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.

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

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.

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.

Oh wow. The burning is where the pollution comes from! Natural bodies burning up in the atmosphere typically don't contain aluminum. Satellites do. And in fact we can measure an increase in aluminum particles and compounds in the upper atmosphere since starlink satellites have been regularly do-orbited. We have no idea what the long-term affect will be. I've heard atmospheric scientists call this one of the largest uncontrolled experiments in air pollution we've ever done as a species. Surely you agree that's a bit reckless?

Claude has already seen it.

The region where Starlink satellites orbit, and many other of these massive constellations live, will clear itself out after a year or two, after which we can start over. But besides light pollution problem, Starlink's biggest problem is air pollution. We don't know what the long term effect of thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere is. This is quite concerning. These satellites are contaminating our upper atmosphere at rates we've never experienced before.

In the orbits above this region, Kessler syndome is a real possibility.

Sometimes yes. But it's not usually the government itself producing and thus pushing out private enterprise. Usually it's the leader establishing close personal relationships with loyal private businesses, and funneling money their way without bidding or due process. A king picking the winners and losers. This is what Hitler did in the 30s and 40s as he built up his war machine, what the CCP in china does now, and what Trump is doing in the USA right now. In fact Brandon Carr just boasted in front of an audience of thousands how he has used the power of government to get rid of Trump's media critics and helped his friends buy up all the big media companies.

Is the rise of cheap but powerful embedded processors and the Arduino ecosystem partly to blame? I don't think I've seen very much high-quality and efficient arduino programming done. C++ with lots of unnecessary OOP. As long as there's a watchdog timer to reboot the thing every couple of hours, she'll be right. Ship it. Heck I use micropython for a lot of projects lately. It's very cool but it may not be preparing young developers for the rigors of aerospace development.

Yes you can. You have to boot into recovery mode and then change the security level. This is already something you have to do to load third-part (even signed) kexts, which are sometimes required for certain types of presumably poorly written (or not Apple-blessed) hardware drivers.

Apparently this is even still possible on the iPhone chipped MacBook Neo.

This thing was never about "dangers to defense." The original contract was signed and had clear terms that humans would always have the final say. The DoD unilaterally wanted to change those terms and Anthropic said no. In reasonable times this might result in Anthropic simply losing the contract; plenty of other companies including OpenAI are perfectly happy to sign under the new terms. To declare them a supply chain risk as punishment was unprecedented and illegal apparently.

Anthropic was never a danger to defense. They fully allowed their technology to be used to kill people. There was no issue there.

The idea that the DoD wants to allow AI to kill people without any human intervention (and responsibility) is really disturbing. But given the way things are going, maybe if AI simply ran all the wars we'd all be better off. You've been declared a casualty. Report to the absorption chambers! Time to watch "A Taste of Armageddon" again.

Except MS Office was based on Carbon, not Cocoa. So it was basically OS 9 code that had a prettier face on it. But you could always tell Carbon apps as they never looked or acted quite like a normal Cocoa-based OS X app would.

The parliamentary system has one thing going for it. The prime minister must also be elected as a lawmaker, so he has skin in the legislative game, and can't just say off the wall garbage. He has to appease his party, including back benchers, and any coalition participants. And like you say, he or she is vulnerable to a non-confidence vote.

In all democratic countries democracy really tends to break down at the lowest and most important levels. The things that impact peoples' daily lives the most originate in local government, and voters have the most apathy at this level.

Mr Putin, is that you?

Every fact checker out there declares this one false and bogus. While corruption happens under all parties, this story is false. Repeating it as fact is dishonest. Please stop.

The current crass state of political discourse seems to use this sort of lie to justify one's own political team's increasingly lewd, illegal, and unconstitutional behavior. If you think we're bad, you should see those awful, evil, Democrats! Or, if you think we're bad thank your lucky stars the Republicans aren't in.

It stinks.