I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

Something like this needs density. If there's not enough people using it, then the per use cost will be far too much to make it economically viable. That makes cities much more attractive to startups like this. Of course there you have airspace issues with large buildings, so the true sweet spot may be relatively dense but very high income suburbs. But it sure as heck won't be rural.

You can do that with github and many of the others as well. My employer has a private github.

Except it really isn't. The stuff from 2 years ago is miles ahead from the stuff 5 years ago. The stuff from 1 years ago is yards ahead of 1 year ago. The stuff from 6 months ago is nearly indistinguishable from the stuff from a year ago. Diminishing returns is hitting hard and rapidly. Many experts think that LLMs are closing in on their technical limitations, regardless of how much extra compute its given. It will need entirely new techniques to actually become much more than it is now. Which may happen, but doesn't appear to be on the horizon.

A study you can't even directly link to? Yeah, I call bullshit.

And my personal experience is it's at least a 50% slow down. I have yet to ever have it do anything not completely trivial that wasn't badly insecure and broken, and when using them to provide static analysis the false positive rate is around 90%.

No, those who aren't willing are actually following the science. Every measurement so far, every actual study has shown AI code generation is 20% or more slower for senior engineers. Even scaleai, a company founded and run by Meta's AI chief, shows the same in their data (https://scale.com/leaderboard/rli). Possibly it will someday get there, but it sure as hell isn't ready yet.

I started lurking in 4K enthusiast groups to see if they were all cracked up to be. The arguments about relative quality of various BD/4K releases isn't even the most interesting part.

It turns out that there are a lot of issues with set top boxes playing particular disks. The disks themselves also seem terribly fussy.

Also, Android is an open source OS. You can always run it on a modified OS that pretends to have secure storage but logs all data sent to it.

Still trivially though for any talented reverse engineer. Somewhere in the code they have a function that checks if they think they're 18 and returns a boolean. Change the function to always return true. It would be harder if it was sending the image up to the server to analyze, but local is easy to break.

I actually like my camera bump- when I put it my last phone without one on a slightly curved surface (such as the side of my bathtub) it would slide off. With the bump, there's enough friction to prevent that. So while ugly, that's enough of a QOL increase I'd rather have the bump.

I have a dead former coworker. His family has access to his account. Every so often, they browse fb on it and like a post. It feels icky and wtf every time. In fact the first time I had to go back through old DMs and emails to double check that he was actually dead and I wasn't misremembering, it was that fucked up. This would be the last thing I'd ever want, for my loved ones or myself.

Doing a crappy C compiler was basically a semester course I took in college. Everyone more or less finished, while taking 3-5 other courses at the same time. So yeah, if it can be done by 1 engineer in training in a similar amount of time to it being done by 1 agent, while it's kind of cool I don't see this as a major accomplishment.

Really you can use lex/yacc for parsing and tokenization. You can find the C grammars online. C is a very simple language, if you aren't looking to optimize you can map each operator to a set of instructions easily. I'm pretty sure an experienced engineer could do this in 2 weeks easily. Absolutely so in 4, and probably start working in on optimizations. Instead you still paid the engineer for those 2 weeks, plus 20K on cloud costs.

This isn't about the ethnicity, it's about geopolitics and the different goals of our government and theirs. That said, I question the value of that when half our electronics are manufactured there and can have hardware level spying already there.

Like I said- there may be a small single digit percentage of people that actually do like not having access to a car. But that's all it is. This isn't just me talking- it's every time I've had this conversation with everyone else who lives in Manhattan, the one area of the country where a car is actually not practical. In the 12 years of having that discussion, nobody has ever said that they like not having a car. Not once. The amount they missed it differs, but every single person has wished they could drive on occassion. Just not enough to pay for it given the costs.

Welcome to reality- you may actively dislike cars and driving, but you're a small, miniscule minority. There is no major car hatred movement. There's pro-transit movement, but that's a different thing (and I'm also pro-transit, there's a variety of reasons why driving isn't practical or possible for everyone, and fighting conjestion is worthwhile). But you need to get out of your bubble and realize that people do actually love being able to drive, and cars aren't ever going anywhere. At most, you're 2% of the population. Although since you like suggesting people move, I'll match that- Mackinak Island exists. It has pretty much the entire population of people who feel like you. You should check it out.