and unlike AI, [people] have a right to exist.

But GOP said AI companies are people too. They spent good bribe money to buy that status.

shrinking promises

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.

Bonehead Spurs

The first thing I thought when hearing the US invaded Venezuela was "how can I insert AI into this?"

I told OrangeMan to insert something very quickly.

Trump is being manipulated by someone. This isn't the right kind of crazy for trump.

Al Z. Heimer

Waymo CEO: "Our Waymo engineers just invented self-steering submarines! We are still working out minor hitches, though."

^ MagaGPT

... detailed in a book with many citations written "by liberals, for liberals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
        Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending.
        Klein and Thompson propose an "abundance agenda" that they say better manages the tradeoffs between regulations and social advancement and lament that America is stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention. They present the abundance agenda as a way to initiate new economic conditions that will diminish the appeal of the "socialist left" and the "populist-authoritarian right". ..."

https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...
"The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).
        We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.
        You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web. ...
        In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
        The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.
        The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life? ..."

Instead the USA ceded most of its technological know-how to China over the past quarter century. Given that, perhaps I should hope China at least will eventually work on such a library and someday make it available to the rest of the world under a free and open licence?

A recent related comment by me on "On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements)" as an answer to "What's the Best Ways for Humans to Explore Space?": https://slashdot.org/comments....

Of course, Bucky Fuller was there first with his "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science" idea.
https://www.bfi.org/about-full...
"In 1950, Buckminster Fuller set up an outline for a course in Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. Taught at MIT in 1956 as part of the Creative Engineering Laboratory, this course by Fuller probably served as one of their more unusual offerings. The students who took the course, all engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists, represented research and development corporations across America."

"God gave me freedom to spew killer germs everywhere!"

MAGAT!

"Trump ID Card"

Proof