Too bad there's not a moderation category of "+1 both Insightful and Funny". But yeah, someone please mod parent up.

The U.S. elected a carnival barker as President. Why should anyone be surprised?

what is godot game engine and why should I care?

Google is RIGHT THERE dude. Theres no need to be so lazy.

396 satellites in orbit is commendable. It took decades for humans to put the first 396 satellites in orbit. Now we (mostly SpaceX) do thousands per year.

On the other hand, Amazon's FCC license required them to have 1616 satellites operating by July 30th, or risk losing their spectrum. Amazon has been granted an extension because...reasons. Some of the stated reasons may be genuine, like ensuring consumers (including the US gov't or military) have a competitor to Starlink, or having a US company secure a spot in a global land rush.

But there are probably unspoken reasons, too, having to do with Bezos' extraordinary wealth and Silicon Valley's cozy relationship to the White House. I expect that if some scrappy startup were in a similar situation, their spectrum would have been revoked, so that a bigger player could snatch it up. We all need to adjust to the fact that, since Trump v Slaughter, the FCC is no longer an independent commission - every member has their job at the pleasure of the President, who can fire them at will if he doesn't get the outcome he wants.

Do you have an auto-complete hotkey for that choice phrase? It must be very painful going through life with so much venom in your veins.

Good for the MAGA morons, because they can claim "unemployment is down".

Not necessarily. While that is absolutely what the administration will do, and is doing, for a lot of the "angry boomer" set, they will be feeling this on the ground and in their community, and it can lead to one of the cardinal rules of politicking being violated;- "Dont tell the punters that the thing they are experience isnt what they are experiencing". When politicans say "The economy is great, look at this GDP!" but people are feeling like everything is more expensive, their kids cant find jobs, their own job is becoming more insecure, and the rent or mortgage payments keeps going up, then people just get angry and feel like they are being lied to and betrayed, and its that sense of being lied to and betrayed that lead to so many people going "Well this trump guys kind of an asshole, but at least he's honest".

Now, you and I know that "Honest" is literally the opposite of what trump is, but when Trump was out there campaigning that washington technocrats where letting people down, well he wasnt wrong. The institutional Dems and Republicans where very happy to stick with a status quo that had been getting worse and worse for average people ever since the sub prime mortgage crisis. Obama promised hope and change, but other than a marginally better health care system, not much changed. Biden seemed content to just try and fix some, but not all, of Trumps damage from his first term. People where angry, because the technocrats where telling them that "Everythings fine, America is America-ing, everything in its place" , meanwhile jobs where still fleeing offshore, grandma cant afford her diabetes meds, and wages where pegged while inflation ran rampant. Trump promised to fix that. Trump DIDNT fix that, and in fact made it worse, but the promise not the reality is what got him in the door.

There are lessons for Trumps opponents here, but the biggest is, the people on the fence about MAGA and the people who where marginally MAGA *can* be reached, and when the Dems get back in power, they actually need to concretely resolve the anxieties that caused Trump to get in in the first place. Because if America was working, Trump would have been impossible.

The Trump administration is cooking the books but they can't do it fast enough to head this off.

Even with the shell game the numbers are falling.

This is a post pandemic, starting to be AI era job market. Kinda looks like the pre-genocide Gaza strip, where one young person would support seven family members. This is my Signal chat today - two people overdrawn, one about to default on mortgage, a fourth who needs to move for safety's sake but can not afford.

This is a global phenomenon and the Hormuz "peace" where both sides keep shooting is NOT helping.

Years ago Republican pollster Frank Luntz, when asked how bad things might get, deadpanned "France. 1793."

We're not there yet, but you can faintly hear the thunk of falling guillotine blades, if you listen closely ...

