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Comment Re:Fuck This and Fuck Them (Score 1) 53

I don't like ads either, but I do like that they (at least for now) have a paid tier with no ads. If there was an option to use google services at some paid tier, without being part of their ad network, I'd probably pay it. But there isn't and llm is as good as search these days (in many cases anyways) so I'm happy to jump ship. Piss off, google.

Comment Doubt (Score 1) 22

Trump in his first term was willing to go all-in on human spaceflight to mars...until he realized he couldn't get it done before the end of his term. Trump has always been interested in space stuff...but only if it's achievable within his term. This seems like a play to keep contractors employed and skills sharp until the next administration is seated, which will hopefully be willing to invest in goals longer than 4 years.

Comment Unfort. e'ryone picked an opinion/side two yrs ago (Score 1, Informative) 40

Unfortunately everyone picked an opinion two years ago, when AI was genuinely garbage beyond some basic bash scripts or a top 1000 bug/question on stack exchange (which mostly overlap). AI started getting really good in Dec '24, particularly spring '25 and by August 2025 even the $20/mo tier of chatgpt was starting to get legit as OpenAI started to try catching up with (now market leader) Anthropic and their blessed claude code. The 4.5/4.6 models released this year are nothing short of incredible, and the Qwen 3.5 series of models are right behind the state of the art models. Google is doing some stuff too but I'm kind of done giving them my money.
 
In 2-3 years we'll have found all 20,000 top reasons LLMs hallucinate things and solved for 95% of them
 
Creatives rallied against LLMs but as has been proven, nobody actually cares about making funny pictures of , they just want to know that they can.

Comment "bright as a full moon" (Score 3, Insightful) 80

You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.

(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.

(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.

Comment I absolutely HATE spotify (Score 1) 70

Last fall I bought a knock-off iPod mini with the intentions of switching off but haven't come up with a good way to load my daily podcasts on it before work each morning (without some manual step). I keep meaning to quit it, but haven't managed to do it yet as playing music on the smart speaker is part of our kid's bedtime routine. I loathe spotify, i loathe their not-an-ad ads, I loathe the pop ups, i hate everything about it. If they go out of business so much the better it will finally force me off their cursed platform.

Comment Re:Fine (Score 1) 123

NRA is not the only US 2A rights organization, it's not even the most effective. GOA for example defending Pretti's "right to bear arms while protesting", as did the SAF and many others

People freak out if you threaten to take their guns away.

Do they? Because the last time the President suggested it, along with people from the DHS, the best the NRA could muster was a "it was a bad idea to bring a gun".

Odd, that's not what the NRA stated, nor what any media org reported them as saying. So where do you get that so-called "quote"?

Trump was the one who said "it was a bad idea to bring a gun", and here is the NRA's actual response to trump's suggestion: “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,”.

Comment Re:Anti-copying technology for currency (Score 1) 123

Actually, I thought it was legal in the US to make your own firearm for personal use. You just can't sell it. So why would it be different if you 3D print it vs. fabricate it with some machine shop equipment?

You are correct -- under federal law, it is legal to make your own firearm for personal use (PMF), though manufacturing firearms with the intent to resell for profit requires a federal license (FFL). A few states are trying to pass their own local restrictions on firearms manufacture. Some of these proposed bills, such as in the states of Colorado and Washington, also include CNC machine tool fabrication in their bans.

This specific bill proposed in California is focused solely on 3D printing

Comment Re:Anti-copying technology for currency (Score 1) 123

Did you know all color photocopiers and printers sold have anti-counterfeiting technology? There are special patterns printed on bills that photocopiers and printers can detect and will refuse to print.

Most commercial printers, copiers, and print engines, but not "all"

So it was solved not by a law, and not by software that looks for anything resembling currency, but rather by placing a simple, easily software-detectable, pattern into all currency, and ensuring that anti-counterfeiting tools treat any currency lacking this pattern as fake money.

Okay, so now we just need to mandate the (mostly anonymous, decentralized) designers of printable gun CAD files to embed these special patterns into their open-source STEP and other CAD files, and then convince the open source printer and slicer software developers to include the detection code ...

Comment Re:Already a Thing (Score 1) 123

This content restriction is already a thing on printers everywhere. Try printing a bank note and see what happens.

The currency detection pattern (The "EURion Constellation") was added to the design of banknotes and certain other documents to enable detection. Good luck getting the printable gun STEP/STL/GCODE people to embed a special small easily-detected feature into their files!

Also worth noting that currency detection isn't a law, and isn't in every printer. The few companies making high-quality color printer/copier internals caved to political pressure and "voluntarily" added detection for a very simple pattern to their firmware. Adobe also embedded this in their (closed source) photoshop software.

Reliable detection of anything that might possibly be a gun or a part of a gun, in any possible 3d rotation, is not a trivial problem, an effective solution would pretty much first depend on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Comment Re:Claude Code is pretty awesome (Score 1) 40

> And you too are "senior staff", right? How long will it be before AI replaces you?
 
I suspect you still need a human in the loop for 30-60% of things. It's gonna be a few years before companies are ready/confident enough to staff down that low. It doesn't matter if engineers cheerleader AI, management is busy building their own tools already, the toothpaste is well out of the tube at this point.

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