When they locked out anonymous access to old.reddit.com, I moved on.

Yes, I will miss the technical, humor, and local-events discussions. The rest, I won't.

A slight smile crosses my face at the ad views this will cost them - as one might presume with the current old.reddit.com redirect to a login page (which does not show ads), the only way one would be shown ads on the platform going forward is if one is logged in (and doesn't have an ad blocker). So all those ads being served to anonymous viewers goes bye-bye. I very slightly wonder if the bean-counters took this into account.

This move will create a vacuum. Some other thing, for better or worse, will come around to replace it. The internet, as has been long said, will interprit this as damage and route around it. I still have just enough faith in humanity left to believe this...

I would amend the title to: "Please let the way that most people use the internet die".

And that has to start with individuals.

Are you ready to give up social media and clutivate a local group of like-minded friends who will put in the time and effort to socialize in-person?

Are you ready to shop locally for everything you can, and not order online unless you have to?

Are you ready to walk or drive yourself to your favorite local restaurant to pick up your takeout, instead of using a gig delivery service?

Are you ready to eschew LLMs, even to the point of pushing back on your employer if they insist you incorporate LLM output in your work?

The punchline to my little ol' rant here is that I feel most people are too comfortable with, or too addicted to, or whatever to, the kind of things I mention above, and that for most people, if they think about it at all, might have a passing thought of "why should I bother, some other activist will start the fight and then I'll just like their posts".

With blackjack! And hookers! ... In fact, forget the internet!

Boom meet bust.

Which is a bit crazy since the llm probably trained on the open source code to begin with

Tariffs always apply to the import. Yes, I agree if there are cases where digital content is bounced back and forth across borders while incurring some value add step then that becomes hard to track both internally and externally. But no more difficult than likewise having manufacturing that has a supply chain across borders. Real businesses have accounting for such things.

Just... no. Do not want.

Perhaps it would be better if that wasn't the case...

Is there some experimental mode for Siri that can utilize an AI model? Despite the higher error rate I would expect that the LLM is going to give more interesting (engaging) results for certain types of interactions.

The important thing to remember with Starship is that the last two flights incorporated an entirely new design.with multiple experiments. These were fundamentally new rockets largely unlike their largely successful prior versions. Rather than a tweak of a nearly successful version to fix a few things we saw major changes one or two of which unfortunately is causing some catastrophic problems. They never got this far, but even just the tile system included probably a hundred different experiments.

Unfortunately since they didn't get that far it is also possible some of those tile experiments will cause catastrophic failure on re-entry if they try them all again. The thing about experiments is you need to to survive long enough to get to them. Hopefully some of those experiments were more about manufacturing rather than survivability so they can down select the most promising alternatives next ship in production. Regardless, we are still seeing a lot of changes each flight and those changes have the potential to not work.

I view BO's (heh) New Shepard as roughly on par with the risk of everyday commercial air flight. Some factors increase risk, while others (like the fact that the entire spacecraft is thoroughly checked out between flights and telemetered to heck and back) reduce risk. So overall I think it's probably a wash.

It goes straight up and comes straight back down. Atmospheric re-entry heating is a fraction of that of an orbital re-entry.

The capsule is aerodynamically stable on re-entry. The part that should point forward, will always point forward.

The flight is so short that even if atmospheric conditioning failed, as long as the capsule maintains pressure, there should be plenty of breathable atmo for the duration. This is reinforced by the fact that the New Shepard crew are not required to wear pressure suits.

The LES is a simple solid rocket motor - ignite and it will burn, no valves or propellant pressurization to worry about, so it is as sure to work as about anything else in this world, to get you away from the going-boom rocket behind (plus it has already been demostrated both in tests and in a real-life booster failure).

So, I don't think it was that much of a step for JB to ride the first crewed bird, from a technical perspective. And of course there's other reasons why he might want to be on the first flight, but I'll leave it to others to expound on those aspects...

AI is like paying a toddler to be your CEO and paying them double.

Amazing progress doesn't mean AI is ready to take our jobs.

The order renamed the area bounded by the US and the Continental shelf "extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico"

That area is recognized by both countries to be under US jurisdiction by treaty. Mexico could retain the Gulf of Mexico name in their waters without conflicting names.

Greater Distance, low power, simplicity make AM still a very effective communications protocol. Keep it. And go ahead and mandate it.

Romneycare still has onerous penalties on Massachusetts for lack of insurance above a certain income