Someone should ask media/technology studies professor Torin Monahan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill how much a college degree is today.

Oh wait, anyone can look that up.... $47k/yr.

Perhaps that isn't the (chapel) hill Mr Monahan wants to die on?

"Humanism] tends to appeal to people who are skeptical of a god or other supernatural power yet still seek a scientific and moral framework to ground themselves in. "

St Athanasius, St Augustine, & Erasmus would all be somewhat surprised to hear that they were skeptical of God.

Lol at the atheists conveniently forgetting that the entire basis of Western Humanism came from the Catholic Church and ultimately Protestantism.

While such bootlicking is repellent, some of us would note with irony the attacks here from people who - with the same craven, lickspittle reasoning - cheerfully spent 2020-2024 (and some until today) insisting we disregard things like penises when determining "what is a woman" eh?

While I'd love imaginary propulsion tech to be our saviour here, you know that Hubble exists outside a lab, right?

"Peer Review and Scrutiny: While showcased at venues like the Electrostatics Society of America, APEC, and technical discussions, the claims sit well outside conventional physics consensus, and full peer-reviewed validation is pending"

Yeah, why would you post something as ridiculous at "computer tech put in orbit" on Slashdot? Absurd.

It's not like this is a TECH site anymore. This is a "we fucking hate MUSK" site.

Get with the program.

https://theins.press/en/news/2...

Headline from 1845.

Thanks for confirming.
Always nice to be validated.

It is peak irony that - honestly - the whinge about how miserable the "internet" (as a broad synonym for social media, I guess) is, is followed by one of the most authentic, non-political*, most Old-Slashdot-Flavored engaging discussion I've seen here in at least the last 5, maybe 10 years?
Thanks, this was a nice post & engaging discussion. Even the people I disagree with on balance were making persuasive points.

*so far. It's 2026, I don't hold much hope it'll remain pristine.
Even my simple posting here, I may have tainted it. I have a lovely anon-stalker (I am pretty sure I know who) that follows any post I make with political bile, regardless of the subject.

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

I'm surprised that Reddit, of all places, is emulating twitter?
As far as I can tell "for you" is just a firehose of shitty people that disagree with me politically.
On the other hand "following" is (I guess?) derived from the posts I've actually followed, and that's a firehose of shitty people that I ostensibly agree with, politically, but clearly don't in nearly every other respect.

I think the intent is that one feed will engage me angrily, while the other will engage me affirmatively.

In fact, together they've made it astonishingly easy to never check twitter, ever. Kinda like facebook and reddit.

Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)