"They fly now?"
- "They fly now."

If you've never had a boss like this -- a lazy narcissist -- you're lucky. But if you have, the pattern is familiar and unmistakable:

* Doesn't understand the issues.

* Doesn't do his homework.

* Believes he's a genius whose "gut" overrules people who do understand and do do their homework.

* Plays his subordinates off against one another.

* Highly susceptible to information from random sources: thing he saw on TV, or heard on the golf course.

* Not particularly fussed about contradicting himself because he doesn't care about being right, but does care about being in charge.

* The more chaotic he can make things, the more in charge he feels.

* Has a cynical view of the people he works for but has a genuine gift for flattery when it suits his purposes.

Once you've seen this up close it's really obvious when you come across it again. You can't *not* listen to a lazy narcissist boss because he absolutely will try the stupid shit he says he will. But you can't count on him either, because he has no commitment to anything other than how he looks and feels *right now*.

Neither. Commerce didn't drop it, it got taken away and given to DoJ, but not because Commerce couldn't handle the invetigation of where the chips were going. The case goes to DoJ because we're talking about criminal charges of smuggling, corporate fraud, violation of national security statutes. Also because the Commerce investigation was tained by potential political interference. And possibly because it ran afoul of a counterintelligence operations siloed in the DoJ -- although by this point the cat is so out of the bag everyone must assume they've got a FISA wiretap warrant on them.

However, the *effect* may be to slow the progress of the investigation and delay any actions being taken.

The first reason for this is that criminal investigations are slower, the standards of proof higher, and potentially involve a criminal trial. Commerce could simply make an administrative law determination that put Megaspeed on some shit list and come to some kind of agreement with NVIDIA.

The second reason is that putting this into DoJ's hands is putting it into a department that has had staff turnover and loss of institutional knowledge, strife between career personnel and political appointees, and difficulty replacing lost employees. It's also led by lame-duck appointees, facing turnover in the next administration. So if they don't make progress in the next two years, allowing for transition delays, it could be years before anything gets accomplished. By then a lot of people will have left their jobs, memories will get hazy, evidence will go missing, and defensive positions constructed.

So while the investigation hasn't been *killed*; it has been delayed so long that it's effectively in suspended animation. It's not possible for Commerce to sanction anyone because the investigation is out of their hands.

Not at all. In fact my wife is trans. And I do know a bit about the subject

And of course there are outliers. The question is what we (society) do with that. They used to be marginalized, then we went completely the other way. In particular, not only trying to convince kids that they might be one of those outliers, but offer them gender affirming care (or whatever we're supposed to call it these days), with far-reaching lifelong consequences. In the past, the incidence of regret after the surgery used to be incredibly low (around 0.1%), but it is already climbing (3-5% now). A German study showed that of people aged 5-12 and diagnosed with "gender identity disorder" (their term), more than half no longer carried that diagnosis after 5 years. Yet some people are so stuck in their ideology that they refuse to understand that the diagnosis in kids is highly unreliable, and continue to push them towards treatment. And yes, even "just" hormone treatment at a young age has serious consequences, regardless of whether the person transitions later in life or not.

That's the ideological "nonsense" I was referring to.

Money may be an aphrodisiac but come on, Jensen, look in the mirror. There's limits to anything.

Really? The gender fluidity nonsense. CRT and Intersectionalism. Or half of the field of Sociology and most of its departments that have devolved into an echo chamber devoid of scientific fact, imposing groupthink instead and ousting those who do not toe the line. The nutty left is just as nuts as the nutty right. But culturally they are a hell of a lot more influential, billionaire propaganda notwithstanding. The best trick that the radical left has pulled is somehow convincing the intelligentsia that their brand of insanity was in fact truthful, mainstream rather than radical, and the only decent opinion to hold.

Maybe. I first read the headline as if the Vietnamese jails were the ones doing the pirating.

That is what Danfoss recommended after the last attack: update your crap and disconnect it. The supermarkets (and I guess blood banks) that were hit in the second attack failed to follow that advice.

The answer is to actually hold actual miscreants to account, after you have established that they are in fact miscreants. Not label an entire social class, political party or the people who voted for them as such. What is happening is part of what you describe: it is easier to label a group as "evil", especially if they aren't a particularly popular group, than it is to go after individual who have done actual wrong.

This statement exemplifies what's wrong with politics today. This attitude of "We're right, everyone knows we're right, so whoever is against us is either stupid or evil". Old-school elected officials at least tried to be a leader for everyone in their bailiwick, from millionaires, entrepreneurs, landlords, students, blue-collar workers to single mums on the dole. They might have certain priorities, spend more on one group than another, but they understood that everyone's interests were theirs to be concerned with, even if they conflicted with their beliefs or with each other. What they looked for was balance, rather than absolutes.

Now there's this us-vs-them mentality pervading politics, even amongst elected officials. We're here for those who voted for us and fuck everyone else. They are "trolling the libs", or we have Mamdani addressing the rich in a TikTok video, knocking on the camera lens and declaring: "I'm coming for you". Fuck that, seriously. It's fine that an elected official increases taxes on a certain group, but instead of pretending that this group is evil and had it coming, how about a simple: "thank you for your additional contribution".

We need to start treating political opponents and social classes other than our own as if they too have society's best interest at heart, treat them as fellow countrymen on the same journey, or at least treat them as human fucking beings. And I say this as a European, because it is the exact same shit show over here.

Religion should be relegated to its proper place: a private belief, or a hobby. No more exemptions: what is good for the goose is good for the gander, same rules for all. And no more protected status. Most religions' tenets are reprehensible. Some not so much in practice, others very much so, on average. But in either case we should have the courage to stand up to such ideas... and not be stricken down in name of the law for it.
"Life of Brian" could not be made today. A Muslim version would be completely out of the question. That's the position that religion has in our lives these days.

Now with more... molecules!

The summary mentions 1kW for the satellite with 4 TPUs, but the latest TPUs do seem to have a power draw of 1kW for a single chip.
Your calculation seems to be pretty good; a quick search turns up a paper that mentions 1.1 m^2 to 1.4 m^2 per kW for the proposed SpaceX datacenter sats. I've no idea how large they could make the radiator, maybe 500m^2 is doable. Enough for a tiny data center, but keep in mind you need almost twice that area again in solar panels, to generate the required power.

Looks like a truck/pickup body on a regular car platform. What they call a "Ute" Down Under.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.