And yet, the worst-case stupidity keeps happening. False positives happen, people are denied access to services without due process, recourse, or recompense. Facial recognition tends to have lower accuracy on faces with darker skin color. There is not, nor should there ever be in a free society, a requirement to produce ID just to use the bus. And who's to say that it'll be limited just to people who have been blacklisted from public transit (itself rather hilarious). It could easily turn into Kavanaugh Stops at a massive scale.

So, "People With Disabilities Don't Exist" then?

My father was recently paralyzed by Guillain-Barré, so I'll let him know, thanks.

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

May I ask where you found that value? The linked-to article (press release, really) does not say. Is that 500 across all three units, of 500 each?

MidJourney was the first sizable AI company to become profitable, having done so back in 2022.

The funny thing was that I knew him for like six months online before I realized he was fully paralyzed. He's been covered in the Finnish press a number of times. Amazing guy. Up until recently he was living in a house he built himself before ALS struck, but the medical service decided he was too far away and he had to move closer. You lose a lot of control over your life with ALS.

He wrote a book about nuclear safety engineering recently, which is a fascinating read, and which I strongly recommend.

BTW, AI is a godsend for ALS patients. Even with an eye tracker, your writing throughput is low / tiring compared to typing, and of course you can't do anything that requires physical activity (painting, playing an instrument, speaking, etc). AI tools help fill the gaps.

Did *she* want to die? Did *she* want to be "released"?

Did she have an eye tracker, to allow her to communicate naturally?

Motor neurons dying != brain control of motor neurons dies.

Anyway, you don't need a brain-computer interface for an ALS patient to work. I have a friend in Finland with ALS who works as a consultant on safety for a nuclear reactor startup (he was a nuclear safety engineer before becoming paralyzed). All it takes is an eye tracker.

The biggest problem is the typically short and unpredictable lives of ALS patients. He has lived abnormally long (I think something like 13 years now), but a large part of that is due to him thinking like a nuclear safety engineer (backup on backup on backup, training his nurses to have zero tolerance for error, etc), and still has a close call like once per year or so, and I regularly worry when I don't see him online in a while that something happened that killed him. A tube comes off a life support system. A nurse forgetting to reconnect something. A mucus plug in his airways. Etc. ALS patients' lives are fragile. He does CAD design for parts on his computer (it's too hard to do it with the mouse using the eye tracker, so he designs the shapes programmatically) and orders them 3d printed to correct any deficiencies he finds in his support systems.

ALS patients also have to constantly fight the medical system. Even in a place like Finland that will actually do long-term care for ALS patients (which is very expensive), it shows that it would be much more convenient for them if those danged ALS patients would choose to die (and there's often pressure put on them to do so). One of my friend's goals is to outlive a doctor who told him he would only live a year or two put a lot of effort into getting him to choose death. It was a battle to get long-term ventilator care. It was an even bigger battle to get to use a cough machine and to be able to control the settings on it; without regular, meaningful cough support, your lungs fill with mucus, and you'll probably eventually die of a mucus plug, pneumonia, or whatnot.

By contrast, ALS patients today can actually live a decent life using eye trackers. It's not like before when you had to tediously spell out things one character at a time to a helper holding an E-tran frame. Given that 1 in 500 people will get ALS at some point in their life, we really should be allocating a lot more money toward researching cures, even if purely from a cost-saving perspective.

(One final note: if anyone here starts getting peripheral weakness and worries its ALS: your instinct will be to exercise more. Do just the opposite. If your peripheral neurons are dying, the last thing they need is more work. ALS overwhelmingly strikes active people - one researcher I was reading noted that in her entire career, she's never met a couch potato who got ALS. Take it easy, see a doctor immediately, and if it is ALS, start preparing early, but know that you do not have to be forced to choose to die, so long as you can get care. You can live a decent, productive life if you choose to).

So long as they keep making chips for Raspberry Pi. (Although, I wouldn't be surprised if the Pi Foundation folks aren't working on alternative designs at this point.)

I started watching the "launch video"...

The first 12 seconds is just the Commodore brand flying into view
0:12 to 0:24 is introducing the Callback name, without actually telling you what it is.
0:24 to 0:36 are some computer-rendered fly-throughs of a vaguely computer-y object: PCBs, chips, LEDs
0:36 to 0:46 is a smash of vaguely retro video clips
0:46 to 0:57 are headlines and audio about how awful smartphones and social media are for everyone

At 0:58 you finally get a view of the product! But still computer renderings.

1:10 to 1:20 are spent showing you all the awesome colors it comes in. Silver! White! Beige! Transparent!
1:20 to 1:26 finally tells you, via voiceover what's the big deal: apps but not social media 1:26 to the end (1:32) encourages you to buy.

I'm not sold.

The opening of every Star Wars movie, from "long ago" to the fade of John Williams' score, is about the same length. And in that time it provided way more information and drew you into the movie to follow. And that was just text on a screen you had to read for yourself! Maybe Commodore should have just done that. I guess there is a long history in advertising to put out weird videos for a product without actually, ya know, showing you the product (much). See, for instance, the campaign for the EV1, or even the Macintosh "1984" commercial. Still, I think those could be categorized as teasers - which this Commodore video most certainly is. You want a launch video? Go back to Jobs in 2007. Or the best launch video of all time.

Or, the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster came down and did a giant turntable scratch on the planet.

It is a hypothesis that explains the present evidence about as well as their proposed hypothesis. Sure, they can run a numerical simulation and say "hey, this could have messed with Venus' rotation". I also can calculate angular momenta. But is there anything testable to come out of this? Is there any evidence we could spot today that favors the impact hypothesis over some other one?