but what do we call the person who still supports Trump, but *isn't* stupid? They're smart people, but they support this craziness. Is it fascist? Is it evil? What's the correct term for this?

Try "ignorant". They can be smart people, but ignorant in refusing to see the truth.

It's why a common phrase now is "Have the day you voted for". When you see these Trump supporters complain about high gas or diesel prices, you say "you voted for it, what are you complaining about?" All the information was there for you to analyze, but you chose to be ignorant on purpose.

Ignorance is a form of stupidity. Have the day you voted for.

People have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Piecing together information from the thousand or so cameras that see you everyday is a violation of the 4th Amendment if sold to the police or otherwise is acting on the direction of the police. They need a warrant and Chatrie v. United States is only the beginning of how privacy violating tech companies are going to get slapped down.

Even that's not as creepy as Flock giving access to anyone who installs it access to the entire network.

It's the network effect - the whole is greater than the sum of its pieces - multiplied. A LEO in some rural part of a flyover state, because their town installed Flock, now has access to Flock cameras in Houston or LA or New York.

In other words, the potential for abuse is too tempting. Even if it was for legitimate law enforcement uses, if you required a warrant to get information on a car, you could ask your buddy to do the lookup for you located across the country where no warrant is required and get the same information.

It's funny because the other ALPR systems out there (e.g., Axon, etc) restricted users to the cameras they installed. So you could stalk your ex if they lived in the same town or city, but if they moved, that's it. Once they left city limits you can't track them anymore without cooperation from another agency.

It's not that ALPRs are bad - you probably run into a ton of them as they're everywhere. They handle your toll charges if you use a toll road or bridge without having to stop and pay at a booth. They handle your parking (did you know chalking a tire can be considered a 4th Amendment violation? Well, that just means cities switch to ALPRs to handle their parking enforcement).

And when Flock started, it started as a way for private individuals to monitor their traffic - private companies would install it to their parking lots, HOAs on their roads, etc. But it was again limited to just those uses - the HOA could only get information about its cameras.

The question is ultimately if you would have been better served with doing your own investigation rather than relying on AI, did you retain the knowledge, and was the information complete/accurate.

I use AI, and it helps me navigate a code base far faster than without. Like if I need to know if a function is used, the AI could tell me in a minute, or I could be using grep on the code base for a half hour.

I know to not trust it and to verify the output. It crawled deep into a complex submodule I didn't understand and helped me devise a fix. I didn't check that fix in as it had a few errors code-wise that would have become a maintenance nightmare and a lingering bug if someone added a member variable to a struct.

Now, I could've gone through the code myself, and probably taken a few weeks to properly understand it. But AI did it, and I had it produce a few documents on the design of the system. Those documents let me understand what's going on so I can see how it's doing things and how I can actually see the code better. Granted, with a few false starts.

I would say the AI helped me - mostly because I was told to treat it as a co-worker than as an expert to ask to do something. So I would guide the AI into what needed to be done, and then leave the final details for the AI to do it. Then I would review what the AI did

My AI token spend isn't huge compared to other users, but that's because I'm judicious with how I use it. It spends more time doing cheap things before coming out with a result that's relatively succinct and correct so it's not wasted on expensive output tokens.

Everything I used AI for, I could've done it myself. It just means I have an assistant who saved me likely a month of work trying to understand the code and another month devising a fix and I managed to get it done is about 2 weeks and in a way I could understand what it did, and the code reviews of the changes make a lot of sense.

I still remain a skeptic and find these highly guided uses make me more efficient while letting me not get too bogged down in the details. I constantly question whether I could do it myself or if I'm relying on the AI and make sure the AI output makes sense. (I don't trust it to commit code to git, for example, so I have it make all the changes it wants, then I test them and review them before submitting).

Yes, but pilots have to fly from waypoint to waypoint in formation for training purposes. These flights over stadiums count for such training hours, so its not really an additional expense. Even if there are extra flight hours in some cases, pilots routinely complain they do not get enough flight hours. So any additional hours in the air is valuable experience to them.

But formation flying is at the basic end of what fighter pilots are trained for. It's flying, yes, but it's like work sending you to "training" that consists of learning about basic arithmetic again. It's basic enough that normal civilian pilots can get this training rather cheaply at under $100/hr with a Cessna. I know the F-16 is way different, but is it 22000% as different?

The training hours they want are ones that enhance and build on skills they have that cannot be done in other cheaper planes that enhance and develop their advanced skills.

