The first steps to real human space usage are: (1) building a prototype centrifugal habitat in low Earth orbit, and (2) building remote operated vehicles to mostly replace EVAs. (1) is necessary to determine what gravity is needed for humans to be able to live off-Earth for longer than a year without debilitating health consequences. It's unlikely that the moon's gravity will be enough for this, but maybe mars is, or maybe not. The cheapest way to figure this out is not to build a moon or mars colony first. Seems like it would make a lot more sense to know the health effects of moon gravity before planning the structure of a long-term moon installation. As for (2), using EVA for essentially all external maintenance, as is done on the space station, is not viable for accomplishing large amounts of work in space. Having humans present locally to operate the ROV is a big plus, however putting those humans in space suits just doesn't make sense. Just to have gloves that a human can squeeze without excessive fatigue, the person has to go through a lengthy decompression-recompression protocol. This is not viable for efficient and effective everyday work. Suited humans likely have their place, but most maintenance should be done by ROVs, just like it is done on deepwater installations on Earth.

Until these two things are on the agenda, manned spaceflight seems to be just a vanity project targeted at space tourism (short-term visits) or showing up other nations. (Note that the push for effective, affordable heavy lift is separate and has many other benefits outside manned spaceflight.)

Some background from personal use of Astral's products ...

Astral makes a tool called uv, for Python.

It offers one solution to an important problem in the Python ecosystem.
Certain projects require certain versions of Python.
You may end up with two projects that you need on the same machine, but with different Python versions.

For example, you want to run Home Assistant and AppDaemon.
Using uv, you can have two separate virtual environments (venv) each with its own version of Python.

It is also lightning speed for pip.

So it replaces venv and pip in one go.

Home Assistant recently dropped regular user support for it being run from PIP or uv, so I moved to Home Assistant under docker.
But for developers, doing a git clone, then using uv is still very helpful.

In the eighties, fourth generation languages or 4GLs were going to spell the end of programming. Business people would design and implement the systems.

Well, that was the theory, or scaremongering, anyway.

Add to that the hyperbole around some technologies that were pushed to end users, rather than a developer tool.

Examples:

- COBOL was supposed to be a language for managers so they don't have to ask a programmer to write a report for them.

- SQL was supposed to be the same, managers can query databases directly without the need for a programmer

- As you stated: 4GL was supposed to relieve programmers of the tedious work of coding

None of that came true, ...

Is anyone else puzzled about the logic behind hitting him now? Sure, there's some amount of supremacy nerd 'noone is beyond our reach' wank value to targeting someone through the CCTV system; but why hand a fairly unpopular theocrat who is already old enough that succession planning is an urgent problem basically the most PR-friendly death imaginable at the same time as you provide his government with a plausible argument along the usual 'need to take necessary measures during the current crisis' lines?

That's a more or less instant upgrade from 'increasingly pathetic reactionary with questionable public support' to 'martyred by jews and international zionism' for a guy who was otherwise not long on options for shoring up his popularity.

Because Israel said so. That's all you need to know. Now Israel can play victim when someone does something to them, completely ignoring they're the one who's been attacking its neighbors for decades.

In addition to that, there is probably the Venezuela scenario.
When you have incompetent people heading critical departments, such as Hegseth and Gabbard, they see "decapitating the regime" causing it to fall in-line with the USA. You capture/kill the head of the regime, and the rest of the country will magically bend to the will of the USA.

You even see Hegseth saying this is not Iraq, this is not eternal war.

Wishful thinking all the way, caused by hubris and incompetence.

Maybe it's time to just say that designing and marketing an AI to be good at "doing homework" is destroying things and hurting people. It's like social media targeting increased "engagement" at the cost of truth, social function, and the mental health of its users. It's just morally bad even if it isn't illegal. Providing wholesale solutions to homework someone is supposed to be doing to improve their skills has always been a Bad Thing(TM), it just hurts the person that it is being provided to. The grade they are getting is far less valuable than the increased knowledge obtained by doing the homework. Homework problems only produce new knowledge in the person doing them, not for society overall. They are always exercises with known solutions.

