Or, an alternative, they are genuinely concerned and are trying to balance their own financial incentives (which would be to rush out the models quickly) with the actual danger. If you prefer, look at what happened with Kimi. That model was open-weights, and a security firm testing it ended up with (in part due to their own sloppiness), a similar sort of containment breach to what Anthropic and OpenAI have reported https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/. So that's an open model being reported to do the same thing by an independent security group with no incentive to lie. So one should take it seriously in their case. And if it is real for Kimi which is almost certainly weaker than any model being currently built/evaluated by Anthropic or OpenAI, that should cause you to take their own concerns about these new models more seriously also.

To be fair, isn't that what a distribution is? I mean Linux Mint is just Ubuntu, Linux Mint Debian Edition is Debian. Lots of distros based on Ubuntu and Debian, including Devuan. All of them could be said to be opinionated customizations of the base distro.

I did find it funny that he keeps saying he has 30 years of Linux experience but doesn't seem to know anything about systemd. Connects to the mossad? Kind of lost all credibility at that point in his video.

Why can't these things just be an add-on package to an existing distribution

That's essentially what he's done. It's just Devuan with a custom package set and some scripts to make a better post-install experience. I don't think he maintains his own core OS repos other than the packages he's added on (nvidia installer, themes, etc).

I watched some of his video and I wonder if his purpose would be better served by building on NixOS. All of his post-install automation could be done quite reliably by some .nix scripts and flakes.

I used RPM since RedHat 5.1 days (and the really, really rough transition from libc to glibc). That was definitely dependency hell without a tool like yum. Thankfully yum and dnf eliminated any problems rpm had with dependency hell.

Lately the only major dependency hell problems I've had are with apt on debian. By far I've had more problems with apt than yum/dnf.

As far as I know, the GNOME project has been the only Linux graphical shell that actually performs systematic studies of the user experience, and based on this, changes the interface. Testing how users are able to figure out a system is crucial, especially watching people (without helping them) who have never worked with Linux before.

This is a very different axis to most Linux developers building UIs based on what they feel like, which is most of what we read about on slashdot.
This is a very different axis to experienced users who have an emotional reaction when things change, which is where most of the software building energy goes.

GNOME indeed has a very nice interface design guide (likely originally inspired by Apple, but they evolved themselves), that you can consider for your own non-GNOME projects.

I like GNOME's systematic approach, and great to see that Germany is putting money to these efforts.

We don't need bigger models, at this point. What we need is multi-dimensional decomposition, problem space transforms, and the ability for AI to use external tools (such as SQLite, memcached, etc) so that it can externalise static data that it needs to not corrupt accidentally but still keep in easy access.

If we had that, most of the things "bigger models" will do will actually end up being done better, quicker, with fewer compute resources.

Chinese companies learn from the best (us). And they are only responding to demand. The blame for low-quality goods cannot be placed on China. The blame is squarely back here at home because low-quality, cheap goods are exactly what the American market is demanding, and demanding big time (Temu and Shein are wildly popular). No one wants high quality goods at higher cost. We all say we do, but in reality we don't, and our buying habits just reinforce that. No you can't blame China, sorry. The destruction of American industry is entirely a problem of our own system. American companies deliberately destroyed American manufacturing (and employment) in the name of short-term, quarterly profit. China didn't cheat and steal our jobs: we gave it all to them on purpose. No amount of tariffs and taxes will change that.

And for the record, I've had to deal with poor quality goods made in the US as well. Cutting corners to save pennies applies just as much to American manufacturers (maybe even more so) as it does to Chinese manufacturers. For example, Eaton Cutler-Hammer electrical panels are the most flimsy things I've ever dealt with. Every possible cost was cut.

I suggest you go and read the link. It discusses why Occam's razor is a reasonable rule and also why it does not in fact put personal deities as a simple hypothesis when done correctly although it uses "witch" as the same type of category. In essence, some things like "witch" or "god" are types of items that feel very simple to human minds, but really aren't when you try to describe them precisely.

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

Probably LRO vs. Danuri

Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.

We know that brain function is altered by the blood chemistry changes made by gut bacteria. This means that any mental illness exacerbated by this route where the chemistry added is verifiably unique to an undesirable bacterium can be targeted by the immune system.

Will this be all mental illnesses? Obviously not.

Do I know of any such chemistry? No, which is why I said "in principle". The potential for the vector exists and the potential for training the immune system to attack it exists, but the reality of such a vector actually existing is unknown and the safety of attacking it is also unknown.

"Potential" and "Unknown" are very important words here. They mean that we do NOT know if the probability of such a vaccine being possible exceeds zero, but equally we do know that a key underlying requirement has a probability that isn't zero. But that is all that we can definitely say at this point in time.

Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't. And if we could get something to them to fit new nuclear batteries and replacements for components that cannot be revived, we could get newer probes out there with better sensors and a more powerful nuclear battery that could last a lot longer.

Having said that, I honestly wouldn't trust any of today's manufacturers to be capable of building anything with a comparable level of robustness, so a recharge mission isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Almost, but not quite.

Still, fresh probes sent into the Kuipier Belt and the Heliopause would be extremely interesting.