Defenestresque

So we don't devolve into semantics, I am just going to use the term "special tax status" to denote anything thab the regular payment flow. I'm doing that on purpose, because part of the argument is that tax exempt and tax deductible are different things. Your argument, as far as I understand, does not actually rely on this distinction. It just comments on it.

I read your comments and what I ended up inferring was that it relies on a few premises:

1. Google states in their policy that their billing platform cannot be used for [special tax status]. 2. Google would be presented with an undue burden if they had to alter their processes to process donations with [special tax status], which may potentially involv extensive manual review manually. 3. Therefore, despite the wording, the rules and undue burden are clear that you cannot use Google Play billing for [special tax status].

I've read the rest of your comments downthread and I think that I'm representing your position accurately. Again, if I'm not, I legitimately want corrections.

The issue with going from the premise to the conclusion is that if you look at their actual payment flow to the Open Collective it seems to be just a webview to their donation page. I mean, it doesn't look like Google's payment flow at all and I'm pretty sure Google doesn't accept ACH payments directly.

If Google wants to avoid extra work, they literally just can do nothing about it and the donations on that page will go to a tax exempt organization.

I'm going to take a look at the rules right now and either update this comment or reply to it. (Sorry, I figured I would post it because I'm not sure when I would be able to post another.)

P.S. I probably should have out of this to the top, but I do want to mention that several people pointed this out in the comments but I wanted to be a bit more specific about the payment flow, and what we're actually debating.

A fascinating , yet sad, post-mortem.

Anyone wheeling and dealing along in the shadows between "politics" and "deliverable, functioning product" should read it. Or, I guess, paste the link into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to summarize for them, lessons learned in bullet points and how it could apply to $their_job.

But I'm generally a weirdo who finds these kinds of reports fascinating, so don't purely go on my recommendation.

Huh! Seems quite obvious in retrospect, but the forced competition for limited resources that encourages growth, while fairly dystopian* if applied to humans, is an interesting idea in terms of forests, as long as you don't believe trees can experience qualia such as grief, a fear of death, unhappiness, etc.

[0] I was thinking of this kind of human dystopia: "overpopulation could never be a problem: if people run out of food they'll either invent a better alternative to farms or simply arrange themselves in groups where people who can achieve the highest metric that the head/quorum of their society wants the fastest will be fed and the new growth that can't be supported and can't reach that level will simply "select themselves put of existence", increasing our evolution by >10x"

P.S. ..that being said, if a confirmed traveller from the future tells me that in 100 years we discover that trees have feelings (just like we discovered that plants communicate about threats and exhibit behaviour that is definitely anthropomorphized by a tiny, but loud portion of people as selflessness), I would not be at all surprised. I mean I would be surprised, but about as surprised as I was when I learned that a captive octopus that lived in a tank kept shorting out the electrical system in his room at night. No one had any idea wtf was happening until they put cameras and found out that when it wanted to go to sleep at night, it would turn off the lights by spraying salt water into electrical outlets until the breakers tripped so he could get some nice dark sleep.

It seems to be a trait from the time we became _the_ apex predator that we are way too overconfident about our understanding of our environment, especially the other creatures that share this rock with us. Are we the baddies?

I'd add more but this already went on a huge tangent. Thanks for the link.

github.com/charmracelet/crush

The company that had that acrimonious split from OpenCode. Still, fully written in Go and compared to node-based harnesses, uses 1/5th the RAM. (At least for me.)

Works with any provider (including OpenRouter free ones).

No conflict of interest here, just a happy "customer" of this excellent resource.

I've been guilty of repeating this claim on the basis of not fully reading the original analyses. Thank you for your sources and a reminder to stay humble about what you might think you know.

For the curious, the rest of the types:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

I'm glad I'm not alone in missing native apps. I get that it's easier to code a note-taking Electron app, but every time I look at a Linux terminal app written in JavaScript it makes me want to cry.