It seems a lot of people have been sold the myth that LLMs are just a tool like a calculator. But they aren't marketed and used as an assistive tool like that. They are often marketed as a plagiarism database (encouraging the user to represent the intentionally obfuscated output of the LLM as their own work, not as the output of a piece of software.) The evil part is that in many cases this appears intentional on the part of of the company running the LLM. i.e. they have intentionally made it a better tool for fraud and adapted to that use case instead of a more productive use case.

> and making sure the code is both commented
> well and self-commenting where
> thatâ(TM)s possible -

I can and do agree with you 100% on the rest, but this made me LoL. Enterprise code being documented is a unicorn.

Frankly, Iâ(TM)ve thought about seeing what caliber of docs come out of handing some AI a codebase. Even if itâ(TM)s half-wrong, itâ(TM)d beat the nuthinâ(TM) I usually get.

Multilateral agreements, be they about peace or trade, are dead, even if a sane guy gets in the white house in a few years. No one wants to take the risk of signing something with the US only to have it be torn up when the next crazy guy gets elected.

It is worse than that.
The idiot re-negotiated the North American Free Treaty (NAFTA) during his first term, and became USMCA/CUSMA.

Then in his 2nd term he himself is violating it all by imposing tariffs on anything and everything on Canada and Mexico. In other words, he himself is shredding his own agreement.

There are no rules, no laws, no agreements, no trust ...

Even if the American vote in a sane guy the next time, what guarantee does the rest of the world have they will elect someone who is smarter and more evil the elections after that?

We are starting a post world order era, with no rules or decency of any kind, when it comes to dealing with other countries.

Yeah itâ(TM)s not arm, itâ(TM)s all the secondary hardware (a) being proprietary by (b) a company that zealously hoards IP.

First, phase 3 studies are by definition not safety studies, but efficacy studies on a large number of test subjects. Safety studies are phase 1.

Second, ethics guidelines stipulate that you must provide state of the art care for those subjects which do not get the new vaccine, with very tight exceptions. For flu shots, it means that everyone gets a shot, either with a traditional vaccine or the new one, since it is universally accepted outside the new FDA that a classical shot is better than placebo.

And of course you can compare the outcomes. Comparing the new vaccine to an established one wrt efficacy and side effects is actually more informative than comparing against placebo.

And that is exactly what JFK Jr has been harping about in his insane rants, before he was appointed by Trump.

He wants every new study to be compared to a placebo.
But, it is unethical to deny someone a treatment that works.
Imagine patients of a certain type of cancer, and a new treatment.
Should we leave the control group without treatment? Or give them whatever is the standard of car for that type of cancer (e.g. radiation, chemo, ...etc).

You know what?
Let us just not do that because a senile lawyer thinks that medical experts are crooks.

Oh, and JFK Jr scared Samoan parents, and kids died because of his anti-vaxx agenda.

Funny, mostly what the Fed does is *destroy* money. "Money" is naturally created because banks can lend out what is deposited, over and over. The Fed limits that by charging banks a fee if they lend out too much. But the money that goes to the Fed to pay the fee vanishes. It is funny how badly people who bad mouth the Fed misunderstand how fractional reserve currency actually works.

There's a lot of hyperbole (imo) about Trump and adjacent stuff.

But this one strikes me as particularly Orwellian / post-truth / straight out of Idiocracy etc

The government running public disinformation campaigns against individual defendants ... and modifying pictures... idk.

It is just the natural progression from putting up easily falsified lies, then defending those lies as "alternative facts".

Don't forget Spicer and Kellyanne Conway.

Yet, people fell for Trump again and gave him another term ...

They have a system in place that basically retains screenshots of every document printed?

Great, now that looks like a juicy target for an attacker.

This is the same as stupid people installing a SSL MITM proxy on some shitty VM that instantly wipes out any encryption-security that CAs (and sometimes the companies themselves) go great lengths for (and a lot of money) to achieve.

The other problem with these highly classified, compartmentalized and monitored environments is of course that it gets more and more difficult to get anything done at all.

Nah, every GenX nerd can attest, T2 was the liquid-metal shape-shifting robot Skynet sent back from the future to kill Sarah & John Connor.

I will just leave this here: Kessler syndrome.

If these guys can be deported to CECOT without due process, anyone can including you and the fox news grandpas. That's what lack of due process means.