Steering things in the wrong direction, apparently — solar panels, the country, etc.

I don't think you realize how little radioactive material we're talking about here. 1 kilogram of U-235 would power a 100 kW reactor for more than two decades, if my math is right. That's about the size of a golf ball. You're telling me you don't think they can put enough lead around a golf-ball-sized chunk of uranium to ensure that it doesn't end up exposing anyone if the ship explodes during launch?

OF "Models" are up a creek, when the basement dwellers can create a whole character to sell that will do whatever pays the most.

Which will drive down revenue for everyone except those skimming $ off the top, namely the OF owners.

Once again, the environmentalist fringe has set standards so high that they are impossible to meet so that they can berate folks for not meeting them.

Meanwhile, PLA 3D printer output can be trivially mechanically shredded and extruded into new filament several times. It's hard to say that PLA isn't recyclable with a straight face.

+1. In my home town, the pay phone by the high school was used for exactly two things: calling parents to pick kids up after away games and calling in fake bomb threats(*) to get out of tests. I would expect similar behavior from public phones today, sadly, minus the kids calling their parents part.

* When I was a freshman, this is what the seniors told me people had done in previous years. I cannot corroborate the story with any actual evidence. Also notable: this was in the early 90s, before school shootings and bombings were really a thing.

The age of the internet where requests are honored has long been over. Tha fact that it has taken this long is an anomaly more than anything.

Websites are going the way of the Dodo due to AI. Once the data has been captured by AI, it is owned by AI.

"I get the impression these kinds of batteries don't scale down well"

Go look at the picture in TFA and note that it is literally 8 individual packs tall and 4 packs wide in a box.

1/8 of this thing could sit in your garage and power your house for a few days flat.

Yeah, likely true. Also, if you're intentionally looking for them, half the people you think are trans probably aren't.

That's really entirely the fault of laziness by the IRS and/or Congress. We should have laws requiring all of those companies to provide the complete set of information necessary to file your taxes in a computer-digestible form. There's no excuse for having to manually change several *hundred* lines one at a time to tell TurboTax that they are short-term or long-term gains, or whatever the one random piece of information that it needs from my Edward Jones statement every f**king year on a third of the transactions because it is trying to parse a d**n PDF file.

What makes it a nightmare is that even though all of the forms theoretically have compatible fields, they aren't actually standardized in their formatting, layout, which fields are omitted, etc., and that's true even for the easy stuff like 1099-INT, much less nightmares like 1099-B. And they are provided in formats that are intended for human consumption, not software consumption, so they're having to do crazy amounts of interpretation to figure out what the numbers mean and how to correlate them with other things on a page. This is the stuff of nightmares.

Instead, these data formats should be standardized with a mandatory standard format (XML, JSON, etc.) and shared schema. Providing data in that format should be a hard requirement for all financial institutions, and if a financial institution's data is unparseable by standard tools or is wrong in any meaningful way, the company that provided it should be on the hook for the cost of any additional interest and penalties caused by the taxpayer relying on that data blob.

Once you have that sort of strict data portability and interpretability codified into your tax code, tax filing software *should* become easy, because it's just shuttling data from one strict standard format into another strict standard format. This would be very easy for the financial institutions to do, because they already have the data. It's hell on earth for TurboTax to "Intuit" from human-readable PDF files. (See what I did there?)

In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

I think you're understating the odds a bit. The average person meets 80,000 people in a lifetime. If your numbers are correct and trans women are 0.35% of the population, then on average you will meet 280 in your lifetime, which is a far cry from it being easy to go your whole life without meeting one.

This ignores social aspects, where in some parts of the world, you may go your whole life without being aware that you've met one because they all go out of their way to hide it, or where in some places you might not meet one because they've all left because of persecution, but that's a rather different statement.

And yet Lofgren usually gets tech policy at least half right, while still having a background in immigration law. To be fair, she represents part of Silicon Valley, and thus presumably has great advisors, but the point remains that being a lawyer shouldn't be an excuse, particularly if you're in Congress. I mean, you're right that the lawyer monoculture in Congress is a disaster and leads to policies being frequently irrational from the perspective of common sense when applied to technology, but I think it's more than that.

IMO, the bigger reason is that Congress is old. The average age of the current Congress is 58 years old. For context, the youngest people who had any non-negligible chance of owning a personal computer as a kid are in their late 40s now. The youngest people who had Windows-based or Mac-based computers throughout their school career are in their mid-40s. You didn't get to the point where half of kids had computers in their homes until about 1996 or so. Want to know how many members of Congress had a 50/50 chance of having a computer at home by school age? Figure out how many were born after 1991 (34 years ago). The answer is six.

Going one step further in our analysis, anyone over age 59 would not have even encountered a graphical user interface until they became adults. So for approximately half of Congress, if they know modern computer technology at all, it's because they took the time to learn it on their own AS ADULTS.

This is a staggering statistic, and explains why you will never see Congress be competent on technology issues unless they get lucky and find really good advisors rather than just listening to the lobbyists; based on age alone, you'd expect a statistical majority of Congress to have no idea whether a technology policy idea was good or bad without help. And this is wildly optimistic, given that most kids weren't exposed to computers (beyond playing educational games on an Apple II) until probably the early-to-mid-1990s.

We don't just need non-lawyer members of Congress. We need younger members of Congress. We need congress to be a representative sample of the people they serve, where the median age is 38.7 years, not 58. I mean, we're not going to get all the way there because of age limits (25 for the House, 30 for the Senate), but having only 1.1% of Congress under age 35 represents a massive distortion of the demographics of the country that leads to poor technology policymaking.

The thing is, only a small number of mosquito species are actively harmful to humans, so wiping out those specific species probably won't have much effect on the overall ecosystem at all.

Besides, you can always keep a cache of unmodified mosquito eggs in frozen storage. If it turns out that this theory was wrong, you'll only have to wait about 13-ish years for all of the male mosquitoes to be dead and gone before reintroducing the normal breeding pairs, and you'll eventually get back to where you started.

How? The certificate validation is part of the https handshake process. You have to accept or reject the cert, and in most sanely designed platforms, that stage in the process is typically the only point at which your code even has access to the cert. And unless I'm misremembering the protocol, all of that happens before the URL loading stack sends anything other than the hostname. Even headers don't get sent until after the TLS validation is complete.

If it is easy to make that mistake, then the fundamental architecture of your URL loading system is garbage, IMO. Making it easy to turn off validation is problematic enough, but checking the cert after the server authentication happens should require storing the certificate in a global variable or something equally appalling, because in a properly designed architecture, that step shouldn't even be happening in the same function/method as anything that happens after the request is complete.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

AI being a personalized tool for helping you search for things to buy, do, etc. can reduce the grunt work and make those tasks easier. AI being a tool for being productive can give you more time to do other things (assuming they don't stop paying you as much because you're working half as long, and that is, of course, the real problem with their approach).

AI as a tool for replacing work can also lead to you having more time to do other things, with the exact same caveats.

In fact, these two approaches turn out to be the exact same approach. Meta is just putting a different spin on it, talking about it from the user's perspective, as giving a cog in the machine better tools, rather than from the management class's perspective, as allowing you to pay fewer cogs for the same amount of work because they have those tools.