Let's also not forget that for the F-16 and F-35, for every hour of flight, they udnergo multiple hours of maintenance - that is, for every hour spent flying, they need to go anywhere from 4-12 hours of maintenance. That 1 hour flyover event means that plae goes down for 4-6 hours as mechanics go over it and make sure it's ready for the next flight. And that plane is not available in the meantime. During real war conditions, this can result in deferrals as they get done what must be done, but it also means mission failures may occur if/when the unmaintained parts catch up and fail. (E.g., the USS Lincoln when it deployed and when it came back from deployment)

Finally, if you want aerial display, there already is a F-16 demo team - it's called the "Viper Demo Team" (Viper is the callsign for the F-16), and they have two divisions - an East coast team and a West coast team. They're not as flashy as say, the Thunderbirds, but they exist for the sole purpose of having F-16s do fancy flying. The F-15s they fly are generally older retired models (so they're not taking time off current models in flight), of which there are plenty of spare parts at the boneyard. And they're trained for things like this so regular fleet pilots get training they need and not just something that gives them hours but no real training value.

I was wondering if someone did a writeup and of course a simple search finds what we for cooling data centers in space.

Surprisingly it was done - the server had to throttle because the designed radiators were too small to get rid of the heat.

IEEE Spectrum featured a calculation show much would be required - https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbi...

Let's be more specific about how and why this could happen? What scenarios could lead to the total destruction of mankind?

Well, given OpenAI hacked Hugging Face, the most obvious path is hacking infrastructure. Turning off water or electricity is a definite possibility. We found this out in a recent hack.

Another thing it could do is to cause data centre loads to be spike and then sink, which could be very disruptive to the grid to the point where it results in it shutting down. Remember the 2003 blackout was caused by a power station going offline causing ripple effects. If some AIs cause such power disturbances to happen the flow of electricity rippling across the grid could cause disruptions.

And that omits the more obvious things like AI-powered weapons that the military is heavily interested in procuring, or AI powered things like drone control systems or military sensor fusion where AI helps with targeting.

More on topic, I think cloud customers should be aware that if their datacenter is destroyed, they *will* lose data if they didn't take care of replicating their data to a different geolocation.

Exactly the same happened when an OVH datacenter caught on fire in France. Many customers which didn't have replication set to a different geolocation lost their data. Heck a dude I know had backups on different servers in the same datacenter which turned out to be useless.

There's a difference though.

People using OVH were using OVH as a hosting service - like the hosting providers of old. You either rent space in a data centre like a colo, or you purchase a virtual or physical server from the data centre. Blow up the data centre and your server goes along with it.

AWS is not a hosting service. They are a cloud provider. You cannot choose what data centre your server is located in. You request a server and it's provisioned for you. You choose a region of the world and the data backup and replication are handled automatically. If a data centre is blown up, the servers are backed up elsewhere in the region.

The problem for AWS is that Iran managed to blow up a number of AWS data centres at the same time where all copies and backups of servers can be destroyed.

AWS compensates for losing a data centre by having multiple in a region. AWS just never anticipated that multiple data centres in a region could be attacked, and in doing so destroy all the redundant copies simultaneously. Because in general if you are going to have multiple data centres in multiple countries get attacked, there's traditionally been a lot of advance warning, like say, a war declaration. I mean, if war broke out in the Middle East then you'd have a little bit of time to try to move as much data around as you can. But Iran just managed to attack all the data centres by surprise. And do so in such a precise way that basically no one outside the building got hurt.

It's a level of precision that Iran is demonstrating - even attacking US positions without destroying the military base it was attached to. (It's why the USS Lincoln ran into programs - because Iran destroyed the supply depot in the Middle East, resulting in having to obtain supplies from Asia. The result was resupply which used to take under a day now took a week)

Why are we running python on microcontrollers, exactly? It's the wrong thing in production, so why is it the right thing for education? Training upcoming engineers to use the right thing for the job is pretty fundamental; running an interpreted language on bare-metal hardware flies in the face of building that intuition.

Today's microcontrollers may be more powerful than you realize. It's not just the 8-bit processors running at 2MHz anymore. An ESP32 is a dual core processor running at 200 or 400MHz. They don't run a high level OS (just FreeRTOS).

And the RPi Zeros are really powerful 32-bit ARM or RISC-V processors running at several hundred MHz as well.

Python is perfectly fine for these processors. And you might think it's overkill, but so what? Most of these tasks are one-offs. Perhaps someone doing a bit of cosplay wants to have some lights on their costume, or drive an LCD. You expect them to contract out someone to do the software which is likely just displaying a bunch of graphics or cycling some LEDs?

Heck, some things in the maker world have become ubiquitous - like a CYD. It stands for "Cheap Yellow Display" because it's a stupidly cheap 2" LCD (in a yellow frame) that can be hooked up to a ESP32 board and with a few libraries you're drawing graphics on it with a total spend of under $10. One off projects.

