I hate Zuck as much as the next geek, but preserving human rights is a governmental-scale responsibility, not an issue we leave up to every random company to do their own due diligence (or we'd have none).

It's great Wyden and Markey are taking an interest in this, but the issue is far bigger than one major brand of spy-glasses; there are dozens of brands of similar glasses that don't even pretend to try to protect privacy; and moving beyond that specific form factor, there are thousands of styles of spy cameras available to any random Joe for under $100 (many in the $20-$30 range!) right from Amazon. This isn't even trying to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube - This is drowning in a vat of Colgate while pissing and moaning over a stray blob of Crest.

Two engineers (one of whom is a stuffed shirt being thrown a bone post-acquisition) are going to rewrite Cisco's legacy code using AI and an unlimited budget.

I'm sorry, can even the most delusional pro-AI executive out there seriously say that with a straight face? This just plain fails the sniff test - Are they establishing a scapegoat for an already-failing project? Honoring some contractual landmine EZDubs managed to sneak in? Straight-up insurance fraud?

If this is exactly what it looks like at face value, excuse me while I go short Cisco stock.

Headline from 1845.

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)

Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

...Nothing on them but cranky bastards contributing to climate change while moving between ticky-tacky, 40+ hours of indentured servitude, and temples to Mammon.

I largely agree with most of Klee's points, but there's a serious bias issue with his conclusion: "The internet" is just the road we use to get somewhere. Where we go is up to us most of the time. And in this case, the "old internet" is still mostly there - Case in point, I still have a crappy static personal website up that hasn't been updated since the 1990s.

Problem is, nobody wants to read my ramblings from 30 years ago any more than they did 30 years ago. People want FAANGs, even while they may openly resent those same platforms. Sure, Amazon is evil... But the alternative is leaving the house and going to a store, eew! NetFlix kills everything good after two seasons, but two seasons on-demand beats a 30-second stick-figure animation that takes six weeks per "episode" and depends on the unpaid hobbyist creator not getting bored with the project. TikTok is measurably destroying the attention spans of our youth, but we can't risk missing the next big "hold my beer and watch this" moment.

The problem isn't "the internet". The problem is us as a collective whole. When there's demand for trash, sanitation engineers flip to supply side.

The primary reason companies advertise with Google is to drive search results to their site.

If AI summaries become good enough that nobody needs to click the links anymore - What are advertisers paying for? "Brand recognition" only takes things so far, at some point they need real customers to drop in and throw money at them or they won't have anything to advertise.

My company ships data dumps like this to multiple vendors on a monthly (sometimes weekly) basis.

My side of that equation takes security very seriously. The recipients... Well... When someone offers to send you credentials out-of-channel, the right response is never "Just email it, this isn't a shared account" followed by getting cranky at being told that ain't happening.

If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.

Speak for yourself, Pluto is fascinating. Tectonically active. Cryovolcanism so abundant it appears to have formed large mountains by the merger of individual domes. A gigantic scar exposing its mantle, which over time roils in massive convection cells, pockmarked in sublimation pits. Mountains drifting like icebergs and accumulating on the shore. Penetentes (sublimation ice spikes), the size of large hills. A multilayer blue atmosphere, in which organic chemistry occurs, depositing not just organic matter onto its own surface, but that of its moon as well. Active glaciation. A probable subsurface ocean, in contact with rock. Conditions suggesting it was habitable when it formed.

IMHO, it's way more interesting than a number of recognized planets.

(Also, I'm confused by your response. This isn't about the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere for flying)

Google "Dark pools". Currently they account for slightly over half of all US transaction volume. Yes, they're still regulated; no, we do not have visibility inside them.

Yep. Back in the early days of Slashdot, when helium usage would come up, I'd grumble about how wasteful the medical industry was with helium.

It still uses a lot, but it's nowhere near as wasteful as it was before.

Yes, like the Nile Delta, water flowed in from wet regions further away to the desert and near-desert lowlands, and humans began using it for agriculture. Around the Tulare Basin, there's dozens of inches per year in the mountains due to orographic uplift, but only half a dozen in the lowlands. The problem is that farmers first consumed the water from the mountain-fed local rivers and are now consuming water shipped in from as far away as the Oregon border and drawing down groundwater much faster than it's being replenished. At the same time, the mountain rivers are becoming less reliable as climate change leads to snowpack melting earlier. As it stands today, it is not sustainable. More water is being used than is long-term available.

Indeed, I have no clue what you think you were trying to prove with this link:

The conversion of this water system to a lake-and-slough wetland to agriculture began in the mid-1800s when European settlers began to build canals and diversion structures to irrigate their crops. This early irrigation infrastructure upstream from Tulare Lake slowly cut off the lake from its source waters, shrinking the lake's footprint. By 1899 - less than 50 years after irrigation was initiated - Tulare Lake went dry for the first time in history.

They were overdrawing the rivers *even before the 20th century*.