In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.

That isn’t really true. Let’s say I have a service where I sell dirty filthy smut. You want that dirty filthy smut. I require you to set up an account. So I know what account name you have picked, if it is “WankerWeasel” I can guess that it is the same WankerWeasel as is on SlashDot and maybe other places, but that is a guess. If I look at the IP address you use to connect to my web server I can assume I know roughly where you are, although Private Relay makes that a pretty bad guess (I’m in VT and everyone that looks at my Private Relay IP address is going to think I’m around 400 miles away in MA. Which doesn’t make me “hidden enough” if I don’t want it known I’m in the USA, but hey, Apple didn’t promise me that, plus the farther they drag the traffic the more latency gets introduced). In the future when you use the passkey again I’ll know it is the same identity as was used before, and very likely the same person. I still don’t know if you are the same person as is on SlashDot. I definitely don’t know what state you live in, or if you are in the EU what country. If you are on a smartphone I probably can’t figure out your movements if you use Private Relay unless the passkey continuously leaks the address (i.e. in future verifications not just creation), and even then I’ll only see it on login. If Private Relay also covered that traffic I wouldn’t know any thing about your travel habits.

So sure you making an account gives me some ability to track you, but not really much to correlate you to any other existing data I might want to link yup so I can leverage my vast store of citrus treat preferences to advertise at you at a higher success rate. Folks always looking for ways to blame Apple

Yeah, they are (now) the big guy on the block, so many root for failure, and point and jeer. Plus on slashdot they are frequently seen as the enemy of open source even though they do frequently contribute patches back to various things, or entirely open up works they do internally.

That said this is an Apple screwup. I’m pretty sure it was an accident not an intentional privacy leak so they can “look good” but still gather privacy data. It is at worst a bug someone noticed prior to release and it got filed as a P1 or a P2 and got demoted to a P2 or a P3 so the product could ship, and once shipped rather then being treated as a “fix ASAP” it got treated as “that can’t be a block ship bug by definition, because we shipped with it, so P2 at best, why should we block a future product for a bug we already shipped?”, so it is sitting in someone’s radar backlog and it hasn’t gotten fixed despite being fixable (maybe the private relay folks and the passkey folks have a disagreement on how to fix it, but it doesn’t seem like it is a hard fix, either have passkey ask PR how to route traffic PR can’t recognize as “web traffic to reroute”, or PR has a mechanism to mark non port 80 port 443 traffic as something that PR needs to reroute and passkey isn’t using it, but should -- maybe it is a little deeper, maybe PR doesn’t have a way to encapsulate non http(s) traffic and passkey’s protocol isn’t “enough like” http to work, so a general VPN needs to be used, and Apple’s private relay partners are not up for general VPN, and Apple hasn’t solved the busness side of that yet, not even the minimal “only VPN a few protocols from processes that have the right entitlement so it can be used on a case by case basis for things like passkey but not magically give everyone a free VPN that Apple has to pay for if they use it for bulk data”).

What ideas are those? Are you familiar with the policies of Stalin and Mao in any way, or are you just parroting something somebody else told you?

And here I thought the First Impact was billions of years ago, when the Black Moon carrying Lilith crashed into the Earth.

That's an interesting observation. Yet, apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.

Well as you said FRAND is one reason private companies would fund research and then donate it to a standards body, and a “good” one.

Not the only reason though. A lot of things are driven by adopting standards. If you make your very own technology and other companies need to adopt it they tend to want to deal with standards not a single source product, so you get wider adoption by publishing “your thing” as a standard. It does basically burn most or all of the money you invested R&D, but in exchange you get to enlarge the market. You also get to be the first company that can supply a product that uses the standard. So investing money into a new radio strategy and having that be part of the next WiFi standard you are trading that R&D money for being one of the first companies with the “new” WiFi in your basement station (or sort phone, or whatever).

You also get to shape the future direction of a market. So for example (sticking to radio technologies again) if you contribute a low bandwidth low power long range mode for WiFi you can make WiFi more applicable for things like location tags.

SANDisk I think makes FLASH but not RAM, so from their point of view high bandwidth FLASH displacing some HBRAM demand is a huge win for them, any hardware that decides to use this and less HBRAM makes the market SANDisk participates in larger. SKHynix doesn’t get that same boost because I’m pretty sure they also make RAM. SKHynix however gets a boost because unlike say the other 15 companies that will eventually make high bandwidth FLASH SKHynix (and SANDisk) will be making it from day zero.

Humidity is currently 91% in Yangsan.

but that's going to have to run on a motor spinning 25fps in the other direction. It could work if frictionless was possible though. I wonder if gyroscopes, low friction and a counter prop like a helicopter would make that feasible.

i was thinking something similar, then I realized that with a 25fps camera, it's made an entire rotation in the time the aperture was open. I was thinking more about taking pictures OF the drone. But if I was designing some automated machine to attack this thing, like another drone, putting a 120fps camera on it would give a decent picture of it. that's only about 1/5th of a rotation. Tracking software doesn't need to get a perfectly clear picture to track something.

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

It obviously gives us guarantees in terms of what the source will do and what the compiled code should need.

These do not provide memory safety, so memory bugs would not be solved by these. They will find unexpected behavioural issues, though.

The precondition and postcondition statements are not cunningly-disguised assert statements because they're not asserted at runtime. They're enforced at static check and/or compile time.

The policy hints mean that if the kernel is doing something you're not expecting, you find this when testing the code. Equally, though, it means that users cannot cause the software to venture into realms unknown through many of the usual attack vectors because those will require permissions that aren't there.

I assume there was some form of contract. Generally speaking, any time you send somebody unsolicited copyrighted material, you can expect it to get summarily thrown in the trash, so whomever you sent it to can't fall for the old "you stole my idea" bugaboo.