I recognize that it's on-brand for an AC to also be daft, but have you been living under a rock as well? What makes you think that any other monitor technology out there would be immune? Try this: pull out your smartphone and point its camera at the screen you're reading this on now. Notice the fringe-y rainbow patterns?

Because it was a smartphone image of some other screen, it was probably riddled with Moire patterns, further contaminating it for the facial recognition.

The article seems to focus a lot on the "oooh, Prada made this! What does this mean for luxury brands?" rather than, I dunno, flying to the fucking moon!

I guess it's kinda interesting that Prada was the company to fabricate the garment. On the other hand, they do know a lot about manipulating materials onto the human form, so I guess that fits. The author also missed the opportunity to point out that the Apollo lunar suits were fabricated by International Latex Company - the makers of the Playtex bra.

Having it die spontaneously while in service to its (very) extended mission is a much better fate than being functional but deliberately shut down under the guise of "savings".

I do mechanical design around COTS components as part of my job. What Google has provided is incomplete documentation. If someone were to ask me to design a custom band or something to accept this, I'd tell them that, because of the complex 3D shapes at play, the 2D drawings they've provided don't have enough information. I may be able to get close, and with enough iteration get to something that works. But it'd be a whole lot faster if they provided a representational 3D CAD file (STEP, STL, IGES, parasolid, whatever).

Congress is pretty feckless as a check on the Executive. By the time they get their act together to protest this action, the monitors will already be removed.

There is an adage: "don't ask a question you don't actually want to know the answer to." Dismantling this monitor system is a way to make sure the question cannot even be asked.

The Trump administration, and the Republican party generally, has a deep antipathy towards science - climate science especially. Most of them go on and on about climate change being a hoax, but for most of them that's probably performative. Deep down or away from cameras, they know better, and are either in denial or prefer to ignore it as long as possible, because doing so is in their own venial best interest (money, position of power, etc.). Another adage: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

As to the first: it depends a lot on how the stock issuance is written. If it's anything like the SpaceX structure, or Facebook's IPO, the voting shares will be jealously guarded; most stockholders will be junior status, non-voting.

As to the second: is that any different than thing now? Do you think Anthropic hasn't already been chasing never-ending profit to the detriment of all? They may talk and dress Claude up a bit nicer than Altman or Musk, but the rapacious desire is still all over it.

Rather than piling on with the math, I'll point out a widely-stated metric about solar: the entire US could be powered by a solar farm in Nevada roughly 100x100 miles. This rough calculation is widely attributed to Elon Musk, but it's been floating around for at least two decades (it was even mentioned in an episode of The West Wing in 2004) - ever since monocrystalline silicon PV panels got above 20% efficiency.

It's not strictly true: the US would need more area than that today, and it's better to distribute that as many smaller sites, but it's not far off.

Speed holes, eh?

And a total lack of zoning, or jurisdictional restrictions of any sort (save Isaac Newton). No one whinging about noise, water consumption, land use, or any of that. No state/local/federal politicians to pay off. No public meetings where you have to at least pretend to care about local citizens' concerns...

I've got no retort for that. But the potential upsides listed above are compelling enough that you better believe the AIntelligensia will keep trying to make it happen.

That statement lacks any kind of historical context. "Realtors in the market for over 2 to 3 decades" ought to recall that for long stretches of time, the interest rates we see today would have been seen as 1) normal, or 2) a bargain. The recency bias of seeing 3% a few years ago was a bonkers-crazy anomaly.

A 30-yr mortgage today comes in around 6.25%. As it so happens, that matches the introductory 5-yr rate on the ARM I used to buy my first house 20 years ago. My parents like to tell me that, when they purchased their home in the early 1980s, mortgage rates were around 12-15%! See here for historical data.

Higher mortgage rates do make it harder to buy a home. And for someone sitting pretty on a 3% rate from refinancing a few years ago (like myself), it makes selling not very appealing. But to say the higher rates of today "have f***** everyone over" is half wrong, and wrongly implies some grand conspiracy with malicious intent. Home ownership rates have hovered in the mid-60% range for decades, with almost no correlation to interest rates.

You need to also look to home prices for the "f***** everyone over". Those prices have increased at wild rates, doubling since the 2008 recession, and going crazy since COVID. The higher costs have various reasons, but it's mostly because of a serious supply shortage. That contributes at least as much to the "what's my monthly payment going to be?" as interest rates.

Consider $385k @ 3.7% - the average sale price at the average rate circa 4Q2019, just before COVID: monthly payment $1772.
Now consider $385k @ 6.5% - same price, but at today's rate: monthly payment $2433. Ouch.
Then, consider $515k @ 3.7% - today's average sale price at 4Q2019 rate: $2370. Also Ouch: the increase in home price is about as bad as the change in rates.
Finally: $515k @ 6.5% - today's average price at today's rate: $3255. Bloody hell!

The monthly mortgage payment has roughly doubled since COVID, but interest rates are just one part of the picture. You could whine about the Fed, but 30-year rates are more closely tied to the bond market than to the Fed rate. Those higher 30-year bond rates are driven by 1) uncertainty about the future, and 2) the US Government's wild, irresponsible deficits. You won't really be able to do much about interest rates. But you can do something about home prices by advocating for more home building and density. That's driven by state and local policy, which you do have some influence on.

Musk brought xAI (maker of Grok) into the SpaceX umbrella. SpaceX is reasonably profitable, xAI is burning money. So Musk, who controls both companies, incestuously merged them together to cover the losses. Musk has pulled similar self-deals to merge X (formerly Twitter) into xAI last year, and SolarCity into Tesla years before that. SpaceX/xAI has a large AI datacenter that its leasing to Anthropic, and has plans to build its own AI chip fab (in partnership with Tesla - more corporate incest). And SpaceX is pretty bullish on using its rocket capabilities to make AI Datacenters in Space a real thing (or, at least, that's what they're selling to IPO customers). Plus SpaceX has StarLink, which isn't AI exactly, but certainly adjacent.

So while you might think you're buying into a rocket company, at least 20% of the valuation is xAI+Twitter, and a lot of the projected future growth is in datacenters (on the ground and in orbit). Without the AI fluff, there's no earthly way to justify a $1.25T valuation just on being able to launch rockets and StarLink. (Even with the AI, the valuation is still bonkers - costs vastly exceeding revenue for years into the future.)

Just what we need: the ability for anyone to publish a vibe-coded Android app.

Brings to mind a famous joke from George Carlin.

One can get multi-Gpbs radio links from orbit, but it tends to be 1) physically large and heavy, and 2) quite power hungry. These demonstrators are 6U cubesats, meaning the optical link equipment is really compact and power efficient.

For comparison: the NASA TDRS network, used for providing feeds from the ISS and telemetry from a bunch of LEO satellites, can manage 0.8 Gbps in the Ku-band. But those satellites are house-sized and use >1kW. NASA has been doing experiments and demo missions to use optical links for higher bandwidth.

Another comparison: Starlink satellites have a couple kW of electrical power available, and each one can do a few Gbps on its radio downlink. But it uses optical links to achieve up to 200 Gbps between satellites for backhaul.