It was Aliens. They were out there raking the sand making it all smooth.

When you feed it a giant cesspool of invalidated data (The internet) you should not expect a single response to be accurate. none of these AI's are fed a carefully curated data set.

But companies are expecting to replace all their programmers with AI.... What could possibly go wrong?

This program has the stink of regulatory capture.

I pay $25/month for 50 Mbits Internet without any discount. That's $5 less than the "discount" the ISPs are milking out of the FCC. I live in a small town suburb so it's not like I have a lot of ISPs competing for my money.

Meh. It's not used anymore now.

Don't forget your power supply. The video shows 300W at 6 ghz.

Great for heating your room in the winter.

In a dictatorship you would be right.

But in a capitalist society, some of the technically literate will realize there's an opportunity by selling specialized firewalls for TVs. The choices will proliferate for awhile until a few clear winner emerge and their inventors will make a nice sum of money selling to the technically illiterate.

One of the virtues of capitalism is it decentralizes power - an effect dictatorships abhor.

Just try to say no. Adobe screws you anyway.

I used to use an Adobe Acrobat utility, Distiller, to produce pdfs for my class. It was part of a series of tools that I had cobbled together over the years to generate individualized documents for each student.

Every few months or so, my workflow would go sideways. 99 out of 100 times, it was Adobe's fault. They'd update distiller, without my permission, and screw up the settings.

They pulled that stunt once too often last Spring. Exasperated, I finally sat down and learned how to get the same result using Python. I was so happy to purge Adobe Acrobat from my computer.

Hello, my name is jmichael and I've been clean for 185 days.

I think TSMC may have averted an invasion by warning China that mere possession of their physical plant wouldn't be sufficient to continue operations. TSMC tweeted that they rely on a global supply chain to make chips. Invade Taiwan and away goes that supply chain. Moreover, if TSMC's equipment is damaged beyond repair during an invasion, it would be years before the equipment was replaced, if at all.

The U.S. has repeatedly said it would support reunification with the caveat it was a peaceful process that Taiwan agreed to. China screwed up when they didn't honor their commitment to allow Hong Kong to self rule after Britain left. They promised a One Country - Two Systems approach which they reneged on when Britain left. Reneging on Hong Kong warned the Taiwanese they wouldn't fare any better after reunification.

A path forward would entail restoring self rule to Hong Kong. Leave Hong Kong alone and Taiwan wouldn't be as reluctant to join the mainland. If China was smart, China could end up becoming the United States of Asia by letting other countries maintain their democratically elected governments and joining China like the Territories joined the United States. The word "States" in "United States" means self rule for each region subject to the powers reserved to the Federal government.

    For that to happen, China would need a new Deng Xiaopeng to replace Xi Jinping. China's huge strides forward were due to Deng allowing private ownership, a huge break from Mao's legacy. Hopefully the Chinese recognize that before WWIII breaks out.

Nothing serious, just a fun read despite Scalzi injecting his political bias. Scalzi and I don't share political outlooks but nonetheless, he is a gifted storyteller.

The story weaves together several popular sci fi tropes into a single arc.

FWIW, I had no idea what a Kaiju was until yesterday.

Recommended.

Musk said the current generation of Starlink isn't sustainable economically and that they need Starship to loft the next generation of satellites to make it sustainable.

If Starship works, I think you're right, Starlink will own the market until competing launch providers master reusability.

If Starship fails, it remains to be seen who is still around in a few years.

A friend at work is dealing with cancer. A little over a year ago, he started receiving a stem cell treatment that put the cancer into remission.

He asked his oncologist if he was cured and the doctor responded, "let's take it 6 months at a time."

Unfortunately he just found out the stem cell therapy has quit working. But still, he's had a year of living in remission that he otherwise may not have had.

I don't doubt we'll eventually beat cancer but it's going to take a lot of small steps to get there.

Stephen Hawking said that figuring out whether electrons and quarks were point particles or had structure, i.e., where hadrons, would require an accelerator the size of the solar system.

He wasn't confident the machine would be built in his lifetime.

Warren isn't greedy enough. Our local sewer utility is privately owned and the California Public Utility Commission guarantees them a 22% return. As you might imagine, our sewer bills are north of $150/month as a result.

California has gone from the land of opportunity to the land of graft. The middle class is the chump that suffers the cost.

Remember that for a study's findings to be considered true, the study should be replicated by a different group.

That's especially true in medical studies as both Amgen and Bayer independently found that more than half of their internal research was not reproducible. Those two studies woke a lot of folks up to the fact that scientists are humans and make mistakes just like everyone else.

tl;dr Skepticism is warranted until study is replicated.