People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

They said it's internal rather than a collision, so probably a failed COPV would be my guess.

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

If the midterms occur and are not outright stolen then yes, the Republicans are getting crushed.

But conservatives will absolutely double down on everything and it will probably work for them to regain power, because enough Americans are idiots. The Reagan-era policy of destroying our public education system (once world class, with high school students studying the classics and thereby having a chance to learn critical thinking) has paid off for the religious reich.

This doesn't make it American. It's still Chinese.

If you're not buying anything on the basis of principles, you shouldn't buy anything American or Chinese. GLWT.

If you can't, or won't work from home, having work from home still benefits you.

I'm not claiming WFH is always bad or anything. But the "WFH is only a problem because of evil real estate owning bosses" are full of shit.

First, if people around you are working from home, suddenly rush hour stops being such. You benefit because the roads are less busy so you get a smoother commute. Less traffic on the roads means you get to your destination way quicker and time spent commuting goes down.

Second, if you have to fight for parking, well, less people to fight with which means you probably can find a parking space much quicker or it's just less packed overall so you're not hunting for that one empty space.

Missed the part where I ride a bike to work? :)

Having fewer people on the road is a benefit in terms of less pollution and better buses. But traffic doesn't affect my ride at all,since my ride in is pretty much separated from through traffic. Also, I'm usually in by 10:30, I am not a morning person.

Third, if you're packed in the office, fewer people means more space.

I mean this is true but only a bit. I'm at a very small company. We have one fully remote employee (different country), so obviously he doesn't have a desk. This means we need to spend less money on office space which is nice at this point.

All this means everyone saves on gas - working from home people save on gas. Everyone having to go into the office means gas isn't wasted in traffic jams of hunting for parking as well.

None of use drive in. The entire building (we sublet space) has maybe 5 parking spaces tops.

It's just like how improving public transit options helps those who have to commute by car as well - someone taking the bus means one less car on the road. A full bus means several blocks worth of cars are taken off the road making the road less congested overall.

I am all for this.

Identifying backdoors in an office package is relatively easy, since it has no business communicating over the network in most cases and it certainly has no business opening server-sockers, ever. For the general case, things are more complex.

Many of us don't want to work from home.

Can't stand it myself. Even when I was flying solo as a contactor I hired a desk in a co working space because I liked having someone else to work with other people around. I gained useful info there too.

Plus WFH doesn't work well for R&D jobs other than maybe a very rarified few. Nothing quite like a real whiteboard. Plus I now have constraints of physical equipment that preclude remote work.

IME quite a few (though not all) remote workers just want to be left alone to quietly do their thing. That only works if their thing aligns with the company and there's enough lone work. I've encountered too many software engineers who end up just fiddling with peripherally related stuff that kind of looks like real work but is actually mostly useless. Frankly once you are a big enough company (I'm not thank the gods) you can't rely on hiring above average so you need to deal with those people somehow and get work out of them.

Ok ok ok yeah sometimes I fuck around on the lathe a bit in lieu of doing actual work. One of the perks of being in work I suppose.

Anyhoo where was I?

Oh yeah life choices. What fuel costs? I ride an acoustic bike into work. I live somewhere where I'm not constrained to drive to live my life.

the screenwriters really tone down his campy dialog and cut out the slow parts perfectly.

Toned down? If anything, they added camp. Like turning Rocky into some kind of overly excited dog. And the ludicrously long and stupid posing scene in the airlock? Was that even in the book? A lot of the science in the book got chopped out as well. The movie felt dumbed down. I preferred the book.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.

Not remotely similar to my experience. Granted I'm writing Rust, and the Rust compiler is *really* picky, so by the time the agent gets something that compiles it's a lot closer to correct than in other languages. Particularly if you know how to use the type system to enforce correctness.

Yes, you have to know how to write tests. A few decades of experience helps a lot. I find I actually spend a lot more time focused on the details of APIs and data structures than the details of tests, though. Getting APIs or data structures wrong will cost you down the road.

Also, I suppose it helps a bit that my work is in cryptography (protocols, not algorithms). The great thing about crypto code is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all. If you screw up the business logic just a little bit, you get completely wrong answers. The terrible thing is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all and gives you no clue where your problem might be.

Of course that's just functional correctness. With cryptography, the really hard part is making sure that the implementation is actually secure. The AI can't help much with that. That requires lots of knowledge and lots of experience.

Deep experience is absolutely required. My antennas are quite good after 40 years.

You really have to know what questions to ask, and what answers not to accept. It also helps to know what kinds of errors the LLM makes. It never outright lies, but it will guess rather than look, so you have to know when and how to push it, and how to manage its context window. When stuff starts falling out of the context window the machine starts guessing, approximating, justifying. Sometimes this means you need to make it spawn a bunch of focused subagents each responsible for a small piece of the problem. There are a lot of techniques to learn to maximize the benefit and minimize the errors.

Yeah, I am definitely not doing UI work.

Speak for yourself. I wrote Android's Keymaster implementation in less than a month, and it was about that size, and then re-wrote most of it in a week when it turned out I'd made some core assumptions that Qualcomm couldn't match in their implementation. It was relatively bug-free for a decade -- even when a third-party security research lab spent a month scrutinizing it. They found a handful of things, but nothing serious. I was amazed, especially since I'd seen the reports they turned in on some other code.

That's just one example. In my nearly 40-year career I've had a half dozen crazy-productive weeks like that, and usually when working on particularly-complex bits. If you haven't had that experience, that's unfortunate. It's not something I could do frequently (or would want to), but it's a glorious feeling when you're that deep in the zone.

Not at all bad. Their competitors, such as Codex, are already open source. Anthropic is the odd man out being closed. It's just client side "prompt engineering" and IDE integration stuff, click bait headlines not withstanding.

Nothing of real value has been disclosed. It's interesting, but that's about all.

I like it. Hard to get it on the marquee, perhaps. Mine was a more prosaic "The Floyd Project". Welcome to the machine.

The Public Markets have rules and laws that incentivize very destructive and predatory behaviors. Corporations behave like psychopaths to hit quarterly numbers for 'fiduciary duty' laws.

Private assets don't have these so they can build real companies with an eye on the future.

But private companies don't have nearly as much access to capital because all the investment money goes into retirement because of stupid tax laws which goes into psychopathic public companies.

And then Blackrock / State Street / Vanguard collude to tell these companies how to behave socially and politically, often against the interests of everyone else in society.

Of course this could be done poorly but the idea has merit. Congress is most likely to screw it up, but who knows, maybe they won't.

That's peak optimism for 2026.