That's about reason #6 why I won't be buying a Vizio.

Soul of a New Machine is a really fun book from the standpoint of the technology and culture of the time. But let's not forget it was widely regarded as just awesome writing: it won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Tracey Kidder also wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Dr. Paul Farmer and the work of his medical non-profit Partners In Health. Another excellent read.

It's hilarious that you think that you aren't paying for "free shipping". Amazon just isn't showing it as a separate line item for it.

Just how autonomous was that robot walking next to the First Lady? There have been plenty of whiz-bang demos of "autonomous robots" where that were actually tele-operated. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

I wonder how the Secret Service evaluated the risk to a principal for this.

These kinds of poor outcomes were described thoroughly in the book "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil. She cites examples in bail / parole recommendation algorithms, HR screening tools, insurance, etc. In her view, a WMD is a computer system that has some/most of these characteristics:
* that makes serious decisions affecting people other than the person using the tool,
* uses proxy measurements (zip code, socioeconomic status) for the thing they're actually trying to quantify (e.g., risk of recidivism),
* whose inner workings are opaque, and/or built on data of unknown provenance,
* are not or cannot be corrected in light of new data or mistakes,
* are difficult or impossible to contest,
* have little to no regulation.

That was published in 2017, well before LLMs and AI really hit the scene. But the dangers were already apparent even then, and f*&k-all has been done to mitigate them.

Large amateur rockets can achieve >Mach5 , which qualifies as hypersonic. You could probably build something like that for
You couldn't build, transport, and launch one for that kind of money - the ground infrastructure and permitting would be onerous and expensive.

Nor do amateur rockets carry munitions in hypersonic glide vehicles. So that part is worthy of skepticism.

So is launching a war in Iran without Congressional approval. So is cancelling funding mandated by Congress. So are foreign gifts, emoluments, and self-dealing. So is federalizing the National Guard on false pretenses. So is putting a sitting president's mug on a coin. And yet...

Well, since ARM is trying to sell something, I guess that fits.

"Greed...is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms - greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my works, will not only save [OpenAI], but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much." [ref"

Missing from the summary is this tidbit:

NASA will launch the Space Reactor1 Freedom, the first nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft, to Mars before the end of 2028, demonstrating advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space....
When SR-1 Freedom reaches Mars, it will deploy the Skyfall payload of Ingenuityclass helicopters to continue exploring the Red Planet. SR-1 Freedom will establish flight heritage nuclear hardware, set regulatory and launch precedent, and activate the industrial base for future fission power systems across propulsion, surface, and longduration missions.

So, a nuclear-electric tug between Earth and Mars, and more helicopters on the red planet. That seems 1) much more likely to happen than the lunar base plans, and 2) very exciting technologically.

Let's bear in mind that Chandra has been in orbit for over 25 years. Not quite as long as Hubble, but from the same era. Unlike Hubble, it was not made for servicing or upgrades - it's the same hardware that Columbia launched in 1999. At over 20 tons, it was the heaviest payload every launched by the shuttle. And folks reckon it has at least ten more good years of operation ahead of it.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"

There are plenty of reputable sources that indicate the school was destroyed by a US-made and US-launched tomahawk missile. The US Dept. of Defense has more-or-less admitted it was their strike. The investigation is to determine the particulars about why/how it happened.

Collateral damage is what happens when you attack a legitimate military target, and civilians are injured/killed as a side effect. You blow up a barracks, and folks nearby get hit with shrapnel. In this case, the location was deliberately targeted. It appears that the DoD didn't know it had been converted to a school. I'd say that fits the definition of a mistake. Not happenstance, not collateral damage, not "the fog of war".