Joking aside, there's a much more subtle change too. Look at the quoted wording from the astronauts: "*our* nation", "inspire *this* nation". Even at the height of the US-Soviet cold war it was still "for *all* mankind".

I get Trump's order is very much aimed at the NASA and the US (and probably getting his name onto it somehow), so can give that a pass, but the astronauts had an opportunity to rise above all that partisanship and slip in a message of much needed global unity, yet failed to do so. There are precious few institutions left in the world that can at least try and claim to be at least somewhat above / outside the direct influence of politics, and it looks like we're about to lose another one. Quite possibly for good once the ISS is finally decommissioned.

Task Manager's expanded view does include GPU monitoring and has done for quite some time now, but it wasn't added until they achieved a certain level of market ubiquity (and, presumably, the relevant APIs were in place). I'm guessing that Microsoft now feels that NPUs have reached a similar state and will be adding the extra "NPU" sub-tab to the existing Performance tab where other hardware resources are monitored, and adding some additional AI-related monitoring functionality to the existing GPU one.

You don't have to use it (SysInternal's tools are much more comprehensive), but if you just need an overview level of insight into what is going on when your system's fans start to sound like a jet turbine, it's still a pretty good starting point into what's up.

I suspect the Pareto Principle is very much at play here, in that 80% of customer issues can totally be answered by the scripts that human front-line call centre staff typically worked from (that's why the scripts exist in the first place, afterall), and therefore 80% of the calls can be dealt with perfectly well by an AI bot following the same script. It's only the other 20% that are the unique problems that KB articles and scripted/automated agents cannot handle, and - usually after a lot of pointless tick-boxing to get off-script - those are usually the ones that get escalated to a second line support peon that can actually take some initiative, and ultimately the few real corner cases to third-line support.

If AI can let you cull 80% of your support / call centre staff with no practical loss of service (according to the AI agent salesperson, anyway), then who isn't going to jump at that? Of course, they'll probably go for 90% or more and take extra hit on service levels, then have to wind things back a bit when they realise that the AI agents are not quite as good as promised and some people will get really stroppy about being forced to talk a bot, but at that point they'll have been paid their bonus and who cares, right? They're only customers, and you've got think of the shareholders!

Which is why, as many people pointed out at the time the root servers were opened up to all these new gTLDs, that this is just a license for the successful registrars running each gTLD to print money at the expense of everyone with a brand they have to protect. In most cases, they were absolutely right on the money; .biz being the classic example, almost immediately becoming a wretched hive of online scum and villainy most mail server operators equally rapidly blocked outright. (I am curious though; does anyone actually try and host a legit .biz domain these days? I don't think I've ever come across one.)

I'll give you, there are some pretty cool options for host/domain names under .web, especially with an arachnid theme or things like "web.web.web", that might become useful and popular for some groups, but apart from those - which Verisign, being Verisign, will no doubt have a special procurement process for to maximise their investment - the rest will almost certainly be parked/redirected brandname protection, a vast number of of scammer sites, and a handful of vanity projects that 99.99% of people probably won't even know about, and probably wouldn't care about if they did.

None of which changes the fundamental point that we seldom care about URLs any more. We click on links in apps, webpages, emails, etc., ideally having done some kind of due diligence to make sure the link is hopefully OK, or just cut and paste from the browser bar to put it into something we are writing. Functionally, "bankofamerica.com" is no different from "bankofamerica.web", or any other gTLD/ccTLD they might care to suffix it with, and it wouldn't make any difference to their service if all the other TLDs went away, unless they wanted to do some kind of content localisation based on a ccTLD rather than some other approach to achieve that.

Sam Altman is also a psychotic sociopath. He's probably pitching "Project Skynet" to Trump and Pete Hegseth right now - "Look how effective our tools clearly are! You could be using them against China, Iran, Cuba ..." [checks notes] "Um, Greenland, Canada, Democrats (especially Obama & Biden!), E. Jean Carroll, the BBC... And for the low, low price of..." [pinky finger] "one trillion dollars, we can be up and running by, let's say... 2029?"

It's bad, but Microsoft has a awfully large number of lines of code to run through Mythos or whatever (whether they need that many is a whole other discussion). A more useful metric on overall code quality would be how many bugs are being found per 10k lines of code compared to their peers (including FLOSS); e.g. if Microsoft ran 10m SLOC through Mythos to get those 570 bugs, and a smaller project ran 1m SLOC and got 57 bugs, then you could reasonably argue that their code quality is about on a par with the smaller project. It's still Apples to Oranges though, because some coding solutions are going to be much more challenging to code, and therefore more likely to contain bugs.

On the upside, we're probably going to get several months of this while everyone with access to Mythos et al runs their existing code through it and integrates into their release processes for new code, and the end result will be things being much harder for all the bad actors in the world. Even if you don't use the improved code yourself, that's hopefully going to have a significant impact on the number and size of all the botnets out there, and that's a net benefit to everyone apart from the bad actors.

Wait, what? They're *making* money now? Last I heard they were still playing shell games with pretend money in a financial merry-go-round of pinky swear deals to make it seem like they are somehow not haemorrhaging quite so many hundreds of billions of dollars as they actually are to try and keep the VC funding flowing in.

