Mmmm.... if anything it's "what the Google engineers want emphasized". Executives at Google have surprisingly little control over technical decisions. For nearly all of Google's existence it's been an almost completely bottom-up driven company and while in the last few years management has been trying to exert more control it's a very, very slow process.

It's actually the engineering-driven culture that produces Google's infamous tendency to abandon products. Stuff gets built because some engineers think it's a good idea and convince their managers to let them run with it. Then eventually it gets boring and engineers tend to wander off to other teams in search of something interesting. If the product has managed to achieve significant userbase and/or revenue stream (and keep in mind that both are measured on Google scales; so anything less than 100M users or $1B/year is "not signficant").

In a top-down company products don't get built until they have significant executive support, which requires a fairly detailed plan, which gets executed and adjusted, and if an exec's project is in trouble it will get support. At Google products kind of wander out the door and into the world and if they happen to be a hit, great, if not, well, unless there are legally-binding contracts obligating the company to support something, it just gets shut down. Even with the projects that the executive leadership are really excited about (like AI!), their influence is mostly limited to shoveling resources at it.

Anyway, the point is that execs likely have little to no influence on Gemini training beyond setting very broad guidelines, and even those might not have much effect.

That's a strong statement. Can you explain why that isn't also true of human brains? What's the intrinsic difference?

Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

People could go Vicken and avoid beef and pork.

I just got the encl nastygram from our corporate IT
"We have recently noticed your use of unapproved AI tools, which creates a risk of data leakage. You must not use any AI tools that have not been officially approved when working with business-related information. This includes data such as profits, order quantities, and similar metrics, as well as MS Office files, emails, or any other content containing business information.
We want you to use MS 365 Copilot. ....Microsoft Copilot MS 365 protects our intellectual property."

(I'd asked grok for some lunar orbital data and calculations for fun...so not business-related in any case...)

What are the odds that pointing out in writing to my corporate IT that MS's own terms say "for entertainment purposes only" to say nothing of "We donâ(TM)t own Your Content, but we may use Your Content to operate Copilot and improve it. By using Copilot, you grant us permission to use Your Content, which means we can copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat it, and we can give those same rights to others who work on our behalf." is just going to get me more nastygrams and probably on someone's shitlist?

I would guess 100%, and didn't even need Copilot or grok or gemini to figure it out!

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Yeah, early '90s I got a school computer lab to run as a render farm overnight. Had a script that would lock the systems from 11PM - 5AM (building was closed/empty 10PM - 6 AM). Everything worked fine until a power blip shut down the systems. On reboot, they were all locked and my script wasn't running to unlock them.

Luckily, my gf at the time was working as lab assistant, checked on lab before first class and called me (just for technical help). She was pissed when I explained that I had caused the issue but we were able to get everything reset in time for class.

Still, the Comp Graphics prof suggested I look for a career in IT instead of fine arts. Took his advice; the future was so bright I had to wear shades.

NetBSD?

Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.

I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...

I've been wondering for many years before the first traffic camera appeared, why the toll-roads aren't enforcing the speed limits automatically. The time you enter and exit the highway is recorded down to a second. The distance between these two points is known — your average speed could be computed on the spot even with the early 90-ies technology...

The polite police officers would be standing right behind the toll-booths issuing tickets without the drama of hiding in the bushes, then chasing you at highway speeds...

And, yeah, you could lower it by stopping at a rest area — but it'd still be a tremendous disincentive to speed.

I was and continue to hope, that such universal enforcement, affecting all voters, would cause the limits to go up to reasonable figures — or even be abolished completely...

I've run into these people, they're the worst

When have you last checked your compiler's output?

As I recall, Ohio toll highways did this years ago; if your time stamp at the booth was less than a certain number of minutes since the previous, you got a ticket for speeding.
Infallible, and took away the point really.

Sure, I guess you could speed and then pull over waiting before you cross the next gate but... Why bother?

Yes.
Have you heard the quality of her court discussions?
A Supreme Court justice that argues against the minutiae of 'legalese' seriously?