Seriously, there are benefits of burning stuff up on the atmosphere. But if SpaceX has 9000 active satellites, doesn't it seem like there should be some regulations in place that rather than trashing the atmosphere, they should be required instead to capture and recover the old satellites?

I get insanely bitchy about technology which is designed to last a little while and then just trash it and make it someone else's problem.

Musk is launching stuff into space all the time. I assume most of the missions he launches are about sending stuff to space and coming back with empty rockets.

It's time he made his only "Space Wall-E" which floats around in orbit, grabs the decommissioned satellites and stores them until the next rocket is launched. Then it transfers cargo and SpaceX will take the old satellites and recycle them appropriately.

And by the way, this should be a requirement for absolutely anyone launching constellations. I don't care if these are tiny little cube sats. There is no excuse for leaving your trash laying around.

And if anyone reading this knows, what happens to all the little nasties in the satellites. Like ICs generally contain arsenic and other lovely things we don't like in our rain and water supplies. I'm sure it's barely trace amounts. But there are 9000 satellites up there right now which have a scheduled life span of a few blinks of an eye. And everyone is racing to compete and sending thousands more. Sooner or later, the stuff we burn up in the atmosphere has to accumulate. It might take weeks, it might take decades, it might take centuries. But, it strikes me that using the atmosphere as a trash can sounds like a bad idea. What happens to all the burned up waste?

This isn't difficult. Ask an llm, in this case, I ask Gemma running on lmstudio :

"using lmstudio how can I prepare the context. In otherwords, I want a standard document which lists rules I want the llms to follow when answering my questions. For example, I don't want it to provide any information without also providing reference links. I often get responses like "There is a research paper named..." and I want the link to the paper and don't want to search for it."

The response it provides is long and detailed. It's really quite good. If you follow the steps, it's really much more reliable than getting constant hallucinations.

If you want it to work like a champion, then ask it

"Is there a way to keep an llm up to date? It would be amazing if I could tell the llm that later today I intend to ask it more information on a specific topic. Do some research while I'm gone. And then the llm would search the internet. It would be even cooler if it could chat on message forums and then check the answers for validity afterwards"

Which will help you setup a RAG.

It sounds like Lawyer dude started his project way too early. And I get it, after all, if he didn't rush in and start early someone else would have. It also sounds like he probably got to the point where the customer expected it to provide better results and if he didn't reach version 1.0 pretty soon, not only would they ditch him, but it would probably slam the doors shut for everyone else. And finally, he probably chased a rabbit down the wrong rabbit hole for far too long and delivered a shit product.

I think to run a project like this, if I were starting today, I would talk with Google (I'd prefer Ali these days, but the whole US government/China thing is an issue), and I'd ask to license Gemma for the base of my own LLM and then extend on that. After all, training your own model from scratch is not only insanely expensive, it's also impressively stupid. Let someone else waste a few gazillion GPU hours to lay down the base weights and deal with all the other training annoyances.

But, again, he sounds like he did a great job suckering some investors into giving him money and now he's trying to convince everyone else that it's not worth their effort to make a competing project because it's really hard to do.

Honestly, cutting a deal with ANY of the mainstream LLMs and uploading the entire legal library of Alaska as RAG data and creating a context rule document which would constrain the answers provided to verifiable fact with linked references would have been far cheaper and far more effective.

Of course, at the current rate of progress of LLMs, I expect by 2030, there won't even be a need for RAGs regarding things like legal references. But this might end up only being possible on Chinese computing systems since OpenAI just killed all western AI research. After all, we spent $32,000 a card on 340 H200 cards last year. They have 141GB each. This is way to small to run decent LLMs on current generation tech. I speculate that we'll see a breaking point closer to 512GB. And I don't think we'll see 512GB from anyone but the Chinese until there are A LOT more RAM factories up and running.

Thankfully, I have nothing to do with Windows clients other than being forced to use them as a client for filing my hours in an accounting program. But, the environment I'm in has what I suspect is a few tens of thousands of Windows virtual machines. We are mostly a Linux shop, but there are many tasks where only Windows will do.
I'm guessing Microsoft has provided us some sort of offline license activation server because there only legal method of moving data on or off this network is to copy it to a USB device, send it to a department who then scans its contents on a machine which is read-only and boots from network freshly for each task. Once the content is validated as safe, it is sent to the next machine which is virus and malware scanning. You can't send data in unapproved container formats like RAR. And then the USB drive is moved to the correct isolated virtual network and transferred into the isolated storage.
We are far from extreme compared to other environments I've encountered. I have worked in a place where, by Cisco's guidance, we were forced to fill the USB ports of Cisco equipment with epoxy because there was no way to disable the ports otherwise.
I think that either Microsoft has decided that they would issue offline licensing methods for special cases or that they wouldn't mind losing this kind of business.

