I'm sorry to hear that. It's a common story, unfortunately. People complain that Gen Z "don't want to work", but it's more accurate to say that they don't have opportunities to work, and when they do get a McJob they have zero loyalty because it's not like working hard there will allow them to progress some sort of career.

There are a few places trying catapults and planes, but they can't carry a lot of weight.

The Soviet Buran spaceplane is probably the model to follow. Unlike NASA's Space Shuttle, it didn't have its own main engines. It only has orbital manoeuvring thrusters, and possible some jet engines for use in the atmosphere when returning to Earth. Instead the whole thing was lifted by a rocket and boosters.

Well, now we can recover the boosters, so you can see where this is going. The rocket was needed for steering, but the boosters can do that now, so maybe it could just be a disposable frame that straps a bunch of boosters to the spaceplane.

What if...

Someone (say someone who was familiar with doxygen and GCC) developed number of comment types, where some stipulated preconditions that must be true for the function to run correctly, postconditions that must be true once the function has run, kernel facilities that the function definitely needs, and kernel facilities that the function definitely doesn't need. These would all be optional for any given function.

A static checker could then validate if the code meets the behaviour expected by the programmer. This is precisely what is done in SPARK, a fork of Ada for high-reliability code. Combined with existing static checker capabilities, this would greatly increase the number of bugs that could be caught with all kinds of tools, AI included.

It could ALSO build a full fine-grained mapping for any fine-grained mandatory access controls system. You'd also want includes that you could import for precompiled libraries. This would allow someone to verify if the code was making unanticipated/undesirable calls but would also make SELinux possible to develop for at the application level.

It would not be trivial. If it was trivial, it would have been done simply because it already IS done in other languages and that makes it "obvious" to anyone who has been programming for a while. However, it should not be massively complicated, simply because you can use AI as the static checker. Once it has a definite set of bounda that must be satisfied, it should be much more capable of knowing what paths would violate those bounds. Which means that the checker stage essentially is trivial today, leaving only the markup stage.

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

That's the plan. You can't run AI locally, you must pay them to run it in the cloud, on the RAM you can't afford to buy yourself.

I can't really see many companies looking at this hybrid design and deciding it makes economic sense though. You have all the downsides of a fossil fuel engine, all the weight and maintenance and consumables. The electric part is mediocre.

Maybe it makes sense in countries with really shitty infrastructure where supplying electricity is hard or expensive, but in Europe every time sometimes under-estimates battery electric progress, time always proves them wrong.

Gen Z were lied to so frequently that if you tell them something is good for them now, they will probably do the opposite. Only slightly joking.

I'm not expecting that from domestic opponents; both because the penalties are high and because people are, historically, shockingly bad at shooting for targets that actually matter. I'm thinking more internationally.

If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you in a botched robbery or have their clandestine services attempt to throw you a little tea party. So far no reports of even foiled attempts.

Anyone who thinks that the bots are going to wipe us out is overestimating the bots; but it seems like there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.

Honestly, the weirdest thing about the 'hard line activists' and the 'war with AI' is how much there isn't to it.

This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?

The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.

Beyond LEO requires more fuel and a bigger rocket to launch, meaning more cost. It creates greater latency due to the greater distance. Also, they want these satellites to have a 5 year lifespan because terrestrial ISPs and cellular providers and datacentre operators are continually upgrading their hardware. So they will probably want to de-orbit and replace them anyway, because moving them to a graveyard orbit will result in the graveyard getting very full very quickly.

It also causes issues when satellites malfunction, because they won't naturally de-orbit in a practical amount of time. Failure to reach the intended orbit, resulting in an uncontrollable satellite, is one of the most common modes.

My browser shreds cookies as soon as I leave a site in most cases, as well as all other site date. These days the tracking works based on multiple signals, so even if you delete the cookies, if the IP address and browser signals like user agent and screen resolution match, they will re-associate that identity with you. You need to screw with a lot of metrics to throw them off.

In my country a spam lawsuit against 50 people where only one of them is possibly "guilty" of a civil offence with a relatively small financial loss isn't going to fly. They have largely given up suing people here because such speculative invoicing scams tend not to stand up to judicial scrutiny. At best an IP address identifies a subscriber, who may not be the person who downloaded the file, and who isn't under any legal obligation to help determine who it was, and who can't be held liable as there are no reasonable means for them to prevent such "abuse".

I didn't say no rocket launches. We just need to evaluate the impact, and take steps to prevent damage. We need to know what is in the satellites and what the effect of them burning up is.

I wouldn't say they are doing it wrong, I'd say that there is a fundamental conflict between privacy and anti-bot measures.

For privacy reasons I don't want a unique IP address. I want a shared one, and if it's IPv6 I want it to rotate frequently. That's one of the reasons why I use a VPN. ISPs probably also like it because it means that without extensive logging, for which there is no business justification, they can't identify who downloaded some movie that the MAFIAA et. al. want to sue over.

But of course the anti-bot features would love everyone to have a fixed IP address assigned to their person. Failing that, they seem to prefer to just mass block shared IP addresses and force you to log in.

Stuff burning up does not disappear. It becomes part of the upper atmosphere. Before there were so few things burning up that nobody really bothered considering it, but now we are going to be having tens of thousands of satellites re-entering every year, it needs to be looked into.