The AI endgame, sure. That's totally going to be the kind of bait and switch that Google pulled when they transitioned from a search provider into an ad provider; get everyone hooked on your services, then monetise all the data you've captured and start cranking up the token fees until your customers (only they are actually more your "product" now) squeal, then turn it up some more while offering a rent-seeking subscription model that looks like a good deal until you realise (too late) what they've buried in the small print.

Drug pushers are probably looking at the tech industry in awe at this point.

Previous planetary probes have done figure-8s around the Earth & Moon to build up velocity before heading off for their target planets, so you could possibly do something similar with this to shorten the transit time; a few laps to provide initial acceleration to escape velocity, then coast to Mars using the panels to keep any systems ticking over and batteries topped off. Mars orbital insertion might need a little thought as to how to manage deceleration, or a secondary means of braking propulsion, if you can't do that using Mars' gravity alone though.

There are at least a few teams out there doing just that. In this case, finding software bugs, get one LLM to look for potential bugs, and use a second independent LLM to try and validate the potential exploits it finds / develop a PoC. Depending on what you are doing and how critical/sensitive the code is, you could also add more independent LLMs in each group to provide additional layers assurance before any output is passed over for human review.

There's also supposed to be a training loop with LLMs, so you should be flagging any false positives and feeding those back into your model so that the quality of findings improves. The current versions of Mythos/Fable might not be perfect, and probably never will be, but with a few more iterations Anthropic should be able to decrease the FP rate considerably, and ultimately that's going to be a big win for everyone with an interest in bug & exploit free code.

I was thinking something more malicious, like:
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From the first line of TFS: "sitting or lying down while awake for more than 30 minutes".

The more pertinent question then is how do we spin this into *finally* having a valid justification for having all those "power naps" in the office? :)

Espresso is a base for other coffee drinks, hot and cold. Putting a shot of room temperature espresso from a dispenser into one of those is going to save quite a bit of both time and money at the scale of something like a Starbucks franchise, and if you're getting your coffee from that kind of chain you're either not going to notice any difference anyway - or deny ever being there in the case of the coffee snobs. No more scooping grounds, prepping the machine, and forcing hot water through the grounds into the cup; the barista just shoves the cup under an optic, pushes a button, then moves onto the next step.

The real savings though are going to come for the manufacturers of those pre-bottled coffee drinks you find in the chillers at supermarkets; that's the kind of scale TFS is alluding to; where the coffee is brewed in industrial sized vats. Especially so if the concentrate approach is viable; add one 10L (or whatever) carton to your vat, then dilute with whatever milk/fake-milk/water/flavouring combinations needed to assemble your pre-bottled coffee-based drink. Coffee snobs are not admitting to buying those either. Also, as a side-benefit, there will be less waste as the grounds will be processed centrally so can be collected and fed into a suitable secondary product - they're excellent for providing fertiliser for some plants, for instance.

All of which probably saves you enough power and money (globally) to run a single AI data centre for a few minutes, but such is the price of progress I guess. :)

I had kits for both an Eagle and a Hawk (which is somewhat surprising in retrospect given it only appeared in one or two episodes, IIRC). The Eagle model was a much more complex kit with far more parts than the Hawk, which was also somewhat smaller despite them both supposedly being to the same scale. Tbh, I always thought the Hawk was the cooler looking ship due to its more aggressive lines, which is probably why it was blessed with a model kit, but you can't argue with the sheer practicality & flexibility of the modular Eagle design. And its ability to survive so many crashes - usually at the hands of Alan Carter - of course!

There was also a range of diecast toys and plastic action figures for the series, I think.

This. The problem isn't the technology; that can demonstrably be shown to work in models and simulations because of things like - as you say - needing less space between vehicles, and also more complex things like reducing capillary action in the overall traffic flow (the stop-start effect you often get in heavy traffic). The reason why you don't see those benefits is the growing number of entitled drivers who ignore the signage in the hope of gaming the system for personal gain (e.g. shorter travel time), so you do need robust enforcement with stricter tolerances and more punitive fines to try and deter that.

It's the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. The best solution for the greater good is to obey the signage, but the best solution for the individual is almost always to look out for Number One. Smart traffic flow systems do still seem to improve things, despite entitled drivers, although that's probably more down to the enforcement measures keeping those bending the rules from bending them as far as they'd like to.

No, I'm pointing out where the slippery slope goes. The US has its approach to business ownership and control, China has theirs, the rest is semantics.

Functionally, there is not a lot of difference between a company with direct ties to the Chinese government that is obligated to share data on the QT, because that is what Chinese law says they have to do, and a US one that receives a National Security Letter and does the same, because that's what US law says they have to do. It's pretty much an open secret at this point that the NSA et al are plugged into most of the big tech companies and have been for ages (cf. Room 641a), so if the US and China were to end up in a game of tit-for-tat on this and don't hit the brakes it could go an awfully long way in directions that might not be immediately apparent, and that will have repercussions elsewhere in the world as well.