Agreed that I think we need an organization that is like a technologically capable "ACLU". It's not practical nor reasonable to make "abstinence" the only answer to questions on technology v. people questions.

Perhaps such an organization could create technical privacy standards that could then be readily adopted into law. First by aligned local govs, then hopefully states, then Federal. For things like doorbell cameras, dashcams, home security maybe we are talking about default encryption, restrictions on sending data /telemetry off-prem by default. Default retention periods, and so on. Those can be then extended to the problematic government programs like Flock, etc. In other words, the cameras are here to stay, so let's get ahead of the curve and codify something that is privacy focused.

Lotsa similar opportunities on social media, AI , online identification, and so forth. Maybe EFF isn't the org for this sort of thing...scrolling through the website they do seem more like an offshoot of the ACLU, just with a focus on technology topics.

YMMV but in my view the phone situation is out of control. It is like being absorbed on a computer for hours on end, but worse since the computer is on your person basically 24/7. I'm no role model, I have to consciously put my phone away for dinner time, and even still I find myself wanting to reach for it as my mind reminds me I should look this up, or respond to this message, or whatever.

And as others have said if you are at any place with kids, playground, yard, the kids sporting events, even a play, you will see a large chunk of the adults nose into their phones. And you will see kids saying "Mom, look at me!" on the monkey bars or whatnot and the parent isn't looking up. The phones are bad news. Real bad news.

Yeah it's hard to contemplate this other than some sort of lobbying effort that paid off. I'm fully in support of firms like Boom & Spike doing research and development on this, and would even say the FAA could issue experimental waivers of the type described in the summary. But why at this point is there a need to change the existing rule? The only thing not related to being bought off, is to say the firms trying to build these aircraft need investment dollars and the risk of them not being able to fly domestically is a block to those dollars. Counterpoint is, prove you have the tech to make the booms acceptable first. FWIW looks like a 737/A321 at a cruising altitude is like 40 dB which is pretty darn quiet on the ground.

But really, the trade-off of 60 well-to-do passengers getting coast-to-coast a couple hours faster versus the 1000's...100,000's (?) people on the ground getting the noise pollution is telling about the priorities here.

Just RTFS describes what's happening here. Only tangentially related to "Quantum Computing". Trump administration gave IBM $1billion dollars to spend on ...basically anything as long as the Subject Line contains the word quantum. IBM says that the will kick in another $1 billion of their own...then may $9 billion down the road. I doubt that will occur. But honestly this government gift just pays for the SVP to get promoted to CEO of the new offshoot, his lackies likewise get promotions. They will hold up a recycled RISC chip to the camera and declare quantum supremacy. Someone in the administration who got Trump to sign the paperwork will get their payola, everyone wins!

This is why the government picking winners is bad policy all around. This $1 billion was better off being unspent, versus creating a weird market distortion, or more likely just being redirected to a bunch of rich, but useless execs that should be retiring already. I say this as someone who made a pretty penny on Intel stock after Trump decided the US government should give them $9 billion free money too. **

**Previous admin with their green new deal, etc was likewise bad policy throwing away free money at pointless projects that we are increasingly unable to afford. Comparing Trump / Biden is apples and oranges. Trump is a rotten, senile apple with the appearance of a rotten orange. Biden was just senile

Recalling the state of OpenAI's corporate IT security when they dropped their first LLM model to the public. It was crazy pathetic. Like Mattel's "My first company" bad. No idea on Anthropic but I would strongly expect that China, Russia, among others have already penetrated. Only the fact that neither govt really knows what they are doing yet, and don't have the full-scale hardware would keep them from running Mythos or whatever today. Also that you don't use your secret weapon to just steal credit card numbers**

**Like .ru probably shouldn't have revealed the whole "We can jam continental GPS from 2000km in space" bit so soon

That's a fair point. However I would posit that altering current culture to be less selfish, less consumer, etc is such a big lift at present to be in the league of fusion, living on Mars, and global vegetarianism.

France's nuclear program has been a success for it's intended goals. They are energy independent**, developed an in-house industry (employment) , met environmental goals, defense goals, and done it all safely. Including the handling of waste, and their uranium/plutonium recycling. The major ding against ASNR is cost, but most nations subsidize to some extent (US -> oil; Germany-> autos; China->...everything) and France chose this. Hard to argue it's success from a 1970's perspective.

Where the conversation changes is looking at nuclear from a 2026 perspective where solar/wind+storage is competitive in most (but not all) places. And new, drilled geo-thermal options show promise for larger baseline/continuity. Renewables also have negative externalities which should be part of the discussion.

** Few if any western countries are 100% energy independent mostly due to economics

Same. Look, the motivation of a corporation isnâ(TM)t the service or widget they are selling.
Itâ(TM)s not even to maximize shareholder value.

Instead, it is to maximize the wealth of the employees. That is to say each employee will do whatever they can to remain employed.

Their managers will do what they can to keep being able to manage people. typically by finding ways to hire as many people to manage as they can. And the executives will likewise do anything they can to keep their jobs for as long as they can and squeeze out as much wealth as they can. The only thing keeping that in check is the ability for the corporation to make enough profit to pay for it. These firms compete with other firms to sell the most stuff using the lowest cost/fewest staff . Then comes the layoffs, etc. Equilibrium of sorts.

However public sector is that there is no such automatic limiting factor because there is no competition, and taxes& fees can simply be levied.

The idea that one slice of workers, namely healthcare service workers, is willing to risk the rest of California for their temporary job security would seem to reinforce my theory.

The idea that this same slice of workers is ok punishing the rest of California for Trumpâ(TM)s Medicare/caid cuts is tough to accept.

