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Comment Re:More from the "never happened" department (Score 4, Insightful) 247

It also showed the IRGC what they need to do going forward: Forget the nukes, they've got the Straights of Hormuz to hold the world to ransom, all you need for that is a few conventional drones and sea mines that you can churn out by the thousand without triggering any sanctions. Plus they've had a dry-run of what else to target, and how, in the future. So they graciously give up their nuclear programme, which they no longer need, in exchange for concessions and lifting of sanctions.

Comment Re:Get a Border Collie (Score 1) 87

The herding portion is actually relatively new, originally it was purely a cattle-management solution and they were running their trials in places where where you had cattle spread out over an impractical-to-keep-an-eye-on area. They spent a lot of time figuring out how to make the things both cow-proof and outdoors-environment-proof, making something IP54 isn't too hard when it's bolted onto a wall and there are no size constraints but doing it when it's strapped to a cow and as small as possible was a huge challenge, they kept finding new unexpected failure modes.

In terms of the herding, I'm guessing they either got feedback asking for it or, given that the things still have a significantly nonzero cost, were trying to find additional reasons to incentivise farmers to use them.

It's a pity the story went for sensationalism with the Thiel mention, the real story is that this is probably the first real advance in managing distributed herds since the introduction of the cowherd, of which there are very few still around. To see what the target environment is, here's an example, the first minute or so. Here's a I'm sure completely unbiased commentary from a farmer on using it.

It's good to see they're doing so well, at the startup stage a couple of years ago it was a lot less clear that it'd take off.

Comment Re:Get a Border Collie (Score 3, Informative) 87

Nothing to do with herding them, it's to do with cattle management when you've got them spread over a large area. You can record where they are, whether they're getting enough food/water, whether they're sick or injured, etc. It's a huge improvement over either having no idea until you run across the carcass several months later or having farm hands spend several days each month going around guesstimating whether there are problems.

Comment Re: Markup (Score 1) 23

Definitely. It takes the cheapest cost on one side, the raw wafer, divided by the number of chips assuming a 100% yield for the wafer, and then the highest possible cost on the other, milspec-qualified packaged devices. It appears to come from Wikipedia, which is based on someone's recollections from 25 years earlier.

Comment Re:when in doubt (Score 1) 68

As for why Sweden is pivoting away from digital devices, researcher Linda Falth said the move was driven by several factors, including concerns over whether the digitization of classrooms had been evidence-based.

Of course it wasn't, that would be going against decades of practice. Changes in education are based on a technique called analytical advocacy in which (typically) a teacher observes that something they do seems to be helping one or two kids (alternatively, a non-teacher thinks that some new thing will help kids), they spend a lot of time writing about it and talking about it at conferences, eventually it gets noticed when the previous analytical-advocacy fad has obviously failed, and then it gets pushed into classrooms. All entirely unencumbered by empirical analysis.

Comment Re:Responsiveness too. (Score 1) 118

Glad I'm not the only one who hates Signal's incessant bloated updates. Ten years ago it was an IM app. Now, tens or possibly hundreds of gigabytes of cumulative updates later it's still the same IM app, currently using three quarters of a gigabyte of memory to display a couple of chats. And the worst thing is that if you block its constant updates it disables itself. It's like the worst type of intrusive vendor bloatware, only you can't really get rid of it because all your friends use it and everything else out there is even worse.

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