I'm old enough to remember being told that we were all going to freeze due to global cooling. Panic, oh the horror and terror!

I'm also old enough to remember and no you weren't. You were told that, absent human interference, we were in a warm period (inter-glacial) in an ice age and would be heading back into a colder period where much of the northern hemisphere developed world would see glaciers return.

Over tens of thousands of years.

Natural climate change is slow. The Earth has enormous thermal inertia and the variability in the sun's output is tiny compared to the long cycle orbital effects.

Obviously once we start talking giga-years then the Earth will be toasty warm (before it's most likely swallowed by the expanding sun).

Using the 1970s stuff on the inter-glacial we are in to assert that anthropogenic climate change is not a problem is like using the red giant end of the world to assert that it will be the end of the world.

... is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting, among other things, in the fact that migrating your upstream Git repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

Git is one of those things that bring the genius of well planned and built software to full display.

BTW, if you want to host your own web-interfaces upstream repo, Gitea is a very neat open source software for doing exactly that.

If a bot-car can be held up by a gangster simply stepping in front of it in a situation where you'd actually like to rather plow through, how safe is that car for the people in it? Given, cars are more dangerous for their environment most of the time, but sometimes its the environment that is more dangerous for the car and the people in it.

Also driving through a rising river that is a meter deep may usually be a bad idea, but if the flood is rising it might be well worth the risk and a very reasonable decision to attempt it. You want to be able to actively make your car do that in those situations.

... wether a dumb command or AI deletes everything makes no difference.

I hope he had it in place or learnt his lesson.

No need for AI or other fancy stuff. Just redo your constitutional setup. Multi-party representative system, 5% barrier to entry for parliament, President becomes (largely) a ceremonial role, coalition government, independent non-private federal bank, independent default subsidized media, any member of a government that exceed 3% of debt per legislative period may not be re-elected ever again and a few more details and you're good for the next 250 years.

This isn't rocket-science. We all know what's broken and needs to be fixed and contrary to what some USians like to think, you can have a total revolution with not a single bullet fired. It's not that the vast majority of people in the US ain't noticing that fundamentals of the US system have to change. You got this.

After all, you guys already helped build a (quite well) working prototype of USA 2.0. It's called "modern Germany".

Given, the Soviet-Russian style of space technology has always been more pragmatic. But this looks rickety and somewhat ghetto-style, like deterioration by neglegt. Or they used chinesium for the structure and it failed before EOL.

However, it could also very well be that they've been using those exact same folding gantries for decades beyond EOL now and the finally simply failed due to wear and tear, no matter how rugged they initially were built.

It's probably a combination of both.

It would be absolutely hilarious if they can repair this russian-Soyuz style with a crew of welders and junk from a scrapyard in two weeks or so, spec-ing be damned. I wouldn't be surprised if exactly that happens. LOL!

Nobody knows what LLMs are fundamentally capable of doing.

We know exactly what LLMs are capable of doing, at least as they exist today. How they might be used to deliberately or inadvertently influence people is a different, and open, question.

There is an area where LLMs might significantly help research - and it might even be applicable to space flight propulsion, and that's bring in knowledge from other fields.

For example, there could be some quirk about the way the squids and octopuses propel themselves in the water which is known to a handful of physicists who have studied the fluid dynamics in detail but isn't generally widely known.

A space propulsion engineer asking an LLM about a problem they're working on will likely "find" this knowledge that wouldn't otherwise be obvious or even obvious who to ask.

And a real world historical example, radar chirping was classified. Bats do it. And the name "chirp" came later, after it was independently discovered and understood in bats.

But it's vanishingly unlikely that LLMs will provide any insight into a research problem to anyone not already well versed in the field and even if they do, it will be because the researchers have sifted that thread of gold from the haystack of straw. The LLM being incapable of telling the difference.

... has to be just about undisputed #1 of nightmare material. Think Warhammer 40k but IRL.Basically the exact opposite of the Ian Banks culture. Imagine a fanatic revengeful god the l00nies can actually talk to and get new mayhem instructions from. Really malicious ones at that.

Yippee, nice times ahead.

No wonder the experts are warning us left, right and center.

Conflating education with academic rank.

Both are not the same. A detail politics likes to ignore because that enables noise-making.

Or at least it's used as one.

And that does have it's advantages, believe it or not.

Any untrained office worker can open an Excel sheet and run the app that's built with it without any extra training or security and privilege stuff getting in the way. Office workers can build their own logic without having to shop around for some developer to take care of their problem and the ERP budget doesn't have to be touched. And it's even modern purely functional programming. ... That's how you eventually get Shadow IT that often becomes mission critical.

What SQL used to be in the 70ies Excel & VBA is today. Wether that's an improvement I couldn't really say für sure, but that's the way it is.

The internet is not the web, as you should know if you are still here in 2025. Videos with and without audio as well as music are all on the net. AI, including LLMs with the right interfaces, can watch humans, listen to humans, and perceive music just as well as we can. Stop and think before you post next time.

... and should've closed with "Would you like a more concise or more elaborate version of this article?". 8-)

Bullshit. Einstein didn't observe that nothing can move faster than light; he concluded this based on his thought experiment and then formulated his theory.

You mean it spouts a bunch of words it strings together, never saying anything intelligent, and having no idea what an intelligent person will make of it? It seems AI is more like you than you realize.

It's pretty evident that you have never had a discussion with Carl.