Tell us more about how you're smarter than the experts who actually did what you say they didn't do

Re-read my post. I literally work in climate research so dont go fucking argument-from-authoritying me, you wont win that fight if we have to start pulling out our credentials lol

I am straight up telling you climate scientists are always being asked to tone down findings and make them seem less dire than they are by government funding bodies. That in practice has led to a pretty cautious approach thats lead to the public not being fully aware of just how dire some of this really is. Thats not saying that scientists are *lying* and hiding the severity of climate change, but rather that when tuning models theres an bias against models that predict the more catastrophic outcomes. When I was working with the CSIRO some of the models where up with predictions that basically have us venusing the planet. We tended to not go with those, because our intuition was that if the planet *could* do that, it *would* do that. But we dont know if thats a sane assumption, so those models dont make the cut for publication.

So yeah. we could end up venusing the planet. Probably unlikely, but just so you know. My most educated guess is the full permafrost scenario isnt a complete venusing but rather a 10c rise. Which isnt particularly compatible with human life, but life finds a way. Lets hope we get a grip on things before we DO completely melt the permafrost

Technically its supposed to be the workers seizing the means of production for it to be communism. However in practice this rarely ends up whats happening.During spains brief flirtation with communism prior to getting smashed by Franco, the anarchist CNT-FAI controlled territory was doing this, and by all accounts it was a pretty great thing. But whe spanish communist party territories where just doing state control. But yeah authoritarian-marxist parties historically have not shown a great history of being particularly ... marxist.... about it all,

Also, whats happening here is more Corporatism than Communism. Its more about trying to appease dear leader than it is about sharing the wealth with the country.

Thats actually a really good point. We are far from untangling the legal mess this stuff brings. Fully AI genned code does not have copyright proection at all (My boss was a bit shocked when I pointed this out to him after he vibecoded an internal tool. I also found about 10 different serious vunerabilities in that mess after about 10 minutes of inspection lol. Hey man, this AI shit is existential threat territory for me......) and partial AI genned stuff is ...... still somewhat undefined copyright legality at this stage, because we have *no* idea how those copyright suits will pan out if one of the litigants ever decides to stick it thru. MOST of those cases get settled out of court to avoid precedent.

In this particular instance though, the Godot maintainers have been disrespectful to humans attempting to contribute for several years.

Oh nonsense. Godots a huge project with literally thousands of contributors. Theres always a handful of people who are serial garbage submitters in any large project (Ask the kernel people about this, they have a terrible time dealing with this stuff) who throw giant wobblies when their buggy nonsense gets politely declined. Theres also those contributions that arent necessarily bad quality but simply dont fit the plan.

Godot has a particular direction it goes in. If folks want to change that, theres an RFC proposal project and then it goes to the community for review. If the community, particularly the community that have to maintain it, reject it, then its not in.

Fortunately the GDExtension system means its rare that rejected code , if its major feature stuff, has to stay dead, as it can just be made into an extension and placed in the asset library.

Those godot forks dont go far. There was one over..... shit maybe it was the code of conduct or something like that. It had 4, maybe 5 conrtributors. The Godot engine it self has 34 separate teams (Ie "core", "network", "physics") each with their own leads that do pull request merging and eventual pushing shit up towards juan who fills the role of basically linus torvalds for Godot). Its a shockingly big operation these days, and yeah. There was a reasonably larger fork over technical issues but it wasnt a hostile fork, and PRs its smaller changes back to main. Pretty much how most succesful open source projects go.

But the political fork? Yeah all big projects get those, and they always die.

The radiators on the ISS are able to dump somewhere between 300 and 700 watts of heat per m^2. That's a square meter of surface for a single GPU, and a single CPU.

Any sufficiently large data center worth operating for "AI" would probably be visible to the naked eye from the ground because of all the surface area that would be required with current methods of heat dissipation in vacuum.

The whole idea is stupid, and it's just a justification for Elmo to continue building rockets - he's trying to create markets for several of his companies based on this foolish, stupid idea that will never work better than just building it on the ground where service, scaling, expansion, and cooling are cheap.

You mean besides burning thousands of tons of methane on a concept that physics and easily observed reality says is very stupid?

That seems like a pretty good reason.

And the bigger the area, the larger the probability of a high-speed interaction with micrometeors, dust, and debris punching holes through it. Hope you aren't using a liquid transport medium to move the heat into the radiator!