I know I'm beating a dead HN horse here, but how the hell is it possible that megabytes of embedded JavaScript in websites, to the point that LinkedIn uses about half the RAM I had for my first computer loading 32 MB of JavaScript files. Jjira loads 50 (!) MB of javascript, enough to include the uncompressed version of War and Peace 16 times. That's the size of a full installation of the entire Windows 95 operating system. GitLab's static landing page is 13MB of JavaScript, larger than that of Twitter.

What the hell are we doing here? Why can I spin up a 100 MHz, 8MB RAM VM with a hard drive size that's 1/16th of your entry level MacBook's RAM and have apps open immediately? I understand some backsliding as things get more high level, but a website loading 50 megabytes of JavaScript, to me, is like a bright neon sign that screams "something has gone wrong terribly here". Obviously programs, websites and operating systems have become incredibly more complex but your $200 A-series Samsung phone has about 8 cores at 2.2 GHz each. A $200 processor when Windows 95 was released had one core at 0.1GHz. making the processing power about 164x faster. Keep in mind this $200 includes a fully functioning computer in the palm of your hand. The actual CPU part for a midrange phone like the Samsung A15 5G is the Dimension 6100+, which costs all of $25 bucks.

There must be some sort of balance between ease of prototyping, creating and deploying an application without bundling it with Electron or building websites that use tens of megabytes of a scripting language for seemingly nothing. Especially when we can see that a fast, usable website (see this very website or the blogs of many of the people who post here, compared to Reddit for your average medium or substack blog).

How the hell do we fix this? The customers clearly don't want this bloat, companies clearly shouldn't want it either (see research that indicates users exposed to a 200 millisecond load delay on Google, performed 0.2-0.6% fewer searches, and effect that remained even when the artificial delay was removed. This was replicated by Microsoft, Amazon and others. It's frequently brought up that Amazon has said that every 100 milliseconds of page load time cost them 1% in sales, though it's hard to find definitive attribution to this), programmers should hopefully not want to create crappy websites just like mechanics should hopefully not want to install brake pads that squeal every time the user breaks.

This got way longer than the two sentences I expected the post to be, so my apologies.

[1] https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/ [2] Velocity and the Bottom Line, Shurman and Brutlag

Need to align something. Simple!     :)

For those who are unaware, this is exactly what Grok does. The default is an auto mode, then when you ask a question it starts researching (which is visible to the user) and if it's using the expert mode but you don't really need all that jazz, it has a "Quick Answer" button right above the prom entry field, and if it's using a "Quick Answer" mode then it has "Expert" button and the same place, and you are able to toggle between them mid answer and it will adjust the model (or model parameters, I'm not sure how it works under the hood).

It's pretty good with the auto chooser, but I appreciate the manual choice available so in-your-face and especially not having it restart the query completely but rather convert the output to either Quick or Expert.

This is on the Web UI, can't speak for other harnesses. I do find that it's quite good with the citations and has a fairly generous free tier, even on Expert mode. (As for who sits at the top, I am indeed put off by Musk's clear interference in several cases involving Grok, nor do my personal values align with the majority of his, but today's Grok is definitely less MechaHitler and more reliable than it was before.)

Based on my experience, this is better put into the Settings -> Customizability dialogue, not Memories

Another user mentioned how it will reference the very instruction ("I know you would prefer concise answers, so here's a concise answer..") but that makes sense when you realize that Memories are more for things like "user lives in San Francisco and is new in town and is open to recommendations of third places to meet people" so if it's answering the question about the best coffee places in n SF, it would make sense for ChatGPT to finish with "Also, given that you are new to San Francisco, and your interest in both boardgames and meeting new people, have you considered visiting [place]? It's a local coffee shop that also rents out board games, with a Thursday evening theme where you are partnered with strangers. It might be a good way to make new people that enjoy similar things!"