Stepping foot onto the maiden Orion flight with the SLS... That is soooo stupi... I mean brave.

The biggest carrot the US and Europe have is the protectionism of their stuff.
If the other country is doing it better, you can sue them and keep them from going after your customers. This leaves your customers with lesser options but at least they're forced to buy your stuff.
China is beginning a big push for patents and intellectual property protection. This will slow them down.
But look at the ugliest case of the absolute failure of a total national economy in 2025.
The Germans are in a panic because Chinese cars are better than German cars. They're more advanced, they're cheaper, they are being built with higher quality components. Overall, Chinese cars offer 5-10 times more value for the money right now depending on your measurement compared to German cars. Workers at BMW are showing up to work driving Chinese cars.
So what's the German answer to this?
You'd think the answer would be to invest heavily into making German car companies competitive with the Chinese. Wouldn't that be logical?
America managed to build Tesla which is a car company who engineered every part of their cars with the goal that they should be able to be fixed and upgraded and assembled and disassembled almost entirely by robot. The company invested in engineers who designed cars that could last 25 or more years as vehicles for the middle class and Tesla would get almost all the money.
Chinese engineered their cars with no legacy parts to copy the Tesla pattern and focuses on vehicles that would be cost competitive in the Chinese market.
Germany did what they always did. They made 10 year cars... which actually became 8 year cars because they don't support their software or offer upgrades. They didn't upgrade their manufacturing because German unions scream murder every time a job is replaced by a robot. They didn't reengineer their systems to have anything to do with robots. They don't even support the software on their cars once the car rolls off the assembly line. They have actually increased the costs of owning their cars over time even while their cars rapidly decrease in value.
And Germany's answer is "Hey let's figure out how we can implement protectionism. Because helping the companies compete sounds like too much work"

It seems to me that this is a tool that could reduce consumption of new things in favor of rescuing stuff from the landfill.
Over the past few years, a large amount of my consumption has moved to second hand. The number of trips I make to the dump has dropped.
Apps like this are a good step towards reducing waste. Of course, whether an item has one owner or five before the dump is just a delay. But it means one fifth will be produced.
I'm trying to push that companies like NVidia should be severely fined for waste like mining series GPUs which is disgusting. A perfectly serviceable RTX3080 ends up in the trash because NVidia locks out features and relabels it CMP HX90. This is a device which was never going to last more than a year. They're everywhere and cheap. These could be powering student AI projects or robots, etc...

Jaguar was never going to survive. Have you seen the crap they make?

Let's start with in school prayer.
I was forced for years to stand up and pray to a bath towel with stars and stripes all over it every morning in a group. I had to pray as well to an imaginary sky deity too. I was gaslighted into a belief that we were one nation, under sky god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

In the educational system, I never really managed to fully understand what liberty meant, but as an adult, I have a pretty good idea and I'm almost 100% sure that it only works if you ignore things like being systematically forced to pray to a dish rag until you become a zealot who becomes offended that someone might call it a bath towel or a dish rag.

Public schools have a tremendous amount to do to compensate for the short comings of children being raised in a country where we're taught to strive for more. To want better. To improve. To anyone like myself who went looking for liberty and justice for all... and left, when I return on visits, I see a country more and more dominated by people lacking simple human values. I can't diagnose the problem, but it greatly disheartens me. I am sad that the country I remember from a different millennium doesn't exist anymore.

We were never perfect. There were always people like yourself who are willing to pay for your religion and beliefs to be forced on my children, but cry out in anger when someone else's beliefs are being forced on other children. And before you claim this isn't true, nationalism and patriotism is a religion or a cult, or whatever else you want to call it. I also take great offense by anyone who supports a two party government. And this means anyone who supports team sports of any kind. I absolutely hate schools who teach out children that we need to make ourselves feel better by dominating other people. I have no problems with kids playing a game. I do take tremendous offense that we teach children that they are better than other children because their school is better than someone else's.

American toxically forces division on the people. We have been and probably always will be forced to believe that every aspect of life is polarized. You're with us or against us. You're part of the solution or part of the problem. etc... We will be forced to choose team red or team blue. We can't like some Chinese people because 1.4 billion people are evil and horrible because we don't like a few people running the country.

American schools exist for no other reason than to teach hate.

See what I did there. I made a statement to be persuasive and to catch your attention. If I were a true American, I would let it stand. But unfortunately, I prefer to have morals and ethics.

American schools are far from perfect. And as an honest to goodness American and as your patriotic duty, you should demand that your taxes be spent to teach children perspectives you don't agree with. This is how we improve. This is how we mature. This is how we build our future. Where I live, in Norway, my civil liberties were severely violated. I was born Jewish and thankfully I've been recovering from that for some time, but my children were forced by the government to attend church and were forced to take many years of religious studies which often were "The jews believe this, the muslims believe this, but WE believe this". And at home, I would teach my children that faith is good, blind faith is wrong. That their grandmother needed religion. I tough them that they have their own choice to make. They can choose to believe in what they're learning at school, they can choose to believe what I believe, or they can choose to walk their own path.

