Quote from the LLM assistant: "you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly." Excellent advice!

Artificially educated human brain.

I haven't yet found any information regarding the fraction of the Earth's atmosphere that can pass through carbon scrubbers in, say, a year. That would seem to be a key factor limiting the value of scrubbers. Sufficiently efficient scrubbers will probably be cost effective contributors to reduction of the greenhouse effect, but it would be nice to know their limits.

Presumably, carbon scrubbers are much more effective when deployed at the sites of CO2 emissions. I would also like to see a discussion of how and how well that could be done. The article above proposes open air deployment, which has the apparent advantage of capturing already emitted CO2, but is subject to the limitation of global atmospheric mixing.

fear the world would run out of IP addresses

The world ran out of IPv4 addresses long ago. Instead of keeping additional hosts off of the network, we pulled tricks, such as NAT, to work without unique IP addresses.

In the world of software, to "run out" doesn't necessarily mean that you crash. It can mean that you are unable to use a resource in the best way, and resort to workarounds.

Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age

Huh? I could have sworn that the ARPANET project designed the Internet Protocols, then CSNet and various other consortia of research organizations brought businesses and campuses into the Internet, then there were FTP, MUDs, RCs, talk servers, Gopher, Archie, Veronica (none of them coming from Silicon Valley), then the World Wide Web from CERN.

They sued the kids who made up their strongest fanbase. "One of the key lessons we learned from this era is that you can't sue your way out of a situation like this," Witt said.

Perhaps the key lesson should have been that it's really nasty to attack your young fans.

Never a fan of Bluetooth, I use it for a few things that refuse to use other connections. I thought that the limited range was a good thing, both for security and to prevent confusing cross-talk. 600 km Bluetooth reception (according to the article referenced here) doesn't immediately strike me as a good thing.

A tech adjusting my BIotronik pacemaker from across the room told me he was connecting with Bluetooth. There are definitely at least two wireless communications enabled, at least one of them allows changes to the settings. The medical techs working on my pacemaker mostly have no technical knowledge of it, so he may have just referred to all wireless as "Bluetooth." It's ridiculously hard to find reliable and understandable technical information for my own use. I observed that my first implant was adjusted wirelessly at very short range through an antenna placed on my chest. The new one (battery depleted after 10 years) was adjusted from across the room. So Bluetooth is possible, and disturbing.

I'm pretty sure that the worst a hacker could do to me is turn pacing off, so I became very faint, or running it ridiculously high, which I would survive. If I had the defibrillation feature, it would be a lot worse. The really scary possibility is that insulin pumps could be vulnerable, and it would be easy to kill someone through control of the insulin pump.

ISPs like to spin their throttling and priority adjustments as providing a "fast lane."

A real fast lane would be an improvement on the network that provides greater throughput and/or lower latency.

What some ISPs are actually doing is building a slow lane by throttling traffic, then charging to get out of the slow lane.

Check out the Lucid programming language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It made the time sequence of each variable explicit. It also treated time as multidimensional, with nested time lines corresponding to nesting levels of loops in a more conventional language. It didn't catch on, but it's a good example to stimulate thinking about alternative views of programming.

"rate of downward acceleration, or g force" (from the NYTimes). Acceleration and force are different physical properties.

I had the strong impression that essentially all 78 RPM recordings are old enough that the copyrights on their contents have expired and they are in the public domain. Is this not correct? Can someone post a reliable statement of the copyright status of sounds recorded on old 78 RPM records?

From the Slashdot description (I did not dig into the sources), it appears that the study in question compared ChatGPT statements to ChatGPT's description of lliberal statements. There is no mention of comparisons to actual statements of liberal humans. Nor any mention of comparisons to anything associated with conservatives or others. I think that demonstration of "bias" requires at least two positions, so that something can be biased toward one of them vs. the other.

It would be real helpful if someone could post a way to detect this bit of malware once it's been planted, and/or the password cracker that it uses, so we can check the vulnerability of our passwords.

1. 1. Programming (plugging wires into patch boards) was automated by stored binary machine code.
2. 2. Programming in binary machine code was automated by assembly language.
3. 3. Programming in assembly language, particularly translating formulae into sequences of individual operations, was automated by FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslater).

After that , the changes in programming were more incremental, so there are not clear breakpoints. The key point is that every step automating programming changes the nature of programming and the tasks that may be addressed by programs, but doesn't eliminate programming. Perhaps some day the word "programming" will be replaced, but there will still be a task to describe what a computer should do. A number of commenters have made essentially this observation, but I thought it worthwhile to think of the specific big steps from the past.

Long before electronic digital computers, writers of fantasy and fairy tales observed the inherent difficulty of expressing a desire clearly enough to get what you actually want. My favorite is Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit. That book concerns a Psammead, or sand fairy, which is additionally amusing since like modern computers the fairy is silicon based.

I bought a Murena Teracube 2e running /e/OS early in 2022. It has the desired button behavior. https://murena.com/products/sm...