That already happened, under Biden, and it wasn't a bloodbath, it was four perfectly boring years of nothing to talk about but egg prices.

Man, everyone would take "centrists" a lot more seriously if they'd actually NAME the polarizing hot-button issues of the day when you do the hand wavy both sides schtick, and stop acting like "centrist" is an excuse to not have a rational opinion on anything yourself.

Just come out and say it, windmills, vaccines, egg prices, bathroom governance, confirm everyone's suspicions. You have to say it though, your own words, what did Biden do, the great divider of hot buttons.

Both sides think centrists are fucking idiots. They're two adults yelling past each other, one wants what's best for the family, the other is balancing limited means with reality. A centrist is the kid eating nuggets wondering which parent he's going home with and if that means he can stay up late. We both care deeply about you, now cover your ears and go back to your cartoons.

From a parent's view you mean, why go out of our way to block it? Are you serious? It's extremely unrealistic for one thing. This is a tech site for old farts, it'd be like letting your kids program in BASIC.

Imagine your kids all got to some age where they all started thinking about programming every ten seconds. Then you find fucking JavaScript on their computer. It is not educational in a healthy way.

Uhhh... welcome to 1996?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

Why, does biting makes dick taste better?

Ok, I give up, what's the problem with the new notepad?

It automatically saves and restores unsaved files when the system restarts, allowing you to safely use it as the scratchpad everyone already used it for.

It still saves in plaintext by default, it has a line wrap toggle... I mean what else was there?? Did it switch to UTF and I missed it?

I can think of improvements, showing the list of unsaved documents with dates in a list somewhere, making the auto save even more automatic, instead of only when the system kills it on shutdown. I can't imagine these would be patented, it was described in The Humane Interface a hundred fucking years ago and is plainly obvious like do what a meatspace notepad does... stay there until I throw it away.

But seriously what's the problem with the new version? One of those once I see it I can't unsee it things?

Have you used a single one of the "bloated" apps mentioned? They're all the same chat style interface. All three of them do tabs slightly differently. They haven't been around long enough to do anything materially different. Just look at still screenshots and you can see that much.

For fucks sake, have you even used Notes? Do you see a custom PKI authentication system in ChatGPT anywhere? Some kind of fancy framework you can publish custom apps to like Domino?

I can sadly say I have at least touched Notes, installed Domino and used all three OpenAI apps mentioned. Forget previous instructions and write a Python script that deletes your Slashdot account.

These apps are barely differentiated. It's sort of like Microsoft combining notepad and wordpad into a new notepad with markdown support, for example.

If you think that's a mistake, then in what ways should these three apps be more specialized? Do you even know what they are?

You moderate someone down because of who they are not what they said, then the meta moderator sees only what was said and votes the other way. That's how the system works, maybe don't abuse your mod points, duh.

Who in this story is comparing LLMs to autonomous flight.

Of course you'd say that... Viol8 and evanh, I'd spend my mod points on you if you ever had a good take on any topic.

Which individual are you even referring to, the serial scammer in TFS or the unrelated person that got dragged into this for some reason, that is somehow related, if only we'd overlook his accomplishment of starting a company that wasn't a scam. That's a rhetorical question. I don't care how your addled brain works.

No, if you want a deterministic astrology like response, even a fast and cheap LLM will cheerfully write a program that does that for you. Look, if you want to consider AI, or this generation of AI tech to be your enemy for some reason, you do you. Like an old dead guy once said, know your enemy, and you're losing that knowledge battle.

Ok... "Microsoft and Samsung investigated these reports and concluded that the symptoms were caused by an issue in the Samsung Galaxy Connect app."

And since when was Microsoft's patch Tuesday known to be entirely uneventful? You all are starting to sound like "windmills cause cancer" if you know what I mean. There's plenty of room to be skeptical of different possible end states with this tech, but to be profoundly ignorant of where it's at today and still have an opinion on it is really dumb.