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Comment If I had one of those Jobs coins... (Score 3, Insightful) 77

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

Comment Re:If you thought SEO/affiliate marketing spam is (Score 1) 18

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

Comment https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-wps-office (Score 1) 143

Not sure why this is problematic.
Governments of the world ought to use open source software - they should also fund its development, perhaps even employ developers to maintain it.
Using proprietary software that costs money excludes some users and is not auditable. Neither of those things are good for tax payers.

The only people that take issue with this are microsoft and its zealots.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Insightful) 166

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Informative) 166

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

Comment More serious issues with Ofcom. (Score 2) 127

For a start they failed to prosecute broadcasters who fail to observe purdah during elections including the BBC, thus proving its motivation is in perserving the status quo.

Ofcom generally fails to prosecute news broadcasters that fail to observe impartiality rules.

BBC runs a program called "Question Time" which presents a false public narrative even stretching to hiring actors to pose as members of the public to support its falsehoods. It has never been prosecuted by Ofcom for doing this.

Ofcom failed to revoke Sky/BSkyB licences despite the News International phone-hacking scandal .

BBC / BBC Scotland broadcasts of Sturgeon’s coronavirus / Covid-19 daily briefings gave undue platform, breached impartiality or “platformed” SNP views without sufficient opposition response . Ofcom never prosecuted.

BBC misrepresented certain rulings or statements in relation to the International Court of Justice, and continued to do so even following corrections. Some complainants allege misleading framing. Ofcome never prosecuted.

Ofcom failed to investigate or sanction Panorama for its ‘Is Labour Antisemitic’ programme featuring distortions / zooming / face distorting of Corbyn”

In the BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, critics noted that the narrator was the son of a Hamas official and argued that this conflict of interest / relation should have been disclosed; further, that viewers were misled by omission. Ofcom stated it would investigate , but the investigation did not surface.

With regards to websites such as 4chan - there have been NO high-profile prosecutions of UK-registered sites - instead it pursues content originating abroad.

MailOnline a website full of clickbait / false headlines: dozens of press regulator (IPSO) rulings, Ofcom has not acted on its “harmful content” policy.

The Telegraph & Express online purveyed misinformation during elections & health crises resulting in numerous complaints on social media, but Ofcom once again failed to act.

Ofcom should get its own house in order before pursuing websites that are funded and run in other countries - regardless of its perceived crimes.

Comment Re:Can anyone here back this up? (Score 2) 76

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

Comment Re:But WHERE? (Score 3, Funny) 76

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)

Comment Re:Great. Another App-dependent widget. (Score 1) 48

It's so easy to get tempted into feature bloat these days. You need a microcontroller for some simple set of features, like doing PWM control on a fan and handling a rotary switch, so you get something like a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 that's the size of a thumbnail and costs like $10, but then all of the sudden you have way more processing, memory capacity, pins, etc than you need, and oh hey, you now have USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and surely you should at least do SOMETHING with them, right? But the hey, for just a little bit of extra cost you could upgrade to a XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, and now you have a camera, microphone, and SD card, so you can do live video streaming, voice activation, gesture recognition... .... it really creeps up on you, because there's so much functionality in cheap, small packages today.

The irony though is that nobody really seems to bundle together everything one needs. Like, could we maybe have such a controller that also has builtin MOSFETs, USB + USB PD charging, BMS (1S-6S) functionality, and maybe a couple thermocouple sensors? Because most small devices need all these basic features, and it's way more cost, space, weight and effort to integrate separate components for all of them. The best I've found is a (bit overbuilt) card that has USB + USB PD (actually 2 of each, and reverse charging support), BMS support (1-5S), one thermocouple sensor, and a small charging display - but no processor or MOSFETs.

Comment Re:...but Trump Says (Score 1) 70

If the Ember trend (solar+wind continuing to meet new electricity demand and strongly displace fossil generation) continues and scales up aggressively only in electricity, then by 2100 we’d likely avoid ~0.2–0.35 C of warming relative to a BAU electricity case — a useful and meaningful improvement, but not a return to pre-industrial “normal.” To actually reverse global temperature to pre-industrial levels would require removing thousands of gigatonnes of CO (net) — a feat that, at realistic removal rates, would take centuries to millennia.

Comment Re:He might still be alive (Score 3, Interesting) 103

When you mentioned "third partner" who cashed out early, I thought for a minute you were going to be talking about Ronald Wayne - what a life of bad decisions he made ;)

For those not familiar:

He got 10% of the original Apple stock (drew the first Apple Logo, made the partnership documents, wrote the Apple I manual, etc).
Twelve days later, he sold it for $800.
Okay, but he could still try to claim rights in court... nah, a year later he signed a contract with the company to forfeit any potential future claims against the company for $1500.
Okay, well, it's not like he had an opportunity to rethink... nah, Jobs and Wozniak spent two years trying to get him back, to no avail.
Okay, but he still had, like memorabilia he could hawk from the early days, like his signed contract. Nah, he sold that for $500 in 2016.
And that contract went on later to be sold for $1,6 million.
Okay, well, I'm sure he went on to do great things... nah, he ended up running a tiny postage stamp shop.
Which he ended up having to move into his Florida home because of repeated break-ins.
Which he then had to sell after an inside-job heist bankrupted him.

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