A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

It obviously gives us guarantees in terms of what the source will do and what the compiled code should need.

These do not provide memory safety, so memory bugs would not be solved by these. They will find unexpected behavioural issues, though.

The precondition and postcondition statements are not cunningly-disguised assert statements because they're not asserted at runtime. They're enforced at static check and/or compile time.

The policy hints mean that if the kernel is doing something you're not expecting, you find this when testing the code. Equally, though, it means that users cannot cause the software to venture into realms unknown through many of the usual attack vectors because those will require permissions that aren't there.

They already have a planned rotation. There will be two crews, rotating every four hours. This isn't unlike existing long-haul flights, except that instead of the crews rotating at the same time, they will be on two-hour offsets. One pilot will stay for the first four hours, the other for the first two hours. A replacement will swap in at two hours and stay through the sixth hour, and then the other will swap at four hours and stay through the eighth hour, and so on. Qantas said that this will apply to all flights of 20 hours or more.

I mostly do heavy multi-disciplinary engineering problems (these I also use for checking an AI, as they're typically not good at these sorts of problems), complex coding, OS analysis, stuff like that. However, sometimes I do throw the occasional odd-ball - I've used ChatGPT to propose a workable quantum mechanics that will cope with Doctor Who canon, for example, and to produce an outline for a story in which symphonic metal appears in 1964 that is compliant with current sociological and psychological models of behaviour.

Claude Opus 4.6 was coping surprisingly well with just about everything I threw at it (but ran out of credits fast), but Opus 5 is churning out incoherent babblings to the point I'm worried I may have accidentally summoned Cthulhu.

But Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek got hopelessly confused on just about everything past a very low level of complexity. They can handle large problems, yes - Gemini has a huge context window - but complex interactions baffle them.

ChatGPT is able to identify issues correctly, but can only outline solutions, it's just not good at depth. 5.6 is a lot better, but still not good at deep answers. ChatGPT is also prone to agreeing for the sake of it, which makes me nervous about trustworthiness.

That is fair enough. I've been trying out Kimi on the free model, and have subscriptions to Claude and ChatGPT. If Kimi is actually as good or better than ChatGPT, at the pro level, then it might be worth my while moving over as ChatGPT has become very disk-hungry of late and I'm pushing right to the very limits on what it can reliably process.

Although the Chinese models are all considerably smaller, it's not obvious to me that they're as good or better. They could be, but I'm not convinced the benchmarks that currently exist are stressing the models enough to establish where models actually are any good.

You use the can of grue repellant in the lake to get past those.

That humans have sufficiently directional hearing is perhaps the most impressive part. Once you have that, then the rest really just follows,

However, this continues the unexpected senses in humans, one of the first discovered was that humans have a weak magnetic sense.

The potential, both in fact (if you can "see" walls and gaps by clicking then you can presumably navigate a cave even if your light source goes out) and in fiction (this one should really be obvious), is considerable.

Most comms software is better handled by a service. Email, chat, phone, etc. Let someone else deal with the problems of maintaining it. Almost everything else is worth discussing.

I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

Not sure you quite get how dopamine works.

Potentially, but not necessarily more than they're going to spend on the work.

Maybe Apple sees it as just the right thing to do. Apple has access to enormous volumes of data that they could monetize if they wanted, but they don't. They jumped through a bunch of hoops to make Lockdown Mode that, if the user screws it up, means that everything is lost. They are unlikely to be making money on that, especially since it limits some app installations and functionality, and they're not going to get fined by anyone for not having it. There is, in fact, a real risk that someone is going to fine them for being unable to recover the data.