Whose bright idea was it to store nuclear waste right next to an ocean coastline?

Regarding b. They get 21% of their revenue from government. However, they get 61% of their revenue from Starlink. Now, I could pay myself 100% of my salary and thereby earn double what I am earning now... except that's preposterous. So, if we don't count SpaceX paying itself, it's still getting more than 50% of its revenue from government contracts. (because if we take out that 61%, then you have 21% from government contracts and 18% from other so, out of that remaining revenue the majority is still government contracts).

Stephen Miller is the grandson of Pogrom survivors, and yet...

I think you're conflating Elon Musk with Tom Mueller. Where are these supposed whitepapers that Musk himself authored?

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

As I said... not acceptable, but not necessarily nefarious.

I'm all for an arms-length agency that controls police data and equipment so there's no opportunity for people within an agency to cover each other's asses.

I think when you put on a badge and assume the authority it grants over others, you should be held to a much higher standard. This does not seem to be a common enough belief to actual have such standards implemented.

It's unacceptable, but not necessarily nefarious.

You have a case, you have a case number. The interface is stupid and you can't paste it in, you have to type it out every time. And every selected camera is another query with that same field waiting for the 15 character code.

You get bored, you type in crap knowing A) people rarely check if there's no complaint and B) you have a case.

I can't say that's what happens with every system, but that's why the video logs look like this on the ones I've touched. Which is also why we captured logon ID and didn't just rely on trusting the manual input.

You know what they fucked with far less often? CPIC queries. Abuse CPIC and you lose your job because if you don't lose your job, the RCMP pulls the police service's access. It should be the same locally, but it typically isn't.

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

I'm just going to quote that here. I could write out a history of electric cars to scrutinize it, but what's the point really?

They did say a biology researcher. Whether that's corporate or university, they probably do have the computing resources available and probably shared among many researchers. Of course, you do run into the issues that, these days, those resources are probably running on cloud servers. So still quite possibly not actually local.

Yeah. Even just doing casual research you run into troublesome censorship of information issues with these LLMs. For example, I was interested in the whole process of production of pennicillin and I had a long discussion going over all the principles from scratch: how to find, isolate, assay, and force evolve the most productive strains of pennicillin looking at how things were done historically, how to grow in aerated flasks with continuous feed nutrient systems (with discussion about corn steep liquor being a traditionally ideal feedstock because it both feeds it, but also keeps it under stress so it ramps up production), carefully decontaminating all inputs and isolating the output through a drip system through an oil barrier, using amyl alchohol, and sufuric acid for extraction along with how to actually produce those, etc. Basically it was a very interesting and enlightening session. However, then I tried to more or less restart the conversation on another occaision to clarify some points and I started off with questions incorporating essentially a summary of the first session. The LLM basically refused to because I was asking so directly and it was worried that I was actually trying to set up an at-home penicillin production lab.

So, basically, while you can get information bit by bit from these things, a whole web of probably mostly liability-based safeguards get in your way. That is one of the real concerns (to add to hallucinations, etc.) with AIs taking over as the interface to human knowledge: they will censor it. Not necessarily for sinister reasons (though I have caught LLMs directly presenting corporate press releases to certain questions rather than generated answers, which I consider pretty sinister), but just for the same reason people who frequent certain heavily corporate forums have started to say "Yahtzee" and "unalived", etc. rather than the real terms even outside those forums. Basically, we have to worry about access to information becoming a compartmentalized, dumbed down, lowest common denominator situation.

Nope. No matter where you look in the sky, on large enough scales it looks the same. There's no indication that things are significantly different in any particular direction.

There can't be a 'source' of a Big Bang that looks like that. It has to happen everywhere or the sky would show signs that it was all accelerating away from a single point.

What we can say is we don't really have much ability to figure out what happened early on. The conditions are too extreme and we don't have any way to model what might have been going on. That's not faith either, that's, "We don't know and might never be able to figure it out".

And here I was, thinking foldable phones would allow us to go back to smaller sizes. Guess I'll be sticking with my SE, which at least comfortably fits into my pocket.

Someone please bash some sense into Apple.

I'm sure there are people who want a mini-tablet in their trousers. I'm also sure I'm not the only one who simply wants a phone. That you don't have to think about every time you move or sit.

It depends on focal length as well as f-stop (shorter focal length gives more depth of field at the same f-stop). Smaller sensors need shorter focal lengths for the same field of view, so a "50mm equivalent field of view" f/2.8 lens for a smaller sensor will have more depth of field than a "50mm equivalent field of view" f/2.8 lens for a larger sensor.