You are welcome to continue development on support for the 486 if you need continued support for it. The kernel is open source and you can easily clone yourself a local repo and continue 486 support maintenance while merging in new features as time goes on.

My very first linux box, which I still have and is still running today, is still on RedHat 3.0.3 that I got on a CD in a book from the Media Play in Poughkeepsie NY in 1996. Granted it is completely useless except as a samba server sharing the 1.6GB hard disk that is still in it (and still works). But, I keep it for posterity, and because I like having a monitor with xearth on it.

I could probably put a newer distribution on it but with only 24MB of RAM, the newer stuff would choke out on it.

I was hoping at the bottom of the article it would say that Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X.

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

I assume that, as an exercise, getting 5 simultaneous introductions working makes for a better paper; but is there a reason why you would want that in practice? Especially if there is any wobble in the ratios either randomly, across generations, or in the presence of certain environmental conditions that tweak the plant's metabolism one way or another that sounds like it would be a real pain in the ass to have to re-balance (and, if different patients are deemed to need different combinations even a perfectly stable plant is going to need re-balancing of the outputs) vs. very specifically going for a specific target output per-plant(or e. coli or yeast or whatever is easiest to bioreactor) and then just mixing to taste after purification. Is there some advantage I'm not seeing?

I realize that there are cases where some plant-sourced pharmacological effect looks like it is actually driven not by the identified 'active ingredient'; but by dozens or hundreds of assorted things, and in that case you just have to live with the complexity if you get better results with that than with purified isolates; but if you are deliberately engineering for very specific outputs why a mix of 5?

For about $3000 USD you can buy an AMD Ryzen AI 395 with 128 GB of integrated RAM, which I'm tempted to do to run coding models. Although it seems to me that 256 GB is more of the sweet spot for local LLMs that can do things at a decent speed. For that size of RAM, the only real game in town is the Mac Studio, will cost about $10k (and rising). Of course even $10k is cheaper than a personal assistant. Now with the true cost of agentic AI starting to fall on the customer, $10k doesn't seem so ridiculous.

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

Current spacecraft velocity relative to earth is 3697 kph according to the latest spacecraft status display.

I suggest:

First offence: Have to watch CSPAN for 5 hours a day, for a week, without sleeping through it - evidence to be provided in court

Second offence: Have to sing Miley Cyrus songs and Baby Shark on TikTok - sober

Third offence: License to practice and all memberships of country clubs and golf courses revoked

La Nina turned out to be extremely weak. It basically ended last month. We're already seeing indications that we're swinging back towards La Nino again.

I agree. I used to be a big fan of Raspberry Pi and SBCs in general. But I realized for 99% of what I want to do with a small computer, mini computers work so much better even though they are (or used to be) more expensive. I also grew really tired of dealing with custom distros and kernel forks for the various SBCs. For server applications (home automation, little file servers, etc), I'd much rather deal with AlmaLinux on an x86 mini pc. I'm tired of kernel forks and device trees and funky bootstrapping systems.

Obviously if you working with hardware sensors, SBCs have their place. I've seen some very cool hardware projects done with Pi Zeros recently.

They tried that with Apollo 13. And.... that actually did work, sorta.

Back in 2019 on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, someone put up a fantastic web site to play back the mission in real time. Complete with actual radio and mission control comms and telemetry data. https://apolloinrealtime.org/. Such an amazing historical data trove. I spent several days listening in real time to the flight unfold from launch to moon landing, to splash down. Even though I knew this was just playing back recordings from 50 years ago, and knew the outcome, it was a neat experience and it filled me with wonder and excitement at what was being accomplished as it were. I remember going outside and lookup up at the moon and thinking about people being on it, as someone in 1969 would have done.

Fast forward now to Artemis II and I have such mixed feelings about it, and the space program in general. Anyway I wish them a safe and uneventful journey.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.