Seriously, there are benefits of burning stuff up on the atmosphere. But if SpaceX has 9000 active satellites, doesn't it seem like there should be some regulations in place that rather than trashing the atmosphere, they should be required instead to capture and recover the old satellites?

I get insanely bitchy about technology which is designed to last a little while and then just trash it and make it someone else's problem.

Musk is launching stuff into space all the time. I assume most of the missions he launches are about sending stuff to space and coming back with empty rockets.

It's time he made his only "Space Wall-E" which floats around in orbit, grabs the decommissioned satellites and stores them until the next rocket is launched. Then it transfers cargo and SpaceX will take the old satellites and recycle them appropriately.

And by the way, this should be a requirement for absolutely anyone launching constellations. I don't care if these are tiny little cube sats. There is no excuse for leaving your trash laying around.

And if anyone reading this knows, what happens to all the little nasties in the satellites. Like ICs generally contain arsenic and other lovely things we don't like in our rain and water supplies. I'm sure it's barely trace amounts. But there are 9000 satellites up there right now which have a scheduled life span of a few blinks of an eye. And everyone is racing to compete and sending thousands more. Sooner or later, the stuff we burn up in the atmosphere has to accumulate. It might take weeks, it might take decades, it might take centuries. But, it strikes me that using the atmosphere as a trash can sounds like a bad idea. What happens to all the burned up waste?

This isn't difficult. Ask an llm, in this case, I ask Gemma running on lmstudio :

"using lmstudio how can I prepare the context. In otherwords, I want a standard document which lists rules I want the llms to follow when answering my questions. For example, I don't want it to provide any information without also providing reference links. I often get responses like "There is a research paper named..." and I want the link to the paper and don't want to search for it."

The response it provides is long and detailed. It's really quite good. If you follow the steps, it's really much more reliable than getting constant hallucinations.

If you want it to work like a champion, then ask it

"Is there a way to keep an llm up to date? It would be amazing if I could tell the llm that later today I intend to ask it more information on a specific topic. Do some research while I'm gone. And then the llm would search the internet. It would be even cooler if it could chat on message forums and then check the answers for validity afterwards"

Which will help you setup a RAG.

It sounds like Lawyer dude started his project way too early. And I get it, after all, if he didn't rush in and start early someone else would have. It also sounds like he probably got to the point where the customer expected it to provide better results and if he didn't reach version 1.0 pretty soon, not only would they ditch him, but it would probably slam the doors shut for everyone else. And finally, he probably chased a rabbit down the wrong rabbit hole for far too long and delivered a shit product.

I think to run a project like this, if I were starting today, I would talk with Google (I'd prefer Ali these days, but the whole US government/China thing is an issue), and I'd ask to license Gemma for the base of my own LLM and then extend on that. After all, training your own model from scratch is not only insanely expensive, it's also impressively stupid. Let someone else waste a few gazillion GPU hours to lay down the base weights and deal with all the other training annoyances.

But, again, he sounds like he did a great job suckering some investors into giving him money and now he's trying to convince everyone else that it's not worth their effort to make a competing project because it's really hard to do.

Honestly, cutting a deal with ANY of the mainstream LLMs and uploading the entire legal library of Alaska as RAG data and creating a context rule document which would constrain the answers provided to verifiable fact with linked references would have been far cheaper and far more effective.

Of course, at the current rate of progress of LLMs, I expect by 2030, there won't even be a need for RAGs regarding things like legal references. But this might end up only being possible on Chinese computing systems since OpenAI just killed all western AI research. After all, we spent $32,000 a card on 340 H200 cards last year. They have 141GB each. This is way to small to run decent LLMs on current generation tech. I speculate that we'll see a breaking point closer to 512GB. And I don't think we'll see 512GB from anyone but the Chinese until there are A LOT more RAM factories up and running.

Thankfully, I have nothing to do with Windows clients other than being forced to use them as a client for filing my hours in an accounting program. But, the environment I'm in has what I suspect is a few tens of thousands of Windows virtual machines. We are mostly a Linux shop, but there are many tasks where only Windows will do.
I'm guessing Microsoft has provided us some sort of offline license activation server because there only legal method of moving data on or off this network is to copy it to a USB device, send it to a department who then scans its contents on a machine which is read-only and boots from network freshly for each task. Once the content is validated as safe, it is sent to the next machine which is virus and malware scanning. You can't send data in unapproved container formats like RAR. And then the USB drive is moved to the correct isolated virtual network and transferred into the isolated storage.
We are far from extreme compared to other environments I've encountered. I have worked in a place where, by Cisco's guidance, we were forced to fill the USB ports of Cisco equipment with epoxy because there was no way to disable the ports otherwise.
I think that either Microsoft has decided that they would issue offline licensing methods for special cases or that they wouldn't mind losing this kind of business.

that this was not already the case.