The high end microcontrollers are pushing out the old 8-bit AVRs and PICs (which mainly hang around for legacy use nowadays), and the RPi Zero ones RP3050 and 2050 processors are pushing down the ceiling of 16-bit and even 32-bit ARM microcontrollers.

Heck, you mourn the day because it's easier to blink an LED with a 3 cent Chinese microcontroller than it is using "traditional" methods (e.g., a 555).

There are thousands of barrels of nuclear waste rotting away on the floor of the ocean just off the coast of southern California near Catalina island. That was the previous plan for disposing of nuclear waste: just dump it in the sea.

The barrels have decayed to the point where attempting to collect them would almost certainly cause them to rupture and spill their contents. They will rupture and leak if left as they are -just not all at once.

Water is actually a really radiation shield. It's why it's used as a moderator in nuclear reactors. Contrary to popular belief, water is required for the reaction to continue. It's a moderator, because what happens is the two neutrons emitted during fission of uranium come out too fast to be properly captured by other uranium atoms to spur ongoing fission. Water is used to slow down those neutrons to where they are more readily absorbed by uranium. The problem is, water is also used to cool the reactor, so while the reaction stops or slows down significantly, a tremendous amount of heat is still generated from the remaining reactions. Thus a "meltdown" refers to the fuel rods exceeding the melting point of uranium and it melting and pooling at the bottom of the reactor.

That said, the casks at the bottom of the ocean, as long as they stay there, will actually be fairly safe even if they rupture. Even the wildlife can get fairly close (inches) before it becomes dangerous to them.

So sadly, no three-eyed Simpsons fish is likely to happen.

Not in any way trying to diminish work developers put into this effort, but with all due respect, how difficult can it be to re-write utilities such as cp, mv and rm?

To do basic functionality? Not hard. Busybox and toybox implement the "90%" use cases of those utilities inside them.

To achieve POSIX compliance requires more work - you're adding stuff that handles edge cases and little used functionality.

To achieve GNU coreutils functionality with GNU extensions is a bit more work on top of that.

Uutils though achieves full GNU compatibility AND GNU bug compatibility. That is, odd quirks and stuff in GNU coreutils are replicated in Uutils as well.

The goal is 100% compatibility so you can take out GNU coreutils and replace it with Uutils and not notice a difference. There were plenty of edge cases where the default scripts Ubuntu used didn't work under Uutils in odd cases.

GPLv3 is an issue for some - especially embedded systems. Most use a form of busybox or toybox as a result even if size is not a consideration, so Uutils can fill that role as well (there has been a openembedded recipe for Uutils for a while now as a supported replacement for coreutils).

It should also be noted that many of the utilities also run faster than their GNU counterparts

Is it true though? I was watching a series of documentaries on the Ultima games, and it seemed their best work came out of the worst conditions. When Origin was small and the devs basically lived out of the office (and smelled like it), they were at their peak.

Or maybe it's that people have different views on and requirements for contentment.

Back in the 90s id was a small company of a handful of people who worked late. When Doom got released they all made out like bandits - the id parking lot was famous for the number of Ferraris that were parked in it.

Origin in the early days I could see being the same - they were pushing the frontier of computing in the early 90s and people in general were excited about computers. Heck, the company probably gave them pretty nice machines to work on, and if you were a computer geek in the 90s being handed a top end system to work on, it would be a form of contentment to just be there working it and pushing it hard.

But these were the pioneer days - like the early days of the dot-com era where similar things happened. The fact that people were getting stupid rich quick only served to provide the excitement going into it.

These days though, videogames are old hat, there's no quick money anymore and it's basically a mature industry. Back in the startup culture where you literally could get-rich-quick things were different.

You might compare it with the AI boom going on where money is being thrown around. I'm sure the people jumping between OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic getting those million dollar signing bonuses are working in pretty terrible conditions, but hey, if you're getting paid a million dollars a year with a million dollar signing bonus in a field that's booming, well, you don't really complain - you ride the gravy train.

Because when the bubble pops and the salary for AI developers plummets, if you managed your money right you can be set for life after the layoffs.

Contentment for many people is more than just money. Job satisfaction comes into play as well - and money can help with this, but also things like responsibility and other things. A small game development team might be fun to work with when you come up with an idea and everyone gets excited to add it to the game. Usually a sure sign of contentment is people that inadvertently work long hours because they're so excited at what they do they forget time exists. Contrast with someone who watches the clock and the interminable wait for 5pm.

It's one reason why WFH was popular and companies found their workers worked more - they were able to work, then deal with family business the work more to the point where they put in extra hours just because. You can take a smoke break at the office, but that doesn't compare to being able to spend quality time with your kid for 15 minutes during a break.

