Or vice-versa. It is increasingly hard to figure out which way the partisanship will go. IMHO this started with masks for COVID, which initially were a right-wing thing (there were plenty of posts saying you don't have to shut stores if everybody wore masks) and at least to me seemed to be a right-wing thing while "free to live my own life" is more left-wing. Yet it came out exactly reversed, probably because some idiot expressed their own opinion rather than the party line.

I agree that if either party makes any kind of statement on this, the other party will be forced to say the exact opposite, and both will come up with convoluted explanations as to why they are right and why it matches their general logic.

At least my district allows the phones to be around so long as they stay in bags in do-not-disturb and do not come out during the day. Enough for potential emergencies and allowing to coordinate pickup better (the nearest bus stop is about 4 miles out across some pretty pedestrian hostile roads, so still needs to be picked up).

It really depends.

Sometimes, it's a shorthand with concrete meaning.

Sometimes, it may have concrete meaning, but is not really any shorter than plain language, and there's a sort of elitism associated with it.

With the examples given though, this is the 'need words to say nothing' jargon. Often there's some compelling reason why the speaker *should* respond or really *wants* to speak, but either has nothing they can say or else has nothing they *should* say. Executives commonly say this. At my work there's currently some executives very excitedly spewing out all sorts of hollow buzzwords and pretending we all should feel like something concrete is happening.

I suppose if you *know* you will get exposed, then you could have a window where you could be in a state of inflammation, get infected, and come out the other side with a durable immune response and discontinue.

Problem being that if you don't know when you'll have been infected, hard to say when it stops. As we saw with COVID-19, it can be a *long* time of active pandemic to try to get through. I guess if this, hypothetically, worked as promised you get to get treated, then have something like a 'COVID party' like they used to do with kids and chicken pox to be more confident about getting infected...

That's fine if it's something actually important, or even 'officially' important. However the vast majority of the time was just the manager wanting to ramble about whatever they were thinking on such important subjects as the new boat they got.

Note the 'for days'. This doesn't sound too promising.

Sounds like they would achieve this by making people 'pre-sick' by having their immune system in a sustained inflammatory state, for a while. This points to both an inability to keep it going, and likely not a very pleasant experience for the relatively short while it is effective. You'd have to know within a few days when you are *going* to get exposed to a virus..

Practically speaking, any pandemic will be bouncing around long enough for this likely to be unsafe to keep going. Even if you did ship out doses, the inconsistency of usage will prevent you from squashing it in a short order.

I remember before COVID, I had this manager that would for whatever reason or another hold an hour long meeting most days.

Now it was pretty much universally a waste of time like many meetings, but at least usually I sit on my laptop doing real work even as I'm in the conference room. Not ideal, but workable. However with this manager, the first sentence in every meeting was "ok everyone, laptops closed, phones in pockets". The manager felt it a sign of unforgivable disrespect to look at any screen while the manager talked about whatever stupid thing they were thinking that day.

At least COVID does seem to have killed off conference room meetings for me, even if I'm in the office sometime.

I am signed up for my employer's 'optional' AI subscriptions and have even enabled it so they can see that my environment is touching the LLM.

However, the more I tried to use it, the less confident I have become in it being a particularly good help.So I get the suggestions and make my employer thing I'm a good little LLM user, but pretty much discard the suggestions. For some very very boilerplate stuff, it can help, but even for tasks today that I thought "oh, this is boilerplate, the LLM can whip this up no problem", it totally botched it.

So while the hiring managers say "we need LLM use by our employees because they are more productive", they end up getting lied to by those of use that are told you'll be laid off if you aren't using LLM. The fact that they can't tell except by taking our word for it speaks volumes to me..

Speaking as someone who works with a large python codebase and everyone prepares for the annoyance of migrating when we decide to support another python release, it's kind of the opposite.

Every python release breaks backwards compatibility in a few ways. This is why people run old versions, this is why a number of pypi modules get abandoned as python revs.

There's broad agreement in the organization over time that python was ultimately not the best choice. It might have been pretty good, if not for the core and ecosystem changing things and driving a non-trivial amount of our effort to just be on a treadmill.

Particularly aggravating because we have users demanding python 3.6, 3.9, 3.12, 3.13, all at the same time so we have to curate things with a broad level of compatibility. It took *forever* before the users stopped demanding python 2.7.

EarPods

Yes I absolutely agree.

The sentence I am questioning is this one: "Even when the farmers offered to buy or lease the land at significantly higher value than what it's worth (or in one case, higher than what the solar company was leasing it for) the leasing company refused because..."

I would like to see proof of this. I think there is some hand waving there and in fact the farmers did not offer more money than the solar did.

If the land is "derelict" then no farming is destroyed by using it for solar.

Yes that is the type of antenna proposed for the very large microwave beam. Other poster pointed out that these have so much empty area that you could put solar panels in them as well.

However the much tighter beams being proposed for these satellites might require solid, or at least very dense, surfaces.

You need to get a sense of scale. The changes in amount of energy received are unmeasurably small. The changes to the rate might be observable but is tiny as well.

That's exactly my point. The 1970's geosynchronous designs used a very large microwave beam, partly because of distance, but mostly because they wanted to keep the radiation below a level where it would kill birds. They neglected the fact that this required an antenna larger than a solar farm that could produce the same energy (at peak, so you could argue that it is smaller than enough solar farms to produce that energy 24 hours a day). I believe the antenna was a lot of dipoles spaced a few feet apart, so basically structures made of thin pipes, like spaced-out solar panels they would allow the land to be used for agriculture.

I think any serious modern proposals have much lower orbits, many more satellites (because now they have "night" half the time), and dangerous levels of the beams (either microwaves or just intense light and infrared like this proposal), steered by the satellites to point at the antennas. There are good schemes so that the satellites are unable to transmit at anything other than the antennas, usually there is a reverse transmitter in the antenna that the satellite must see to produce a coherent beam. I'm not sure but I suspect the antennas have to be solid surfaces.