Huh? read my post that started this thread and get back to me.

The topic is SPACEX setting the low bar.

That PR spew trying to calm the public was smokescreen or made without research. Wasps go kilometers when leaving a nest to make another, and lone queens can go tens of kilometers. And those were empty nests so...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0...

Well, personally I've been calling for legal liability for software vendors and software developers for 35-40 years, often over the explicit opposition of the professional societies I belonged to. So you'll get no argument from me.

Tesla's partial liability in the recent case on the self-driving fatality is a step in that direction.

"Hallucinations are evidence that LLMs are making connections that never appeared before. They are to be expected and accepted as part of what LLM AI provides. They are a feature of AI."

The part that I suspect they genuinely don't like is that the "MicrosoftXTA" CPU vendor code, which corresponds to a Windows ARM device(which I think at this point means 'Qualcom'; possibly a VM on a mac?) is meandering between .08% and .07% and back.

Despite those systems being genuinely well above average in terms of bringing remotely mac-like battery life to Windows; and(despite...optimistic...MSRPs) often appearing on sale at decently attractive price points; it appears that some mixture of apathy, incompatibility, and the total disaster that was the rollout of 'recall' and 'Copilot+ PC' seems to have just cratered those; at least among people who touch steam even casually.

Could be that windows-on-arm is flying off the shelf somewhere else; I don't have MS sales data; but when what was supposed to be the halo product of the win11/Glorious AI product era is under .1%, beating out those well-known Debian gamers by .01 to .02%, they can't be entirely thrilled.

What would be interesting to know(I did some poking; but didn't see CPU information breakdown by architecture or model number; just vendor, clock speed, and core count; and no computersystemproduct/other platform identifier; my apologies for asking a dumb question if I missed something) is what the percentage of linux on steam deck 'like' systems is.

The steam deck itself seems to have held up very well in terms of the semi-custom CPU's priorities, the target resolution, the peripherals included, and the overall polish and user experience; but it is definitely not getting any younger; and there are a bunch of options that ship either with the Z1/Z2 or generic newer AMD laptop APUs, plus MSI's 'Claw' with an Intel(that actually puts in really respectable numbers when the drivers aren't letting it down); but consensus on win11 as a touchscreen OS on devices either without a proper pointing device or with a teeny little one seems to be pretty solidly negative.

That makes me curious about whether gaming handhelds get converted to linux at a significantly different rate than other form factors. I'd assume that 'gaming' laptops are probably about the most hostile hardware flavor; since Nvidia has massive share in discrete laptop GPUs and the 'Optimus' arrangement that allows all the internal display and the video outs to be wired to the iGPU, with dGPU picking up work as needed, is massively driver dependent; desktops are probably the easiest(since you have more control over parts; and you can just shrug off "weird ACPI quirk causes BT chipset to not sleep properly" because you are on the wall and who cares; where that would potentially drain a sleeping laptop's battery pretty quickly; but desktops are also the place where win11 is as inoffensive as it is possible for it to be(still pretty obnoxious; but when you've got a large screen and a real pointing device and keyboard its complete unsuitability for handhelds doesn't matter; even if you hate copilot and the MS upsells).

I bet this is an Other Transaction Agreement (OTA), rather than the traditional Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) procurement. OTAs come with MUCH LESS rules and MUCH LESS oversight. Sometimes they produce quick results, other times they produce substantial questionable, if not actually fraudulent contract charges (at least according to FAR restrictions.) I saw this on FCS, where Boeing charged stuff under the OTA that would later be prohibited under FAR. It's one reason the Army converted the contract to a FAR.

The other thing I wonder about are the requirements, deliverables, and verification procedures. FAR contracts start with a requirements document, a clearly defined set of deliverables, and the contract includes verification procedures (test, inspection, etc) for the deliverables (which one presumes are sufficient to show the result meets the requirements - that's the job of the solicitation authors.)

Now it could be a 'omnibus task order' contract, where there's a cap on the total dollar amount, but actual work is done on a task-order basis. Each task order would have requirements, deliverable list, and verification procedures for that task order.