If you consider adding Memories us adding something to the system prompt, it won't make very much sense a lot of the time, because you might forget what you wrote and then be surprised when your model suddenly suggests jigsaw puzzles when you mentioned that you're stressed building a compiler. Hence it tells the user the context of the memory that it's using and why, whereas if you added to Customizability I've never seen it leak out like that.

If you add to Memories "user is a software engineer and prefers Rust to C/C++" it may say something like "By the way, since you prefer Rust I would recommend [this development path]" but if you put it into Customizability as "do not suggest C/C++ for software projects unless it's the only way, use Rust or Go instead" it will likely start down the path of suggesting and researching Rust from the very beginning without explaining to you your own instructions.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the Customizability instructions (mine say "be concise, do not be afraid to correct the user or use occasional dry humor. Speak frankly and tell the user if they may be making a mistake and suggest other courses of action" whereas Memories contain simple facts about me, i e. ("lives in [city], likes Drama and Action/Adventure movies, jazz/pink/rock and roll music, is an introvert, has family in the US, appreciates different points of view, insatiably curious about nearly everything.")

Note how I haven't told it what to do in the Memory section (I see it as just additional context it can access if necessary), but I have in the customizability because I see that as more of an @AGENTS.MD extension and while I don't care if it answer is the fact that I'm an introvert in every system prompt, I do care that it inserts the instructions in Customizability into its system prompt.

Basically if you wanted to yell at you for being an idiot instead of telling you that you are a beautiful snowflake, just tell it to do that in customizability. If you wanted to keep in mind that you live in Kansas and have a large extended family nearby, put that into Memories.

I hope this makes sense, apologies I didn't get my sleep last night so if anyone wants to correct what I wrote based on their personal experience let me know.

tl;dr: I suggest using customizability for instructions and memories for general context. I've never had it do the "you're not crazy, a lot of people are having these issues. Let's work through them together.." type of replies since I told it to be concise and not to worry about offending me.

According to the article at least, it's 93% pro/7% against in BC, though I haven't had a chance to look up how the question was phrased or n.

I apologize for resurrecting a fairly old thread (I originally came across it via Googling the Claude Ad announcement), and this has nothing to do with the main post anyway but my desire not to further derail things is butting up against my pigheadedness as famously exemplified in xkcd.com/386

You wrote "the majority of US citizens support ICE", later specifying it was after the controversial killings. I want to fact-check your claim, because if I came here from Google I think others may too and so far there has been no pushback on this apart from "no, they don't support ICE" which is problematic.

The Navigator Research poll is probably the most interesting in terms of actually visualizing the data [5], it used to be at the bottom but I moved this section to the top. It's an excellent visualization, my eye was especially drawn to the incredibly stark divide between the MAGA-Republicans vs. non-MAGA Republicans. I've never seen it in such contrast and I wonder how that will play out. Regardless, that's outside of the topic of this comment, wich is already too long.

The poll (n=~1,000) conducted around the five following days states that among all those polled, the Net Favorable rating, asked as:

    Please indicate how favorable or unfavorable you are to: ICE, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

was:

    June 30 '25    - 8
    Dec   8 '25    -14
    Jan  12 '26    -20
    Feb   1 '26    -22

As an added curio, among Democrats it shifted -12 points, but among Republicans it shifted -17 points. Make of that what you will.

A poll released on February 5th and conducted January 27th-30th (n=1,462) by Marist University's MaristPoll organization states [1]:

    62% of Americans say the actions of ICE are making Americans somewhat less safe or much less safe. 37% think the actions of ICE are making Americans much more safe or somewhat more safe

The following information is from Pages 14-16 of the PDF [2]. The specific question was:

    Do you approve or disapprove of the job Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing?

    33% Approve
    60% Disapprove
     7% Unsure

The poll is extremely along the party lines in some respects (e.g. only 2% of the people who answered 'Approve' voted for Kamala in 2024), but I feel like that's to be expected. At the same time, while people who approve of ICE definitely didn't vote for Kamala, people who voted for Trump are not extremely strong supporters, with 24% of 2024 Trump voters answering either Disapprove or Unsure (18% and 6% respectively).

