Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog

Overload? It's probably an overly-excited inference, but that sounds like a basket with too many eggs in it. Anyone know?

"Ukraine, if you're listening..."

Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.

I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...

If you dig deeper, you'll find that AMD originally reverse engineered the *8080*, not the 8086. The two companies had entered into a cross-licensing agreement by 1976. Intel agreed to let AMD second-source the 8086 in order to secure the PC deal with IBM, who insisted on having a second source vendor.

There would have been no Intel success story without AMD to back them up.

(That actually would have been for the best. IBM would probably have selected an non-segmented CPU from somebody else instead of Intel's kludge.)

2) Police officer hides, catches unsuspecting driver speeding, stops driver, issues summons.

This is the very best approach. It's got the perfect tension leading to the greatest safety.

When you're expecting such an ambush (getting caught a few times will teach you to do that), and you're really paying attention and playing "spot the ambush" then they won't catch you. But because you're being so damned focused and alert, you're also a safer driver.

OTOH if they nail you, that means you weren't paying attention. So you weren't merely speeding; you really literally were speeding unsafely, and the ticket is the proof. (If you were so safe, then how come you didn't see the guy with the radar gun in time?)

Every. Single. Time. I got ticketed, my mind was wandering and not fully focused on the road. I wasn't looking for a speed trap, so I didn't see it in time. Busted. And those times I was looking? I didn't fall for it. I slowed down and avoided a ticket.

The ideal system (in terms of safety) happens to also be downright sporting! The ol' classic speed trap was almost .. a game?

To what are you alluding?

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

That's generally how it's being done. The robot reads the code and writes specs. Then another robot reads the specs and writes code. If courts still accept the traditional clean room defense (and why wouldn't they?) then they're probably going to say it isn't a derived work.

It looks like the big catch, the actual source of uncertainty, is that the instance of the robot that reads the specs and writes code, may have seen the original code as part of its training data. That'll be enough to keep it from being a true clean room. In those cases, you'll be totally right.

But for any particular given project, was it trained on the original code? That'll be a case-by-case thing, and I think in a very long-term way, the answer will increasingly be No, simply because codebots' need to keep training on newly-published code, will diminish.

As an analogy, imagine you're a human author, and for some weird reason, one thing you like to do is have people tell you high-level plot summaries (specs) and then you write a detailed story from that. Someone says "the moon is unusually bright one night and people fear something bad has happened" and you write a story much like Larry Niven's Inconstant Moon, from that prompt alone. And you do this with 100 more stories, and most of them honestly don't appear to be derived. You take specs like "bombardier has crazy war experiences" and your resulting story is nothing like Catch-22.

But then one day, you're up in the attic and you find an old box that's been sitting there for decades, and inside, you find an old, worn, dog-eared paperback of Larry Niven stories which happens to include Inconstant Moon. Oh shit, you must have read that 45 years ago and then somehow "forgot" that you had, so your story wasn't truly independent of Niven's work. Your story turned out to not be "clean" at all, whoops! It was a derived work after all, because you read it ("trained on it") when you were a kid.

But the other 100 stories? Nope, those really were clean. Your story-writing process was almost legally foolproof, except that you had to learn reading and writing at some point, so your childhood favorites needed to be off-limits.

The heat wave made March be like late spring. Things that normally bloom in May, bloomed in March. And yesterday I got my first MRGCD irrigation of the year, flooding my back yard and letting the shade trees greedily suck up the water. We're spending a lot more time outside on the patio, compared to previous years during this time-of-year.

If I were stupid, I would be out of my mind with pleasure. Things feel wonderful right now.

But that water I just got .. that is The snowpack, probably. Instead of getting it all throughout summer, this first irrigation is probably the last, or second-to-last.

This summer is going to SUCK.

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

The solution to this is to join a party and get involved in the decisionmaking. It's a lot easier than you might think, and you can have a lot more influence that you might expect, precisely because not that many people do this.

I once worked at a place that had a clean room process to create code compatible with a proprietary product. Anybody who had ever seen the original code or even loaded the original binary into a debugger was not allowed to write any code at all for the cloned product. The clone writers generally worked only off of the specifications and user documentation.

There were a handful of people who were allowed to debug the original to resolve a few questions about low-level compatibility. The only way they were allowed to communicate with the software writers was through written questions and answers that left a clear paper trail, and the answers had to be as terse as possible (usually just yes or no). Everyone knew that these memos were highly likely to be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

I highly doubt that any AI tech bros have ever been this rigorous, and I'd bet that most of these AIs have been trained on the exact same source code that they are cloning.