The car I drive, about 3 y.o. has adaptive cruise control (ACC) which maintains a certain distance between it and the car ahead of it in the lane. If there is no car ahead, or the next car is far ahead then there is some max speed set (say 70mph) . What would be interesting is to dedicate a lane to vehicles using this tech...and of course having it engaged. Like instead of a carpool lane, have the "ACC" lane.

To make sure people are only using ACC in that lane, maybe have an infra-red light included with the car headlights/brake lights with a special flashing sequence that roadside detectors can pick up...if your ACC isn't active then license plate scanner issues you a ticket. Solid line except for areas that would allow for entering/exiting that lane, which is also common.

For me the ACC has been great for longer trips. I set the speed, get in the middle lane, and just let it go. Much less frustrating than a lot of lane changing, and sure I probably won't break any speed records, but the drive is much more pleasant.

My theory for this endeavor, and for Musk's Neuralink (+ orbiting AI data center) is that they are trying to see about possibilities of uploading themselves.

They are at least smart enough to know this is a huge stretch, but they are rich enough to throw some coin at the prospect anyway. Musk for sure.

The NIMBY/YIMBT thing is weird to me since it applies a broad semi-permanent label on what should just be a case by case basis. If someone wanted to build a McDonalds on my block, you can bet I would be full NIMBY. My neighbors want to add a garage or another floor to their house...call me a YIMBY. Name calling aside, the folks that live in these communities should be the ones to decide what gets built in their neighborhood, contingent on property holders rights not being trampled. Like if there is a variance required, or new roads, infrastructure burden upon the local government, then by all means take it to council. But if it's zoned commercial and they are developing a commercial property and not asking the community for anything...well that's their right (IMHO).

I did a quick perusal of the MIDA thing and here's where the story veers into WTF land for me. The original founding of this organization was in early 2000's as military base closures occurred across the country. MIDA was meant to assist in promoting and developing the remaining bases, and was created as a quasi-public/private entity. Also as I read into this, it seems like the stuff they are pursuing is tangentially 'military related', the composition of the board and how it operates is an invitation to favoritism, corruption. It has the power to tax, issue bonds, etc but without the public input. It's like a shadow government, run by a handful of backroom, political types + the only living annoying Canadian. Really this is weird thing to have in a red state where the private sector should just be able to do this on it's own. One of their projects was helping to finance and develop a Hyatt (?) The military aspect was that service men/women could get a discount(?!?!?)

Also, I generally agree about the note on Ohio...but I would be very wary nowadays about speaking of unlimited resources. Glaciers, other aquifers, lakes (great and otherwise), entire rain forests, ice caps, heck the vast oceans and planetary atmosphere have all seemed unlimited at some point in time. Even low earth orbit.

I am not a farmer (IANAF) nor a solar installation expert, but it would be interesting to see if vertically installed, bi-facial panels on the appropriate solar alignment to the site location would work.

Thinking like rows of shorter growing crops with lines of vertical panels sticking up on poles every several rows

Fair-ish point. But a counter argument might be that in our developing age of ubiquitous AI faker, the pictures themselves will lose their automatically-assigned integrity. The phrase "pictures or it didn't happen" wont' make sense anymore since anyone with $2 can 'photoshop' themselves doing anything anywhere.

Perhaps a verifiable, digital chain of custody will be more relevant in the future.

It seems there was a missed opportunity to define regulations around surveillance cameras utilized by the government. The Feds or others (EFF I'm looking at you) could describe measures that have to be in place in such devices.

Some ideas to spit-ball might include
-The images are only captured to the device and are immediately, hard-deleted once the license plate number is resolved.
-Things like vehicle color and possibly any other printed words like model, bumper stickers, brand icons can likewise be stored but only in text format
-Records automatically deleted after XX days
-E2E encryption of the data from device to the mothership
-Absolutely no resale of the data

Might hurt the Flock business model but I do think there is a place where privacy rights are respected and law enforcement functions are available too.

FWIW in my city the cameras have been very successful in apprehending all sort of criminals. I think it would be a hard sell to the residents to get rid of them.

To add to parent post

SpaceX is valuing itself at $28.5 trillion,

      $370 billion of that comes from launches.
            $1.6 trillion comes from Starlink
        $26.5 trillion (~90%) they are attributing to their share of the AI market
SpaceX brought in ~$20 billion in revenue in 2025, but it spent $13 billion on AI data centers, models, GPU's etc. Q1 of this year AI spend

So its an AI company that might also launch spaceships. Or more specifically launching spaceborne data centers. Maybe the case to be made is that ground based data centers are likely to hit a limit in the availability of power infrastructure in the next 1-2 years. i.e. not enough powerplants, nor transformers, nor transmission lines. SpaceX steps in with some pretty expensive orbiting compute and sells that to Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft.

However, I just don't know that SpaceX will be able to launch enough GPU's to make that dollar math work out. And there is the "how does this work in the vacuum of space" part. Reliability, etc. More likely is that there will be
-improvements in the software & hardware to increase efficiency.
-Not every use-case requires AGI, smaller on prem AI's with limited functionality will flourish.
-Firms like Microsoft, Apple, Google, will reduce the AI feature set to only worthwhile areas in their applications, reducing spend
-Data centers will be built overseas in low cost of energy areas

and so forth. it may be the case the AI market cools dramatically before SpaceX can capitalize on it.
Also, you'll have other, better positioned AI companies like Anthropic going public soon to take some wind out of the SpaceX AI investment sails. Open AI has missed the boat, but their IPO will still happen and more billions of investments
Also, also SpaceX will be too big to be meme-y like Tesla was. Musk gets worse the older he gets too.

For those reasons I'm out.

  Yes, I've missed out on TSLA 115% rise over five years, but boy I have been able to sleep fine those years with my risk adjusted, but still well performing boring investments