Some other interesting correlations are that while recent ICE actions are generally very unpopular among Democrats and somewhat popular among Republicans, the usual rural/urban differences which are usually much better predictors for how someone will vote, far ahead of correlations with education, race or income. In this case "approve" difference between Big city (31%) and Rural (43%) was only 12 points. Interestingly, the approval rating almost follows a reverse bell curve (?) in terms of population density:

    Big city   31%
    Small city 31%
    Suburban   28%
    Small town 40%
    Rural      43%

Again, apologies for the digression, I figured maybe someone can make some sense of those numbers. Another question:

    How would you describe the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in enforcing immigration laws? Do you think they have:

    65% Gone too far 
    12% Not gone far enough
    22% Or are their actions about right
     1% Vol: unsure

This can be summarized in a bunch of different ways, but it's not dishonest to say that 2/3rds of Americans think that ICE has "gone too far", which heavily contradicts your statement. Everything after this is kind of just because I felt three is the minimum number of sources to thoroughly dismiss your assertion.

Here are the results from June, 2025 for the exact same question, with the change in percentage from June, 2025 to January, 2026 in brackets.

    54% Gone too far                      [+11%]
    18% Not gone far enough               [-06%]
    26% Or are their actions about right  [-04%]
     1% Vol: Unsure

Ipsos released a poll [3] on January 27th, conducted between January 23rd-25th (n=1,139) with a self-reported margin of error of +/- 3.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Immigration-related outtakes:

Only 10% of those polled picked "Immigration" as their selection to a 17-option question that asked "In your opinion, what is the most important problem facing the U.S. today?" By comparison, 15% picked the "Economy, unemployment and jobs", 12% picked "Political violence and extremism" and 16% picked "Threats to democratic values and norms" (Page 1)

    Overall, do you think efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to deal with unauthorized immigration in the country... (Page 10)

    Go too far           58% 
    Do not go far enough 12%
    Are about right      26%
    
    Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling the following issues? Immigration (Page 3)

    Strongly approve    26%
    Somewhat approve    14%
    Somewhat disapprove 10%
    Strongly disapprove 43%

    Generally speaking, would you say the following things are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track? Immigration policy (Page 5)

    Right direction 35%
    Wrong track     51%
    Don’t know      11%

P.S. I don't claim this comment to be unbiased, I clearly "cherry-picked" certain facts, but they were not out of context nor did I massage the numbers, the reason I phrased it this way was because it was a direct rebuttal to the claim that most Americans support ICE [even after the shootings].

[1] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-febru... [2] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR... [3] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-say-federal-i... [4] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/... [5] https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Nav...

As someone who only occasionally takes photos of mature, or empty streets (I just find them more aesthetically pleasing, especially if they're empty at night, nothing to do with the topic of discussion), I have no dog in this fight whatsoever,

May I ask where you are taking out your camera to experience these results? By "where," I mean both what part of the world/culture you are in and the specific location(s) (e.g. weddings, streets, public transit, work, at a friend's whom you know well, at an acquaintance's).. you get the point.

In addition, and there are a few of these floating around but this is my devloater of choice, may I suggest https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat ?

Despite the fact that it mostly runs in powershell, it still has a better UX then the majority of Microsoft apps. (Except for the confusion about their only GUI pop-up window, you put a check mark next to the built-in apps you want removed, which was led me to reread the instructions to make sure I had it right the first time I used it).

It has both built-in sane default for people who just want to debloat Windows 10/11, along with a "custom" option which takes less than 60 seconds to get through but gives you all the customizability you need.

(No connection with the author except mad respect.)

—sent from my Linux desktop, but alas..

I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads

The first amendment is a good thing overall, but I have honestly never heard of a story of someone attempting to enter the US, someone with no criminal record and from an ally country, just to be forcibly strip-searched at the border.

