Kurtzman gave us Picard. Although it had some severe problems, it did also give us some great moments with Patrick and Picard.

It's a shame it never reached the highs of Strange New Worlds or Prodigy in terms of the writing, but I'm glad we got it.

He brought credibility to a genera that had previously been lacking in it. Instead of cheesy dialogue and hammy plots, he showed that it could be a solid drama with great performances from the actors. Then he did it again for superhero movies.

His final movie, Avengers Doomsday, is going to be bitter sweet.

Thanks. Based in Germany is good. It's a shame they only do a few services. Part of the problem is that to completely de-Google you need to replace things like Google Maps and Android as well. YouTube is another big one. Nothing else offers anything like as much for sharing video, and of course everyone you want to watch is on there and isn't going to switch to a PeerTube instance for the the 3 people who use it.

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)

If only it was as simple as "don't use it". Used to be that communities formed around mailing lists and webrings. Now if you aren't on Discord, Twitter, and YouTube, you are going to be isolated from them.

I am involved in the Japanese electronics and retro computing scene. When many people left Twitter due to Musk turning it into a Nazi bar, the drama seemed to mostly pass the Japanese users by. English speaking communities fragmented onto BlueSky, the Fediverse, and Twitch. So I lost contact with both some of the English speaking ones, and almost all of the Japanese ones. Man, I just want to read about unusual Japanese street lights, or the new project someone made for the FM Towns Marty, but it's all happening on Twitter. At least the Japanese still use blogs I guess.

They have already put far too much emphasis on AI with their phones. When Pixel phones started they had A+ cameras, the absolute best you could get on a phone, at least for still photos. Video was always a bit weak, but for photos there was nothing else close.

A few years ago they stopped really pushing the camera technology and went all in on AI instead. Their CPUs have mediocre performance, but always tout big AI chops, which rarely amount to anything. The supposedly exclusive features that they unlock always get back-ported to older devices within days of release.

Their cameras are maybe B+ now. Some considerable distance behind the leaders, especially Xiaomi and Honor with their huge sensors and optics. It's so sad.

He was cast by Robert H. Justman. Roddenberry had different ideas about who Picard was supposed to be, but in the end going with a British actor with that commanding voice, a mixture of Yorkshire and stage trained, turned out to be perfect for the role. Steward brought gravitas and subtlety to the role, in equal measure.

Crypto makes it much easier. The crypto can be laundered through mixing, and moved to countries that won't extradite.

In this case they are blaming North Korea, which if accurate means that the money will simply be traded with China and Russia.

Are there any good alternatives? Don't say self host, that's a lot of work and your emails will be blocked anyway.

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

Are you sure? There's so much money tied up in circular loans and IOUs based on potential profits that I'm not sure they are.

For example: NVidia invests billions into OpenAI and Anthropic, who then use that money to buy NVidia products. Has NVidia actually made any money, or does the "demand" for the product simply drive up the speculative stock price?

=Smidge=

He's a photographer, so pretty good bet this is a specialist photo inkjet printing onto a suitable paper stock, rather than the run of the mill paper that comes in larger reams intended for more general use like you'd get at the local supermarket or whatever. Photo papers to be of higher quality, thickness (or even be card stock) and weight and do indeed have special coatings, finer fibres, use more cotton/silk, and so on that could explain the texture. Depending on the printer, it might not even be card or paper at all; some support various fabrics, plastic/acetate, and even metal in some fairly specialist cases. It doesn't look like a fabric, but could possibly be a sheet of white plastic/acetate.

If you haven't read the interview, in it she relates a story where her young daughter's teacher asked her to write three things that made her child special. Apparently she is such an awful mother that she couldn't do that, and turned to AI for assistance. The AI shat out some generic Hallmark style platitudes, and she was delighted.

People like her want to dehumanize all of us to that level.

Also, is there a point, when any app uploaded to one of these app stores would have to basically comply with the same terms and conditions as apps on the Google Play Store, from the looks of it?

Google is trying to claw back some of their precious per-sale revenue loss by charging that $10K, and increasing the barrier to entry to the point where only serious businesses will attempt it. It's obvious that having third party app stores provides no benefit for Google, so they are doing everything they legally can to stem their losses. With monopoly app stores, Google and Apple basically have a license to print money. The incentives are not great for consumer freedom.

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.