Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.

Is NASA doing anything useful?

Aren't they just trying to repeat what SpaceX has already done?

I vote to call them the Sardaukar.

That depends on how much I'm paid.

For enough money, I can tolerate almost anything.

The truth is an absolute defense against libel in America.

It is a weaker defense in the UK.

Another difference is that in America, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff to show the statement is false. In the UK, the BOP is on the defendant to show the statement is true.

The arbitrator imposed the non-disparagement clause.

Sarah agreed to the arbitration process (she couldn't afford to do otherwise), but didn't specifically agree to the ND clause.

This seems like the sort of advice that is going to be exceptionally hard to get followed because it's mostly so dull.

There can be some interesting futzing in principle to keep unnecessary sources of variation from getting folded into build artifacts, normally followed by less-interesting making of those change in practice across a zillion projects; and basically anything involving signing should at least be carefully copying the homework of proper heavyweight cryptographers; but most of the advice is of the "fix your shit" and "yes, actually, have 10 people, ideally across multiple orgs, despite the fact that you can get it for free by pretending that the random person in Nebraska won't make mistakes, get coopted by an intelligence agency, quit to find a hobby that doesn't involve getting yelled at on the internet for no money, or die" flavor; which is absolutely stuff you should do; but the sort of deeply unsexy spadework that doesn't have magic bullet vendors lobbying for it to get paid for.

What seems sort of damning is that the explanation is "our tech sucks".

The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.

You obviously have limited control over the network in a situation like this; so nobody expects the goggles to fix the internet or facebook's server resource allocations for you; but having some sort of "can't reach remote system" error condition has been ubiquitous basic function since around the time that dirt was still in closed beta.

I suspect that this is symptomatic of the same phenomenon; but it seems especially weird that they'd be trotting the CTO out to give a, from context, apparently intended to be exculpatory postmortem when the problems with a device you are intended to wear on your face, in public, are 'sensitive to external trigger shared across entire product line' and 'silently fails stupid if network conditions are suboptimal'.

You definitely wouldn't come up with a fresh 10,000 liters of the stuff just lying around somewhere; at least not without resorting to nuclear chemistry or natural gas processing on a pretty heroic scale; but if you purely needed to ship something, anything, to be able to say that the amount provided wasn't zero; the terrestrial supply isn't zero either. I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, though no assurances either that that is happening or that they'll sell, they had formally stopped doing so at least for a while over a decade back; not sure what the mixture of reasons was between domestic users and not wanting inferences about their weapon maintenance.

Such a sale would be basically ceremonial if it has to come from the existing supply which is already spoken for every year; and there would be no point in Interlune as an intermediary; but if some finance construct wiggles one way if the sales are zero and another way if the sales are merely small, it presumably might be worth someone's time for Interlune to be listed as the supplier to Bluefors, even if it's just them slapping their label over whoever Bluefors normally buys from and doesn't actually change the allocation to different purposes or the total size of the market.

It's adjusting the allocation that would be at least difficult(potentially viable if the VCs doing 'quantum' are paying better than the people doing ultra low temperature MRIs or academic physics, or if you can out-lobby the 'national security' neutron detector market that doesn't get anyone excited but zOMG Dirty Bombs the Homeland!; but probably not cheap); and actually changing the supply that would be hardest, but possibly of actual interest.

When you look at all of Europe, it's more like a weekly thing, and sometimes a daily thing. The ones that make the news are the bigger bombs like the thousand-pound bomb mentioned in TFS or the rare ones that cannot be made safe and have to be detonated in place, which can mean a lot of new business for window installers even with dampening.

You can't be the "baddest kick ass person on the block" without having an effective ability to fight. That means weapons, and it means training on how to use them most effectively. When going up against the Soviet Union, that means a nuclear arsenal. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but we also helped ensure through deterrence that the Soviets never moved on Western Europe, and we helped ensure through diplomacy that World War III never broke out.

I'd be a trifle surprised if it's an outright lie; perhaps I'm not properly accustomed to contemporary standards of allowable market manipulation; but it seems to have been carefully worded to make a somewhat exotic but fairly barebones commodity futures arrangement, which could be entirely fulfilled by interlune doing some paper-shuffling resales of helium 3 from any source or simply selling zero liters during some or all years between now and 2038, sound like a tale of Bluefors actively paying to send rockets to the moon because it's obviously only freezer capacity, not any of the other issues, that is keeping 'quantum' from doing whatever it is supposed to do.