If you don't like what is being taught in the school, this is why we have dinner tables. We can teach our children what we believe at home. We can take the time to raise them. When their friends come over for dinner, we can even share our values with them. This is absolutely our rights.

So, as long as there's forced prayer to nappies on a stick, school sports, etc... and civilized people like myself are forced to pay taxes to support that, you should give a little back. People are being forced to pay taxes to have your horrible beliefs forced children's throats, you can pay a few bucks to let someone else's horrible beliefs forced on other children as well.

Nerds.xyz has nothing nice to say to anyone outside of paid reviews. They are nothing but a hate rag.
Some of their points are valid, but their writing is so toxic that they make a poor source of information.

We?
Were you there?

Is that a video game thing? Or is that for creepy old people?
How does it effect cars? Here in Norway we measure in KWH

They've done great stuff, but I honestly don't feel dependent on them and simply don't see them as more than a one trick pony.

I'm 100% convinced that other than spending irresponsible amounts of money on building an infrastructure which is only competitive because they are willing to outspend their peers, they don't offer anything of value.

I currently am using glm-4.5 on a computer with 64000 cpu cores and 304 H200 GPUs. I share the machine with 10 other users. It's pretty fast. It gives me an idea of how AI will perform in 20 years.

But that's the point. OpenAI is interesting because they have computers that cost $1 billion. My little computer cost 1/20 of that. But, consider the NEC earth simulator cost $350 million in 2002. Performance-wise, it was about as fast as a $250 NVidia RTX 5050. It had 10TB RAM but the RAM performance could be matched by 8 2TB PCIe Gen 5 drives in RAID.

So, in 20 years, we should expect to see the biggest computer OpenAI has today for about $2000 in the size of a laptop.

OpenAI's edge isn't their IP. It's their spending.

Nonsense. Tor Indstoey's entire career is about being an alarmist. He studied at BI which is a school that explicitly shelters students from engineers and sells himself as an MIT attendee because he took two six week online courses with no entry requirements. He works in a group at Telenor who doesn't really do anything beyond look for ghosts and talk to the press. He's investigating Nio vehicles as if he could even identify the difference between the steering wheel and the computer in the car. Telenor employs way too many BI grads and its killing the company.

If you need to drive a bus into a tunnel to look for security threats, you already failed completely.

No government needs backdoors to shutdown these systems. You need a tourist and a funny hat.

Oslo's busses are electric and their charging stations are completely insecure, not even a fence. If I wanted to cripple Oslo's busses, I'd visit there driving an electrician's van one day with a gum to take the impression of the "lock" on the chargers. It's more of a security screw than a lock. I'd come back a day later and photograph the electronics. A few days later, I'd return with a circuit board capable of remotely shorting the contactor and also a component contains a corrosive that can be triggered to spray. I'd use a simple nbiot module with esim. Just label everything as Schneider Electric and it will be invisible.

Why sabotage the busses?

You can easily replace busses. The charging infrastructure is far more attractive and easier.

Most people would do just fine with a pretty simple tax app.

I'm pretty sure I could vibe code a PWA in a few hours that would work for 80% of Americans.

How would I fund it?

$0.78 for a stamp.
$0.10 per page to print
$0.50 for an envelope
Total $1.38

Consider payment fees and such and we can settle on $3 to click submit and I'll print and mail your tax form for you. Or, you can do it yourself. Same, same.

Thank goodness I don't live in the states. My taxes are "log into government web page, see if it's worth my effort to make changes, click submit".

So, here's the deal. First of all, this stinks of corruption. Henna Virkkunen will probably have a nice corner office at Nokia in 3-5 years because her work on this.

Next, using "safe vendors" leads to apathy. Nokia and Ericsson are worse than back doors. Their equipment is shit and their paywalled documentation looks like it was written during meetings held in pubs. Just hop on eBay, buy a used Nokia BBU, boot Open5GS and have fun. If you can't find at least 10 security holes in the first hour of looking, you're as drunk as their documentation authors. Don't worry about the age of the software, Nokia and Ericsson don't patch them. The only thing making Telcom software secure is that management is out of band, you need to hack that... But hacking is such a strong word. "Nokia security" is like putting a post it note on a bar of gold saying "don't touch, this is secure" then leaving it on an unattended bench in the park.

Huawei is far more secure. Every single thing they do is watched closely. They patch their security holes at breakneck speeds. Beijing would need at least 10 minutes to hack their stuff compared to the 30 seconds for Nokia or Ericsson.