If I am presenting material I know well, I can "split" my attention, to do some quality control. One half of me goes on lecturing, while the other half is evaluating the presentation. Speaking clearly and loud enough? Too many ums and ahs? Looking at the students enough? Is the board work neat enough? Etc.

I don't do this often, because it is a really weird feeling and shifting back into just one "me" is a strange lurch.

I don't get it either. I use AI a lot, for all sorts of different things. In none of them do I want to talk to it. The only exception I could imagine would be if I wanted to brainstorm about something while driving.

Also, all of the voices have (to my ear) an annoying, fake-bubbly-happy California accent.

Every company ought to always be required to make technical documentation and replacement components available for their products.

I just had this on a much smaller scale: a cordless Bosch vacuum cleaner. It almost certainly needed a battery replacement. Nowhere on the internet is there a diagram of how to disassemble it. Remove all the visible screws and...nothing. Finally get it apart, and: the seven batteries (in series) are installed in such a way as to be very difficult to remove. Of course, there is no information on what their specs are, and as far as I can tell, Bosch won't sell you replacements. Ultimately, we threw it away and bought a new one (from a brand that does sell replacement parts).

It's absolutely irritating to have to trash an appliance that just needs a simple repair. This is where government regulation would actually be important.

Cool idea for satellites near the earth. The thrust will be pretty minimal, but since it's basically "free" that doesn't matter.

Moon and Mars...hmmm...gonna be a slight lack of magnetic fields to push against, as soon as you are away from the Earth. Neither the Moon nor Mars has a significant magnetic field.

ChatGPT points out that the magnets are likely more useful to maintain orientation. Any actual thrust will be on the order of nano-newtons. Let's be generous and assume an entire micronewton of thrust, and that this can be maintained throughout the entire orbit. For a 100kg satellite (that's quite small), that could give you a velocity change of 0.3 m/s over the course of a year. That could be useful for satellites in mid- to high-orbit. It is far too little to be useful in LEO. Of course, the magnetic field is weaker at higher altitudes, so...

Anyone with the info off the bottom of a check can withdraw money from your account. There is basically no security.

Join the modern world, folks.

In the absence of a moon, I would have thought plate tectonics unlikely?

...just around the corner - and has been for 50 years.

They not only need to show that they can generate net energy - a lot of net energy. For commercial success, they also need to show that the reactor can sustain that level of output for weeks, months, and years. That's an area that has not really been looked at, because no one has sustained a fusion reaction for longer than minutes. Personally, I expect that to be a huge hurdle, because of the temperatures involved.

Translation: We're one of the leaders, let us keep our lead.

Even if they are serious, it's just not going to happen. The genie is out of the bottle - many groups are working on AI, and all of them want to improve their models faster than the competition. it's a bit late to get cold feet...

After WW1, the big military powers thought they had learned their lessons - and they had. They went into WWII prepared to win WWI. After WWII, the bin military powers learned their lessons, and went into...various places, ready to win WWII all over again.

The big military powers are now discovering that they are once again prepared to re-fight the last war. Ukraine - out of sheer necessity - has developed new doctrines. Worldwide, the general staffs are left holding their multi-billion dollar assets that have suddenly become near worthless in this new kind of war. Using something like a Patriot to shoot down a suicide drone that cost 0.1% as much? Wars are ultimately decided by logistics, and that is how you lose a war.

There is a moral dilemma, though. Russia is...not a nice country. Their attack on Ukraine was not only unjust, it was also in direct violation of previous guarantees made to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine is deservedly known as the most corrupt country in Europe. Just as an example: where has all the money from the EU and other countries gone? Supposedly, all currently pending orders for new superyachts are for owners in the Ukraine. Maybe both countries can lose?

I have a student who is writing a paper about exactly this topic. Almost any large project nowadays uses dozens of external libraries, which in turn use dozens or hundreds more. This creates a huge, almost unknowable dependency tree. Any of those libraries may be updated at any time, and be pulled into a new release of your software. Any of those libraries may contain a security flaw that could be discovered and exploited. Any of those libraries may be deliberately compromised - and how would you know?

As a current example, consider the recently discovered flaw in Starlette, which the developer claims is downloaded 325 million times per week. Never heard of Starlette? That's because it is a fundamental building block buried deep in that dependency tree. Despite the title of the article, this flaw affects far more that just AI apps.

IMHO, the best solution - if you can afford it - is to write as much of your own code as you can. Sure, you may also have security flaws, but you are a far smaller and less interesting target. If there is a better solution, I don't know what it is...

The US government can compel any US company to release data that it holds, even if that data is stored outside the US. Pretending that any US company can comply with the GDPR is a fantasy.

This might, might be acceptable, if one could trust the US government. At latest after the Snowdon revelations, we all know that you cannot.

What is it with the addiction our governments have to mass surveillance? Were the police unable to do their jobs before the Internet? When correspondence was by physical mail instead of Email? When they had to get warrants before invading a person's privacy?

That's an excellent write-up by curl. It shows that the entire reporting system needs revised, in the age of AI reports. Automatically assigned the highest scores to vague reports can no longer be justified.

This seems slow. Current radio technology exceeds that by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. Plus, lasers tend to have problems with cloud cover.

What am I missing?

Paying ransom ought to be criminal. Moreover, they have zero guarantee that the data is really gone, no copies anywhere.