"I don't love AI slop myself" says the biggest contributor to the generation of AI slop.

I saw this in the documentary 'Idiocracy'

It sounds great, but the primary benefit is quickly providing open space. However, work done in space isn't done in open space, but with equipment. So now instead of having the bulk of the equipment mounted inside a module on the ground (where it's usually much easier to handle, with lots of lifting equipment and people and tools), you've got to do it in zero-G.

You still have to launch the entire mass (possibly more if there's extra tools and packing) and much of the volume, you've just significantly expanded the amount of on-orbit construction, which also means you're using very expensive labor to do it.

It may eventually even out, but I don't think the economics work today. It would only make sense if you had a specific need that required a larger-volume module than can be launched on a vehicle today, and I don't think anybody's had such a requirement.

Seriously, if a person is betting six figures on the whether an interceptor worked, that person needs to re-evaluate their priorities.

Industrial and medical uses of helium require very high purity. What gets used in party balloons is basically the impure waste left over from processing (that has no feasible process to purify sufficiently for other use).

Yes, the US Congress can give instructions to NASA, but half the ISS is run by the Russian Government.

NB: I am only discussing Russian modules here, NASA and its suppliers have already demonstrated the ability to build, launch and maintain the American modules.

The Russians wanted to quit the ISS in 2024, subsequently extended to 2028 at which point Unity and Zarya will be 30 years old. Zvezda, launched 2000, has had a persistent air leak in the transfer tunnel since 2019. While repairs have been made, the leak continues and has caused increased concern due to, at times, rising, significant air loss. Zarya was designed for a minimal operational lifespan of 15 years, while Zvezda, originally built for the Mir program had a designed minimal operational lifespan of 5 years, Mir itself was still OK after 15 years, but by 2030 Zvezda will have been operating for twice that long. When talking about the proposed extension from 2024, Space Policy Online site reports "Roscosmos initially declined to agree to the extension in part because it was waiting for a review by its engineers of the status of the hardware, which TASS said today was completed in February."

Other than operational life of the segments, the other risks are orbital corrections and deorbiting. Fortunately NASA and its suppliers already have orbital boost and plans for deorbiting.

Traditionally boost and other orbital corrections were performed by Progress Rockets docked to the aft port of Zvezda but SpaceX Dragon and Cygnus Cargo Vehicle craft also have that capability, and dock at the nadir port of Harmony so this can be maintained if Zvezda ceases to be operational.

Finally, deorbiting. Had the Russians committed to the 2032 date, the plan was to use multiple Progress cargo vehicles docked to the station, without the Russians the plan is to use a (single?) SpaceX Cargo Dragon.

The above was mostly assembled from multiple Wikipedia pages

Like nearly everything with this administration everything is a cheap gilded facade.

In this particular case all Trump wants is to be able to proclaim a massive "win" with no follow up. The tech companies know this so they will make extravagant empty claims of fantastic investments. They all have a public meeting, smiles all around, thumbs up, and everyone goes back to what they were doing before lying, stealing and cheating the government.

All kinds of personal information can be sent, they probably don't want to be liable.

Ookla charges ISPs a bunch of money to host speedtest servers for them. When I worked for a company that supported a bunch of small rural telephone company ISPs 5+ years ago, IIRC Ookla charged them each over $2000/year. I expect they charge bigger companies (especially with multiple servers) a lot more, and they plaster the app with ads. They also have more than just the regular speedtest servers.

I am a government contracting officer for 22 years and more than 34 years government service. The article is FUD. Pure disinformation. SAM.gov (System for Award Management) has been around for 14 years at least. The goal is to centralize all contracting information systems to make it easier to find stuff. Many different systems are gradually being integrated over a long period. It was first rolled out to replace the Central Contractor Registration at least as far back as 2012. Then it integrated Federal Business Opportunities (FedBizOpps was where RFPs were posted) in 2018-2019. RFPs are now posted at SAM.gov. Since then CPARS, PPIRS, and FAPIIS (past performance tracking) have been rolled in a few years back. They are in the process of integrating eSRS (small business usage reporting) right now. In some cases SAM is a new implementation (like replacement of FedBizOpps) and in others, it is merely a link to take you to the old system (like CPARS) which still exists but no longer have their old homepage. I will admit SAM.gov is clunky, but that is more a function of trying to unify a gazillion different systems with incompatible data formats into anything coherent using the lowest bidder IT contractor.

I would hike every day

I live in New Mexico with a lot of native tribes and I can't recall the last time I have heard the term 'Indian' used by anyone.

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.

Yes, they can, but they can't do it well. As another example to those in the original link, I asked Google Gemini to compare two PDFs to find differences. The PDFs in question were commuter train schedules with different effective dates. The PDFs had tables with stations and times. Some trains were express trains (skipping stops) and some made all stops. I asked, "The attached are railroad schedules for the same train line during different time periods. Summarize the differences between them" followed by "Are there any differences in the timetables for travel between the X station and Y station?" The output detected that there were no differences between the timetables for these two stations (yay!), but it was *terrible* when it tried to list the actual train times; it couldn't figure out when a train skipped a station. After a few back-and-forths, it gave up on determining the train's departure time, and focused on the arrival time at X station. I gave it hints as to the formatting, and it improved.

Or imagine you could use a laser to write data on a spinning disk. That would be amazing!