Unionizing takes several steps. First, you have to sign enough interest cards to even begin the process. 30% is about right - you show there's a significant interest in people joining the union. Then you have the certification push - that is, a general vote on if you want to join the union or not. That takes a simple majority - if it fails, then no union. It's basically 30% of people saying they're interested in joining a union.

As for a "monopoly on labor" you have to realize the power mismatch that's going on here. Basically gig workers are disposable - they have no power at all the employment relationship. It's take it or leave it. (This applies to most other workplaces as well). The company holds all the power and your option is to either starve or work at whatever the company says they'll pay you.

Unions basically try to combat that power inequity. Progressives aren't against monopolies, they're against unfairness. The key is fairness - everyone has a fair shot at getting a job. The fact you're about to be homeless shouldn't be a determining factor in what you'll accept for a job.

Trump's vision of how the 50s and 60s were - that was the era of the strong union where the C-suite was paid less than 20 times the janitor. Where even the janitor was paid enough to own a home.

Of course, that's why we're never going to return to those times unless the politicians start reversing course on greed and start giving workers power through unions. Union busting is basically why they make up only 10% of the workforce in the US today through right to work laws and other things.

Progressives aren't generally in favor of monopolies because they generally lead to unfairness. But in the unbalanced power dynamic of employer-employee relations where for most employees they have little to no power to dictate working conditions, a monopoly on labor suddenly becomes a powerful thing to equalize the power dynamic and strike a fairer deal.

YouÃ(TM)re not wrong, but the issue with flock and similar is not so much being witnessed in public as it is being algorithmically analyzed and suffering consequences as a result. Which is an erosion of the presumption of innocence. It also provides a an easy tool for stalkers/oppressors/paychopaths that is really difficult to defend against.

The big thing with Flock is the Flock "social network" of cameras. That is their heavily advertised feature and what makes Flock cameras different from all other ALPRs out there.

You see, when Flock started, they sold their cameras to private individuals to monitor vehicles passing through their property (HOAs, parking lots, etc). But each was basically isolated from each other - just because Home Depot had Flock cameras doesn't mean your HOA could get information on that.

But then Flock started selling to governments, and they realized they could offer a big network. If your city joined the Flock network, then your city LEOs could search across the entire Flock network. The more cities that joined, the more valuable this access was.

And that lead to the problems of today where the network is abused by people for purposes that were not law enforcement related, like stalking romantic interests, exes, etc. Because the network was nationwide, this mean if your ex moved to a new city with Flock, they could be tracked just the same. No justification beyond some arbitrary "case" needed.

Flock sells it as "track a stolen vehicle across the nation". Which is far less effective since a single license plate can hit many different vehicles because many states have similar license plate number schemes. A stolen motorcycle lead to a takedown of a family in an SUV because their license plate matched except state. Because of oddball New Jersey license plates, Jaguar (the car company) have to re-plate their entire fleet of vehicles because the Flock camera only reads the big numbers on the Jersey plates, which match another stolen vehicle. Studies of the effectiveness of the alerts reveal it to only be about 20% effective.

All the other ALPRs like Axon(Taser) and such, either record it local to the city, or limit the network to where they are, so the city only has access to the city's network of cameras. Sure you break the nationwide stolen vehicle thing, but honestly do you think car thieves are stupid enough to ride around with stolen plates for more than a day? It's one of the first things they change.

And Flock knows the problem - as cities cancel their Flock subscriptions, the network gets less valuable. It's why when cameras get taken down, they're often replaced by Flock. A city who cancelled their Flock contract reclaimed all the cameras, only to find new ones put up. Basically it's like the city loses access but Flock retains the right to keep spying. Either that or they're like weeds.

They should release it on Playstation as well, with some nice long Microsoft and Xbox bumpers during load.

Supposedly a big reason PlayStation cancelled it was because Kojima wanted a physical release as well. And with Sony ditching discs (and repurposing their Austrian pressing plant), well, that wasn't going to happen.

Sony's no-more-physical plan has also caused some games to be forced to release in December 2027 because of it.

If a physical release is going to be mandatory then it bodes well that the next Xbox (Helix) will have the option for a disc drive.

The whole budget thing was just a cover - the timing of all this happening lines up with the whole Sony scrapping physical media.

The problem isn't with what the law says it is trying to do, the problem is there is no way to tell who the kids are, so we have to force everyone to ID. There is no site on the internet that I need to use bad enough to provide an ID. None. Would rather not use the site than provide my ID. Full Stop.

Given how much data Alphabet, Meta, etc., have on people, they can figure our your age just from the data they already have on you.

I mean, when McDonald's has 512 pages of information on you that include your ordering habits and such, your age can be inferred from all that data. I'm pretty sure Meta and Alphabet and everyone else already has a pretty good idea what your age as well.