For about $3000 USD you can buy an AMD Ryzen AI 395 with 128 GB of integrated RAM, which I'm tempted to do to run coding models. Although it seems to me that 256 GB is more of the sweet spot for local LLMs that can do things at a decent speed. For that size of RAM, the only real game in town is the Mac Studio, will cost about $10k (and rising). Of course even $10k is cheaper than a personal assistant. Now with the true cost of agentic AI starting to fall on the customer, $10k doesn't seem so ridiculous.

Current spacecraft velocity relative to earth is 3697 kph according to the latest spacecraft status display.

To what are you alluding?

La Nina turned out to be extremely weak. It basically ended last month. We're already seeing indications that we're swinging back towards La Nino again.

I agree. I used to be a big fan of Raspberry Pi and SBCs in general. But I realized for 99% of what I want to do with a small computer, mini computers work so much better even though they are (or used to be) more expensive. I also grew really tired of dealing with custom distros and kernel forks for the various SBCs. For server applications (home automation, little file servers, etc), I'd much rather deal with AlmaLinux on an x86 mini pc. I'm tired of kernel forks and device trees and funky bootstrapping systems.

Obviously if you working with hardware sensors, SBCs have their place. I've seen some very cool hardware projects done with Pi Zeros recently.

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

The solution to this is to join a party and get involved in the decisionmaking. It's a lot easier than you might think, and you can have a lot more influence that you might expect, precisely because not that many people do this.

Back in 2019 on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, someone put up a fantastic web site to play back the mission in real time. Complete with actual radio and mission control comms and telemetry data. https://apolloinrealtime.org/. Such an amazing historical data trove. I spent several days listening in real time to the flight unfold from launch to moon landing, to splash down. Even though I knew this was just playing back recordings from 50 years ago, and knew the outcome, it was a neat experience and it filled me with wonder and excitement at what was being accomplished as it were. I remember going outside and lookup up at the moon and thinking about people being on it, as someone in 1969 would have done.

Fast forward now to Artemis II and I have such mixed feelings about it, and the space program in general. Anyway I wish them a safe and uneventful journey.

Oh wow. The burning is where the pollution comes from! Natural bodies burning up in the atmosphere typically don't contain aluminum. Satellites do. And in fact we can measure an increase in aluminum particles and compounds in the upper atmosphere since starlink satellites have been regularly do-orbited. We have no idea what the long-term affect will be. I've heard atmospheric scientists call this one of the largest uncontrolled experiments in air pollution we've ever done as a species. Surely you agree that's a bit reckless?

Claude has already seen it.

Meh.

It would undoubtedly be very expensive at first, and therefore only available to the very wealth (probably not ultra-wealthy -- even without automation, caring for such a clone wouldn't be a full-time job, so call it maybe $30k/year -- within the reach of the upper middle class). But competition would drive automation, and we already have most of the techniques required, having developed them to deal with coma patients and the like, but at lower cost because this case would be dealing with a fundamentally healthy body. My guess based on some napkin math is that cost could be driven down as low as $10k per year. Maybe lower.

$10k per year is expensive, sure, but having an immunologically-perfect organ donor could absolutely be worth it for someone making as little as $200k per year.

If the cost could be driven down to $5k per year... then it's in the range where most middle-class Americans could afford it, even if it meant that they'd have to cut back a little somewhere else; maybe drive an older car rather than leasing a new one, or similar.

The region where Starlink satellites orbit, and many other of these massive constellations live, will clear itself out after a year or two, after which we can start over. But besides light pollution problem, Starlink's biggest problem is air pollution. We don't know what the long term effect of thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere is. This is quite concerning. These satellites are contaminating our upper atmosphere at rates we've never experienced before.

In the orbits above this region, Kessler syndome is a real possibility.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.