Can I pause for a second to just admire this guy’s walk-in pantry?

I think I’ve had it happen once over something like a decade of using them. From what I remember it was because I was running something in the terminal that ignored the signals it was sent, so the laptop didn’t properly go to sleep. Of course, the program ended up failing because a lot of the things it depended on did suspend themselves and that caused major breakage.

Luckily I noticed a whining sound (fans at maximum speed) from my backpack before anything too bad happened.

Reddit existed long before Digg died, and was so much better before the Digg refugees streamed in.

Apple laptops are typically extremely good when it comes to sleep and suspend.

A major advantage of having a very small range of hardware you have to support is that it’s pretty easy to test all possible combinations and make sure they work well together. As far as I’m concerned, Apple has been, and probably always will be the undisputed champion of doing this right.

I’ll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.

For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?

AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.

So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.

Government officials are really scared of changing the status quo. They’re really afraid that if they get rid of anti-circumvention laws, that they’ll become a pariah state. In the past that probably would have been true. The US would have thrown its weight around, and Europe would have fallen in line and boycotted whoever it was. Many countries also have a lot of Hollywood productions made there. The major Hollywood studios care about anti-circumvention because they think it guarantees their profits. So, if these countries scaled back anti-circumvention, Hollywood would probably throw a fit and cut them off too. Even if the economic impact of getting rid of anti-circumvention were a huge positive, Hollywood has a big cultural impact worldwide.

I’d like to see it happen, but I think the most likely scenario is that a country that already doesn’t fully respect US copyright laws, like Switzerland or Singapore, might take an additional step and stop respecting anti-circumvention.

Nice.

Ok, now tell us what your magic 8 ball said.

Once again proving that while AI can’t do a programmer’s job, a tech writer’s job, an artist’s job, a composer’s job, a doctor’s job, or any other job involving thinking and understanding – it can easily do a CEO’s job and probably better than the CEO.

Yes, any journalist who uses that term should be relentlessly mocked. Along with terms like “Grok admitted” or “ChatGPT confessed” or especially any case where they’re “interviewing” the LLM.

These journalists are basically “interviewing” a magic 8-ball and pretending that it has thoughts.

No, they haven’t. They’re effectively prop masters. Someone wants a prop that looks a lot like a legal document, the LLM can generate something that is so convincing as a prop that it might even fool a real judge. Someone else wants a prop that looks like a computer program, it can generate something that might actually run, and one that will certainly look good on screen.

If the prop master requests a chat where it looks like the chatbot is gaining agency, it can fake that too. It has been trained on fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Wargames. It can also generate a chat where it looks like a chatbot feels sorry for what it did. But, no matter what it’s doing, it’s basically saying “what would an answer to this look like in a way that might fool a human being”.

Yeah, I don’t like the question because it seems like it’s fishing for a sycophantic answer. But, it’s good to give the candidate an opportunity to explain why this role is a particularly good fit for them, and why they’d be happier and/or more likely to stick around if they got the job.

we should teach them these things directly, instead of relying on science classes

Ok, so by “these things” you mean logic, argument analysis, media literacy, critical thinking, etc.

Yes, I had classes like that, and I think they’re much more important than science and math classes. You can learn science and math on your own from YouTube videos, but you need the media literacy to know which YouTube videos you can trust.

It sounds like they lost you in 3 months, not immediately.

They work, but there are no humans inside them.

It’s amazing how complicated just the O2 cycle is. Basically, we don’t yet how to do it without a whole planet being involved.

Like, plants do release O2 sometimes, but they also use O2 as fuel when they grow. Growing a plant requires light. On the earth that’s easy, just put it in the sun. On Mars there’s no atmosphere and no magnetic field, so if you just put a plant on the surface they’ll die. So, you need to grow them underground in a mostly earth-like atmosphere at mostly earth-like pressure lit by artificial lights.

So, you plant a lot of plants deep underground lit by bright artificial lights. Then you need to supply the plants with a lot of water. Some of that water will be released into the air, but some of it will be incorporated into the plant’s body. There’s a whole water cycle that isn’t yet fully understood.

What about the soil? On earth worms and other bugs break down leaf litter and other things into usable soil and bees pollinate many of the plants. So, do you ship up a bunch of bugs? You’d have to supply a whole ecosystem of them so they live in balance. You could go with hydroponics instead, but then you’d need a constant supply of nutrients for the plants, and given the amount of plant matter needed for just one human, that would be a huge supply of nutrients.

I’d love to see another honest, scientifically rigorous attempt at a biosphere project. Building a closed ecosystem on Earth is easy-mode compared to doing it anywhere else, but so far all the Biospheres have been failures. IMO until we can easily do it on Earth, we’re nowhere near ready to do it in space, on the moon, or on another planet.

“Robertson” is confusing, “square” is straightforward. This Canadian thinks the name Robertson should be forgotten.

Ok, it’s more accurate to say that the fact that the screw will cam out is something that was key to its adoption, even if it wasn’t designed to happen.

Quoting “One Good Turn - A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw” by Witold Rybczynski:

Paradoxically, this very quality is what attracted automobile manufacturers to the Phillips screw. The point of an automated driver turning the screw with increasing force popped out of the recess when the screw was fully set, preventing overscrewing. Thus, a certain degree of cam-out was incorporated into the design from the beginning. However, what worked on the assembly line has bedevilled handymen ever since.

https://forum.gcaptain.com/t/were-phillips-screwdrivers-designed-to-cam-out/57870/9

There was probably at least a year between the screw format being invented and the first screws being manufactured.

I think Torx tend to be used on things that are assembled by machines. It might be better to use Torx on things that are machine-assembled. In that case you have to care about the wear and tear on the screw drivers, and a Torx design might last a bit longer. With a square head there’s going to be a tendency for the driver to become rounded over time.