I have not seen AI code that is *more* efficient than human code, yet. I have seen AI write efficient, compact code when pressed, very, very hard to do so, but only then. Otherwise, in my hands, and those of my developer colleagues, AI produces mostly correct, but inefficient, verbose code.

Could that change? Sure, I suppose. But right now it is not the case, and the value system that is driving auto-generated code (i.e., the training set of extant code), does not put a premium on efficiency.

Web browsers are absolute hogs, and, in part, that's because web sites are absolute hogs. Web sites are now full-blown applications that were written without regard to memory footprint or efficiency. I blame the developers who write their code on lovely, large, powerful machines (because devs should get good tools, I get that), but then don't suffer the pain of running them on perfectly good 8 GB laptops that *were* top-of-the line 10 years ago, but are now on eBay for $100. MS Teams is a perfect example of this. What a steaming pile of crap. My favored laptop is said machine, favored because of the combination of ultra-light weight and eminently portable size, and zoom works just fine on it, but teams is unusable. Slack is OK, if that's nearly the only web site you're visiting. Eight frelling GB to run a glorified chat room.

The thing that gets my goat, however, is that the laptop I used in the late 1990s was about the same form factor as this one, had 64 MB (yes, MB) of main memory, and booted up Linux back then just about as fast. If memory serves, the system took about 2 MB, once up. The CPU clock on that machine was in the 100 MHz range. Even not counting for the massive architectural improvements, my 2010s-era laptop should boot an order of magnitude faster. It does not.

Why? Because a long time ago, it became OK to include vast numbers of libraries because programmers were too lazy to implement something on their own, so you got 4, 5, 6 or more layers of abstraction, as each library recursively calls packages only slightly lower-level to achieve its goals. I fear that with AI coding, it will only get worse.

And don't get me started on the massive performance regression that so-called modern languages represent, even when compiled. Hell in a handbasket? Yes. Because CPU cycles are stupidly cheap now, and we don't have to work hard to eke out every bit of performance, so we don't bother.

Remember kids, spaceflight is hard. Nature does not like us being in space, at all. She puts up serious, difficult barriers that we need to overcome. Just look how hard it was for a new program like Space X to start from scratch even with all of the existing knowledge developed by NASA, ESA, etc.. How many rapid unscheduled disassembly events did they suffer? I lost count. Even the Russians, who arguably have as much or more LEO experience than the US, continue to face challenges. Heck, so do we, as the current generation of engineers no longer has the direct experience from Gemini and Apollo to guide them. Space is deeply unforgiving of mistakes.

To the GP, if you think that your 5-second considered opinion is better than a fleet of talented folks, I'll wager that if you more time, did some research, you'd change your opinion. I hope you do.

I've been expecting that eventual outcome since the early 2000s when we (as in someone in an academic lab) grew a 3rd kidney in a mouse by grafting stem cells from a donor.

The perchlorates are a serious sticking issue. While I continue to be amazed at human ingenuity, the remediation problem for Martian soil seems to be very difficult. Not only that, but the perchlorates are *everywhere*, which means the entire environment is fundamentally poisonous to humans. That doesn't make it impossible, but it raises the bar another notch where we are already potentially dealing with low atmospheric pressure, extremely high CO2 concentration, very low O2 concentration, serious cold, etc. Again, not impossible, but Mars is almost as inhospitable as the Moon.

Yeah, their assumption that a sterile planetary body will not spontaneously develop this chemistry is not a really solid null hypothesis, especially given the number of demonstrations that amino acids fall out of proto-Earth conditions.

The destruction was with the previous Doctor, under Chris Chibnall.

$diety, I wish I had mod points right now -- that's brilliant!

Maybe it's because I'm a scientist, but I had to use a bot to distill down the example for me:

I had to press it to simplify a few times, and it came down to:

And also, maybe because I speak science-geek, the quote from the abstract ...

... makes perfect sense.

The ribbon format is just bad. There is no uniformity to the UI. You have to spend time learning the UI, rather than just using it.

This is definitely a situation where simpler is better, and it's very hard to beat the standard drop-down tree'd menu with modal dialogs at the leaves.

Japan really doesn't span enough longitude to warrant multiple time zones, unlike China which spans something like 5.

Yes, and with DST in the dead of winter, dawn in Boston won't happen until 8 AM. Full on daylight won't be until about 9 AM.

All it will take is one cycle of DST during winter, and everyone will clamor for either going back to the semi-annual shifting, or Standard Time. That's what happened last time this misguided experiment was actually tried.

Oh, dear readers, you didn't realize? Yes, the very same argument --- exactly the same discussion --- happened in the early 1970s, and, for exactly one year, 1974, we went to Standard Time nationwide in the US. Lasted one winter.

So, to everyone who is reading this and was born after that time, for the love of everything holy, look back to learn from the mistakes your predecessors made. You are not nearly as special as you think. This is not the first time.

You forgot to mention random ficticous meeting cancellations.

This has been happening on the Outlook via Web interface for a long time. Total PIA, it is.

Actually, cursor and mouse handling by that web app is a god-awful mess.

Heavy lamp wire is great. You should probably twist it, though, to reduce the chance of EMI pickup. Personally, I used shielded twisted pair, because I can get it easily.

But, as a recent project in my lab demonstrated, even a short length of what seems to be heavy enough wire can have non-trivial effects when you're talking about amps of current and single-digit ohm impedances. Consider this: if a speaker has a nominal impedance of 8 ohms, and the wire going from the amp to the speaker (including all the intervening connections) has a potential resistance of even a few hundred milliohms, that parasitic becomes a non-trivial fraction of the load.

I don't know at what fraction the parasitics would become inaudible, but I do know that biamped and triamped systems which directly connect the load to the amp outputs, with crossover filters before the amp, sound gobs better than single-amp systems with cables and crossovers between amp and speaker drivers. The parasitics would be a primary suspect to explain that difference.