so we are only optimizing for economic output consumption - f*** the planet

thanks for being honest Archie.

Half the stuff shipped in that packaging is destine to be waste in a short time horizon if it isn't before it is even delivered.

The real problem is we have to much disposable crap and the economics of that are ultimately driven by materials being cheap relative to labor to do things like invest in maintenance, upgrades, and repairs.

but tariffs are bad I am told ...

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

AI is not currently capable of performing any meaningful conceptual abstraction, it is only capable of very basic mechanical abstraction. Abstraction is itself multi-dimensional. Nor is there any indication that AI could ever perform multi-dimensional abstraction or multi-dimensional decomposition. Precious few humans are capable of it either, but some can.

No, AI would need humans because the best system is not a pure system but a hybrid system, and that means transhumanism with AI operating as an additional brain function rather than as a replacement for a brain.

Tool calling is, yes, but the current approach to it is (a) overt not transparent to the user, (b) not designed for the purpose I've outlined, and (c) not remotely good enough for the AI to be able to manage data through such tools.

Yes, you can connect an AI to a PostgreSQL database. Whoopee. Not even close to an AI detecting via classifiers that some of the data is relational in nature, transparently setting up its own PostgreSQL database in response, and using that proactively as an additional way to examine the data. You would need to explicitly set up the constructs, explicitly set up the databases, explicitly tell it when, where, and how to use the database, and if that particular usage conflicted with a way the AI actually worked, the AI would not be able to use it effectively. That's not remotely close to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is much, much deeper than that. AIs lose focus when there is too much information currently in the system. Absolutely nothing stops an AI from using a document database as a virtual memory in which it can page in and out conceptual spaces so that the focus on any given step of a problem concerns just the problem. Other than such a concept not existing yet, which is kind of a limiting factor. But you need to know what connects to what. The AI could use an ontology reasoner for that, or a relational database, or an external graph. But you cannot provide those tools and you cannot configure them, for the simple reason that the AI is the only entity with any detailed map of how the underlying neural net is connecting those ideas up.

The AI itself has to select the tools, has to configure the tools, has to do all the work. Which means YOU cannot use any sort of API. YOU should have no involvement in the underlying mechanisms needed for the internal NN housekeeping.

And that's your other error. You're assuming this is about user data. No. It's about housekeeping operations within the NN itself to maximise functionality, it has nothing to do with the user side of things at all. If the user was capable of setting up dynamically structured databases that mutated with each step of a decomposed analysis, you'd have done everything the AI would be doing and you wouldn't need the AI to begin with.

You cannot do this work, you cannot even assist in this work, it has to be dynamic and it has to be utterly invisible to the operator.

We don't need bigger models, at this point. What we need is multi-dimensional decomposition, problem space transforms, and the ability for AI to use external tools (such as SQLite, memcached, etc) so that it can externalise static data that it needs to not corrupt accidentally but still keep in easy access.

If we had that, most of the things "bigger models" will do will actually end up being done better, quicker, with fewer compute resources.

I am not writing in support of flock cameras. You and Compact Disk Reader are are deeply stupid. I don't even know where to start. You all can call me whatever names you want and brigade with your disagree mods but it does not change the fact that everything you support hands dangerous people more power.

You fools can run around going derp derp derp "flock" all you like but at the end of the day. Even if you get them taken down, big if, Target corporation and friends will just put them up. Someone will buy and aggregate the data. The police will have it again, and this time with LESS accountability.

I am trying to help you, by pointing out the problem is the unique identifiers, and people having 'to much freedom' to photo anyone and everything because it happens to be outdoors and do whatever they like with it.

But sure call me names or whatever. Don't worry I usually dismiss everything you two dipshits have to say too. At least drinkypoo says something smart every now and again. You two on the other hand never contribute anything useful.

So to be clear the issue isn't really about privacy at all. That is just noise. People trying to make it about privacy are liars.

The issues are:
1) A lot of people are intentionally commiting crimes of various severity and they don't actually want police to have a more effective enforcement tool

2) Some fear about false positives. Which I think is also over blown. Sure one woman was pulled from her car, and yes laziness and lack of understanding about how the system works lead to that. So sure the incident involved Flock but really policy have pulling people over or doing things like stop and frisk and getting overly aggressive for stupid reasons as long as we have had police. Flock isn't new here and really does not change anything.

The real problem is license plates at all. THAT should have never been accepted. Nobody plated up their horse or their horse cart. You can't in 2026 go around with a unique identifier being displayed or transmitted and NOT expect to be tracked everyone. You won't prevent government from collecting that data and using for things you both do and do not support. You certainly won't prevent other private parties from acquiring it and doing abusive things with it.

Flock is the symptom not the disease. People either need to demand anonymity and insist we stop displaying things like plates at all, and actually limit public photography, or just accept we will be tracked everywhere. There is no middle ground to be had.

First, yes, they arent wanting to serve the people... glad you caught up
Second, there are sites being built to increase capacity, but none dedicated to consumer.
Third, there is a bubble, and its about to pop. Unless governments keep stepping in to delay it....

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.

We know that brain function is altered by the blood chemistry changes made by gut bacteria. This means that any mental illness exacerbated by this route where the chemistry added is verifiably unique to an undesirable bacterium can be targeted by the immune system.

Will this be all mental illnesses? Obviously not.

Do I know of any such chemistry? No, which is why I said "in principle". The potential for the vector exists and the potential for training the immune system to attack it exists, but the reality of such a vector actually existing is unknown and the safety of attacking it is also unknown.

"Potential" and "Unknown" are very important words here. They mean that we do NOT know if the probability of such a vaccine being possible exceeds zero, but equally we do know that a key underlying requirement has a probability that isn't zero. But that is all that we can definitely say at this point in time.

Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't. And if we could get something to them to fit new nuclear batteries and replacements for components that cannot be revived, we could get newer probes out there with better sensors and a more powerful nuclear battery that could last a lot longer.

Having said that, I honestly wouldn't trust any of today's manufacturers to be capable of building anything with a comparable level of robustness, so a recharge mission isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Almost, but not quite.

Still, fresh probes sent into the Kuipier Belt and the Heliopause would be extremely interesting.