But this sure feels to me like "Send us shitloads of cash, and maybe we'll deliver something. And if you don't like what we deliver, tough." (And that's before considering Palantir's track record on the projects where I've observed them, where they delivered to less than the full set of requirements, and told the customer, "Oh that stuff we didn't deliver. That's too hard/something our product doesn't do. Sorry if you actually needed that.")

I did not mean to imply that NOAA's annual budget gets us weather data for all time. I specifically meant that the value of NOAA's data and services, each year, well exceeds the annual cost to taxpayers. (One could argue that some of the money spent on research - developing weather models - is a one-time cost, because now that we have them they don't need to be re-invented every time we use them.)

Taxpayers have historically been willing to pay the costs for all the new data, but they have cut the budgets going forward, so obviously taxpayers are not willing to pay anymore for what they are getting

To be pedantic: taxpayers didn't cut the budget, their representatives in Congress did. It is not at all obvious to me that this is what taxpayers want. I suspect that if you were to ask taxpayers across the country, and present them with the numbers, the majority would say that NOAA's budget is not actually that large, and that cuts to the premier weather service in the country seems like a bad idea. In an ideal world, the representatives would be expressing the will of their constituents in each and every vote. In practice, that is only sometimes the case, because democracy is the worst form of government (except for all the others). And at the moment, Congress appears to be particularly pliant to the whims and demands of the Executive, with a particular animus against science and expertise, even when Congress ought to know how penny-wise-and-pound-foolish it is.

I suspect not...

But the court case could be significant, if GM is held liable for shipping products with software faults that cause significant accidents/vehicle damage, let alone injuries. Anything that moves us towards increased liability for vendors shipping buggy (and insecure) software is A Good Thing, in my view.

The problem is partly that people seemed to have kind of edited memories of what, and who, was promised. Theres a sizeable contingent of people angry that Dr Fauci promised a "100% prevention" vaccine. But he never actually did, and right from the begining said that "sterilizing" vaccines (90%+ protection) are actually fairly rare and most will range from 40-80% efficacy. But people are convinced thats what was promised. even though no scientist ever would make such a rash and improbable promise. Coronaviruses tendency towards immune slipperyness was known long before the SARS viruses ever hit the scene.

The problem is , people are being repeatedly told by political fuckery agents that this was what was promised, and now they are convinced Fauci lied to them. And it just..... never happened.

Top income brackets are ten times more likely to be audited than people at the bottom.

Mostly correct, but subtly wrong on the details. Top brackets are 10x more likely than the national average of individual taxpayers. Report from the GAO, 2022

But curiously, folks at the bottom are nearly 2x more likely to be audited than the national average. Claim the Earned Income Tax Credit? 3x more likely.

It makes sense to audit the very highest earners, though: that's where the money is, where the most...creative...filings occur, and thus the greatest gap between tax owed and tax reported/paid. In other words: auditing those folks recoups the most. GAO-24-106112.

Best to take a look at those reports now, before the Ministry of Truth makes them disappear.

You don't get to have the biggest GDP in the world without having a system that props up entire industries that most civilized nations don't require.

I contribute to increasing GDP by randomly smashing windows.

After enduring price hikes (well in excess of inflation) for the exact same service for several years, I jumped ship to an MVNO. My daily experience of making calls and accessing cellular data is no different, but I'm now paying 1/3 what I used to. Given the structure of the MVNO and local geography, half the time I'm using the exact same Verizon cell towers.

Actually we "nerfed" the monarchy in 1649 while you were still part of the UK and still saying "god save the king!" from across the pond. It happened as a result of the English civil war that established parliament's pre-eminence over the monarchy - and the "nerfing" was pretty severe since Charles I was beheaded! While the monarchy was restored in 1660 it was as a figurehead position with little to no political power, or as you would put it, a severely "nerfed" version of what went before!

Even if you had not rebelled though you would almost certainly not be ruled over by the UK government by now, in the same way that the UK government has absolutely no control over Canada. Canada is a completely separate nation from the UK that just happens to have the same monarch as the UK. The two titles: King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and King of Canada are entirely seperate and equal. However, I doubt Trump would be interested in a position as king though, while they do get a degree of deference, UK monarchs have not been able to rule by royal decree since we "nerfed" them and they are subject to the law.