This is horrifying, terrifying, and sadly well-known even to those who superficially monitor such things.

Popular media: More than one US film/tv studio has "lost" or "suffered a mysterious fire" in un-digitised archives, destroying the lot, during battles to preserve. The BBC sued Bob Monkhhouse for preserving material it destroyed. In Britain, it has been no better. Fans of the British TV series "The Avengers" can only see old episodes because armies of previous fans descended on rubbish tips and, at great risk to themselves, collected as much film as possible.

General history: Places like the John Ryland's Library and the British Library have suffered with rescuing archives at risk of becoming submerged or destroyed by mould. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector filling in the pictures with coloured pens and by another collector allowing the book to be severely damaged by mould.

The National Archives have mysteriously "lost" a great many files over the years and are only digitising those they've retained at an incredibly slow rate. I know because I've personally forked out several hundred to get just two scanned, all because politicians far prefer frippery to archiving. We've absolutely no idea how many of the manuscripts held in other archives are still in usable condition because nobody bothers to check.

It's not just limited to archives, of course. The US has, over the last couple of decades, demolished numerous buildings within the US that are over 300 years old because malls produce profit and ancient structures don't. (They also then complain they have no history...) The Space Shuttle is to be taken to Texas for a PR stunt, which will require it being dismantled and those things aren't designed for that. There is no guarantee any of it will survive the journey. All because PR matters and preservation does not. Other countries? The Louvre... well... probably best not to talk about that utter disgrace. In Egypt, 3000 year old gold artefacts are routinely melted down so the conservators can pocket some extra cash.

It's at times like this that Kenny Everett's general comes to mind.

will be individually addressable LEDs on a wire driven by a local LLM!

Shit, that Groq stuff looks sweet. Would have been cool if Apple bought them. The interconnect alone.. though they have their own 1:1 ultra chip interconnect it doesn't go to 100s of chips as far as I can see.

I picked up a fantastic "like new" souped up 2023 mbp to replace a 2016 model as a buffer at 40% what I would have paid, while waiting for an m5. If yours works for you fine, I couldn't wait but didn't want to get something I would have buyers remorse over. I am greatly enjoying this machine so far and can hang on to it or sell for half off. For Mac mini I would guess in March the M5 should be out.

Maybe, but I hear we will be able to boost memory (slowly) via Thunderbolt. I don't think they would have done that while also riding the psychopathic road you illustrated of intentionally forcing swap to run down SSDs. My battery failed before my SSD did.

That's all well and good but how will I pay for my 256GB M5 Max MBP? 128GB M4 is over $6000 so who knows what it will be in 6 months. Eyes are bleedin here, not sure how cornering the market using speculative investment and government money is all that valid an argument. From someone who is not buying into hype but sees some actual value in AI personally day to day, I *need* my RAM fix more than sammy.

Well, the obvious ones:

No built-in instruction-level or block-level parallelism
Array/vector operations are highly inefficient
Multiprocessing is pretty feeble
No CSP, you have to use OS primitives which are often unsafe
No formal contract system, best you can do is show statements don't do anything bad, you can't show functions do what you intend
Heavy software verification is difficult to impossible

That reminds me, I should really invent a language called "browns" so that Microsoft can put a # at the start.

On the other hand, Microsoft trying to write an OS in Rust will reveal absolutely every defect present in the language.

Unless they write their own, which is quite likely as they'd rather have defects they can ignore.

It seems so elegant, wonder why it didn't arrive earlier. Google says Energy Dome (Italian co.) actually invented it in 2019 with a test in 2022 so I guess it is pretty new but still it seems so simple compared to stacks of lithium or whatever. Though gravity batteries are even simpler it seems.

Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.

Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

No, the executive tells the civil service what it needs to do, but the civil service is wholly independent.

It is totally byzantine if you need an app that is only on one App Store or happen to travel. Actual case that happened to me. United app for boarding pass, mobile roaming app from another country's phone company. Media subscriptions from U.S. App Store which was my default. Apple had me cancel my media subscriptions, create another id with an iCloud email address I don't otherwise use, and every time I need to spend time to make sure something I need will work in advance. Apple PLEASE let us use multiple app stores at the same time without forcing such destabilizing kludges. Even now I never know if what I need to work will work, or if my subscription or billing will work.. The billing screen also has issues like that.

What if you forked it and it is an exact copy of what they used, would that change your standing? Just theoretical for me.