They just tell you that you they are denying you entry and putting you on the next plane back.

That being said, we are clearly only getting one side of the story and I'd love to know what _exactly_ that found on his phone, but given how consistent the stories have been (pulled into secondary, forced to unlock personal media under threats of imprisonment, strip search, disappearance for a few days or weeks) I am inclined to move this from the "anecdotes" to "anecdata" to something-very-close-to-data category.

If you chose to rebutt this with the "millions of people come in to the US every year with absolutely no problem" I'd like to say that only 0.02 people die by train per 100,000,000 miles travelled. Does that mean I don't want the NTSB to investigate train crashes or that these peoples deaths (and injuries) don't matter because they comprise such a low percentage?*

I am extremely sympathetic to his position of his phone automatically downloading media he is sent. My phone's WhatsApp settings came with "auto-download any images people send you to your (local, on-device) gallery" set as default. I also had Google Photos installed, which had the option of "auto back-up any images/videos you store on your phone to your Google Photos account" which I turned on because I break my phones often. The result was that several relatives with questionable (and opposite) political tastes have their memes (think [pollitician x] next to a [hate symbol]" (got it? Good. It's not the one you're thinking of!) automatically stored on my phone and backed up to my Google Photos account, not even accounting for the automatic WhatsApp backup that is stored on my Google Drive account.

From previous reporting, the agents plug in the device into a forensic analyzer which dumps out a list of images/videos that were saved (note the distinction between "that you saved" and "that were saved") and use it against you.

I can't imagine what it must feel like to arrive here from Norway to go camping and be subject to a strip-search and interrogation because someone you may not even consider a friend sent you some shitty memes a few years ago. Or, in this case, because they found a "anti-JD-vance" meme that even JD vance seems to think is fine?

[0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

The second link really impressed me, I'm tentatively sold on (and excited for) their approach. Does anyone know of any other accredited programs similar to Math Academy, but for other subjects?

Anything in the soft sciences, or biology/organic chemistry, or comp sci. I know there are a lot of courses for the latter especially, but I'm looking for accredited ones.

The hobby-sized projects/videos on your Twitter are mesmerizing: https://x.com/anvaka

Talk about a true hacker mindset. Great bloody job!

Disagreed, given that the bodtcams require you to press a button down for 5 seconds before they start recording. Given that fact, it clearly seems like a deterrent (what customer will know this detail? They'll assume they're always on)

When you land on the page, it defaults to Icelandic (it did from me and I'm from Canada): https://island.is/forsetaframbod

However, it does have an "EN" button near the top right. Personally, I think this is as close to a perfect solution as you can get. (Geolocating an IP or something has a whole bunch of problems than just going with your country's official language as a default.)

> If all you need is satellite communication for a few bytes of information, a cellphone can send an emergency message to satellites anywhere on this planet

This month, an unmodified Samsung S21 Ultra achieved 17mbit download speeds from a Starlink satellite, which is. Well, quite something. I do wonder what the upload speed would be.

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2024/03/starlink-achieves-s...

He does not care about users like you.

>>I know I’m focusing a lot on that, but that’s where a lot of the protests in the community are focused. People appear to really love these apps. And, apparently, they think Reddit itself is not offering the experience they’re looking for. People talk about leaving the platform because they can’t use these apps. So if Reddit is going to shut down these apps, you’re going to lose people who loved Reddit, and that still doesn’t quite make sense. So I guess I’m wondering why hasn’t there been...

>90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit? Does that make sense?

>These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

The entire article is just so bizarre and needlessly hostile that I'm amazed they're allowing him to do interviews.