A USA owned company that has a subsidiary in, say, Ireland that is staffed by Irish people (citizens & domiciled) and USA based staff cannot ssh (or similar) in to do things. The USA government makes an order under the Cloud act on the USA company. This then orders its Irish subsidiary and the Irish staff decide that obeying the order would breach the GDPR/similar and so tell the USA parent to shove it.

What can the USA government do ?

Stepping foot onto the maiden Orion flight with the SLS... That is soooo stupi... I mean brave.

Read the Mueller report. It's even available in audio format.

Spy vs Spy

And this is tagged "troll."

The truth is that Rust's cheerleaders have been trolling since the beginning about memory safety.

If we changed spellings so that they followed how words are pronounced:
* We would have words spelled differently in different countries and also different parts of the same country.
* Over time spelling would change, this would make it hard to read old texts. By old I mean 100 or 200 years; even older would be worse.
* Dictionary compilers would have a harder task than they do today.
* Mechanical (ie computer) analysis of texts would be harder, more errors.

If anything we should use a single world wide English spelling. I am English and so I think that it should be the King's English as spoken & written in England. I do not expect those in other countries to agree with me but it would be good if they saw sense.

So I guess that we are not talking about the POTUS.

would result in news organisations, big platforms (== social media) censoring opinions that they believe that Trump does not like as they fear being sued for displaying them. There is no doubt that the opinions would be attacked in a partisan way -- this is already happening, Trump has sued media for saying things that he does not like.

This would result in suppression of anti Trump opinion - this is what he wants to try to bolster his waning popularity and destroy USA democracy.

The biggest carrot the US and Europe have is the protectionism of their stuff.
If the other country is doing it better, you can sue them and keep them from going after your customers. This leaves your customers with lesser options but at least they're forced to buy your stuff.
China is beginning a big push for patents and intellectual property protection. This will slow them down.
But look at the ugliest case of the absolute failure of a total national economy in 2025.
The Germans are in a panic because Chinese cars are better than German cars. They're more advanced, they're cheaper, they are being built with higher quality components. Overall, Chinese cars offer 5-10 times more value for the money right now depending on your measurement compared to German cars. Workers at BMW are showing up to work driving Chinese cars.
So what's the German answer to this?
You'd think the answer would be to invest heavily into making German car companies competitive with the Chinese. Wouldn't that be logical?
America managed to build Tesla which is a car company who engineered every part of their cars with the goal that they should be able to be fixed and upgraded and assembled and disassembled almost entirely by robot. The company invested in engineers who designed cars that could last 25 or more years as vehicles for the middle class and Tesla would get almost all the money.
Chinese engineered their cars with no legacy parts to copy the Tesla pattern and focuses on vehicles that would be cost competitive in the Chinese market.
Germany did what they always did. They made 10 year cars... which actually became 8 year cars because they don't support their software or offer upgrades. They didn't upgrade their manufacturing because German unions scream murder every time a job is replaced by a robot. They didn't reengineer their systems to have anything to do with robots. They don't even support the software on their cars once the car rolls off the assembly line. They have actually increased the costs of owning their cars over time even while their cars rapidly decrease in value.
And Germany's answer is "Hey let's figure out how we can implement protectionism. Because helping the companies compete sounds like too much work"

It seems to me that this is a tool that could reduce consumption of new things in favor of rescuing stuff from the landfill.
Over the past few years, a large amount of my consumption has moved to second hand. The number of trips I make to the dump has dropped.
Apps like this are a good step towards reducing waste. Of course, whether an item has one owner or five before the dump is just a delay. But it means one fifth will be produced.
I'm trying to push that companies like NVidia should be severely fined for waste like mining series GPUs which is disgusting. A perfectly serviceable RTX3080 ends up in the trash because NVidia locks out features and relabels it CMP HX90. This is a device which was never going to last more than a year. They're everywhere and cheap. These could be powering student AI projects or robots, etc...

This will benefit corporations who will be able to jump through the hoops to register all their works; small authors, photographers, musicians will not benefit. I know several small, independent bands in the UK and have been told that it is not worth the time to register with PPL/PRS yet my folk club needs to pay PPL/PRS an annual fee for use of music - much of which is by these small bands.