it. Which in this case they did not, they agreed to remove some encryption instead, while probably going to thug the dick of the politician they donate to, and whine ask them to do something.

How interesting it would be to do a drive-around with an open wifi hotspot in the car -- just to see how many LG TV sets try to connect and find out what data they send.

Just saying, for a friend :)

Yes... we could destroy Putin's nuclear torpedo before it even made it to the UK coast! :-P

... did Slashdot become a god damned commie circle jerk?

Your point would be valid if we were speaking about navigation only. The reality is that the Mercator map is used everywhere, for politics, news, and education. And that is where the point of the new projection comes in.