Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

They define 133-400k "family of 3" as "upper middle class".

Which is just patent bullshit.

All it is, is they keep the same old income brackets for "middle class" while inflation pushes wages and COL higher. There are actually far fewer people able to maintain a 1990s "middle class" lifestyle, and I'd argue most of these "upper middle class" people are living month to month. "Middle class" used to mean you were financially secure and had investments and retirement. That's a joke for most people under 50.

They're defining upper middle class as " family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 per year". So that's 2 middle aged adults + an adult child as the upper barrier.

What's that mean for your typical "family of 2"? Do they normalize on 3 incomes and play funny with the figures, using extrapolation for the third?

Because the cost of living has increased. $133k is going to just barely buy you a house in most of the country. Is starter home ownership "upper middle class"?

Absolutely not.

This is just inflation, and a disingenuous bullshit article in the NYT (as you can expect, at best). The middle class is markedly smaller, not larger, and they're just using old income brackets to define "upper middle class".

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Half the world runs on VBA for Office applications (or used to, it's probably less now), and VBA for Office has never been officially supported by Microsoft. You're on your own if you choose to use it.

Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.

I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...

Pretty much exactly my point.

The fact that every dev seems to just install the latest whatever from npm doesn't help. There's really no "staging", "stable", or "security" branches, and effectively zero vetting outside what the package developer did. That's a lot of trust.

I never said they were new. I, instead, inferred that they're the kind of problems which shouldn't exist, because it's a mindset out of the 90s when the Internet was still comparably high-trust. They're inexcusably negligent.

You can experience over 40 years of UI design differences in Windows still, today: UI dialog panels from 3.1 days still exist in the latest Windows builds, and everything in between.

I don't think you can honestly say Windows has more polish. It has more bloat - yes. But that's not the same thing.

Meanwhile, Windows games (newer titles!) run better on Linux and Mac, emulated and passed through additional translation libraries, than on Windows.

You also grossly misunderstand how prefetch/caching works, both on Linux and on Windows. It does not change the baseline experience, or that the start bar can quickly eat up 10GB+ of memory due to memory leaks and perform worse than a Windows 95 machine deep into swap.

"Overall experience" is also nonsense - most people don't have the capability or wherewithal to switch. They use what is given to them, and have only mild preference in that they want it to work for what they're doing. Nowadays, that means "a web browser" for well over 50% of all users being the primary requirement, if not the exclusive one.

The baseline computers on the shelves have always been under spec'd for whatever Windows requires, and the experience will be poor. This is why so many people are buying Macs.

This is likely a paid advertisement, brought to you by the same people who are trying to avoid the continued fracturing and disillusionment of the remaining non-professional Windows users who aren't hardcore gamers. It's right in line with the "make Windows better again" agenda (I'd argue, propaganda campaign - there's zero chance of it happening) out of Redmond.

Windows hasn't been usable on less than 16GB of RAM since the tail end of the hard drive era (around Windows 7 SP2/3). Windows Vista was never usable with less than 8GB. Since the tail end of W7 around 2010, after W10 was released, things have only gotten worse: slower, more bloated, and more faulty. There are bugs in Explorer which will balloon memory use to 10s of GB just sitting idle for just that process (and many others).

npm is a problem. It's this massive, unvetted self-publishing repository without any easy way to verify the origin of packages, and the packages largely get installed directly to production on billions of sites every day without any vetting or review.

It's crazy, like something out of the 90s.

Yes, supply attacks like those carried out against npm are pretty common in general, at the state actor level. There've been a couple fun ones in recent years. But the openness and lack of basic precautions surrounding npm in conjunctions with common development practice just makes it a recipe for disaster.

"lossy compression"

Yes, just like human memory.

If I read a bunch of books from a series and extrapolate based on them to form something similar, it's not plagiarism.

If I read your book, then write a book using a similar voice, style, and plot, and do it in a different language - it's not plagiarism if I offer citation. Likewise, if I do so with a verbatim copy in another language. It's an independent effort.

Ultimately, it boils down to what you can get away with. Considering how trivial it is now to re-implement things, I'd say the chance of license enforcement is close to zero for anything open source except in extremely rare situations where there's a lot of money involved.

To what are you alluding?

Lawyers are some of the most overworked people on the planet. Not only that, but the work they do requires a lot of high-level thinking and processing for long stretches of time. It's exhausting work.

So along comes AI, which can turn hours of work into minutes, saving them a lot of time and work (at least up front). Of course they'll take a chance at it, especially when it lets them get eight hours of sleep a few more times a week. Besides, with better odds than a coin flip, the case will probably settle anyways, and what they write will never see the light of day.

Besides, it's very easy to skim through what AI generates and feel convinced that it's good enough. Only if one were to really scrutinize the work would one discover how terrible it is, but why bother doing all that extra evaluation...wasn't AI supposed to save you time?