I was skeptical of the article's claims that anesthetized patients may continue to experience consciousness, but this has definitely shaken the foundations of that belief:

>At doses near the unconsciousness threshold, some anesthetics block working memory (20). Thus, patients may fail to respond because they immediately forget what to do. At much lower doses, anesthetics cause profound amnesia. Studies with the isolated forearm technique, in which a tourniquet is applied to the arm before paralysis is induced (to allow the hand to move while the rest of the body is paralyzed), show that patients under general anesthesia can sometimes carry on a conversation using hand signals, but post-operatively deny ever being awake (21). Thus, retrospective oblivion is no proof of unconsciousness.

Edit: there are some sections of this article that could prompt some interesting discussion from the crowd here. For example, from a subsection "Consciousness and integrated information":

>The evidence from anesthesia and sleep states (Fig. 2–3) converges to suggest that loss of consciousness is associated with a breakdown of cortical connectivity and thus of integration, or with a collapse of the repertoire of cortical activity patterns and thus of information (Fig. 2). Why should this be the case? A recent theory suggests a principled reason: information and integration may be the very essence of consciousness (52). Classically, information is the reduction of uncertainty among alternatives: when a coin falls on one of its two sides, it provides 1 bit of information, whereas a die falling on one of six faces provides ~2.6 bits. But then having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative, since we could have had countless other experiences instead (think of all the frames of every possible movie). Having any experience is like throwing a die with a trillion faces and identifying which number came up (Fig. 2). On the other hand, every experience is an integrated whole that cannot be subdivided into independent components. For example, with an intact brain you cannot experience the left half of the visual field independently of the right half, or visual shapes independently of their color. In other words, the die of experience is a single one throwing multiple dice and combining the numbers will not do.

It's funny you mention this particular phrasing. I used to work as a 911/police dispatcher so I was often literally the first person you'd tell such a story to. I had so many instances in which I would have greatly preferred people not use the "I hit ___" or "___ hit me"

>"I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me! He just came out of nowhere and hit me!"

Cue the inevitable asking of a) did he strike you with a fist? a weapon? b) did he strike you with a vehicle? c) if he struck you with a vehicle, were you in your vehicle or were you walking?

I got burned -many- times over taking the seemingly obvious interpretation of "I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me!" and assuming a "two-vehicle traffic collision" just to find out the caller was actually exiting a coffee shop when someone physically assaulted him, or was walking back to his parked car when he watched someone back into it, etc..

Even "I was driving to work and someone hit me" leaves such a plethora of questions unanswered that yes, in instances where -clarity- is important (having to be clear and succinct, not casually retelling the story at a bar) I would much rather hear "I was driving my vehicle when another driver collided with me" which isn't meaningfully longer and clarifies many questions about what happened.

An excellent article, cheers! For those scrolling through, the article is written by a developer of Valorant, a recently-released FPS. He talks about his efforts to implement a system to prevent wallhacks and the challenges he encountered while doing so.

>Cheaters use wallhacks to see opponents through walls. In a tactical shooter like VALORANT, this gives them huge advantages when it comes to individual combat encounters as well as strategic decisions for the round as a whole. Wallhacks are especially insidious because they give an advantage that isn’t always obvious - your enemies could be using wallhacks... or maybe they’ve just figured out that you rush B every round. We really wanted to prevent that sense of doubt which lingers with players, poisoning their experiences long after the match.

>At the beginning of development, when we were talking about security goals for the project, the two things that came up over and over again were wallhacks and aimbots.

>League’s Fog of War system works because the game server withholds information about the positions of enemies until a client needs to display it. I knew if I could implement something like this for VALORANT we could solve the problem of wallhacks because there would be nothing for the wallhack to see. If an opponent was behind a wall, we wouldn’t send their location to enemy players, keeping them hidden until they decided to peek the angle. If we could pull it off, this seemed like the ideal solution - but we had no idea whether this would be feasible in Unreal Engine.

>The end user won’t be doing anything with the OS itself.

What makes you think so? The desktop environment will be powered by KDE Plasma.

>Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting.

Valve is pretty clear that in addition to having a gaming mode they want the device to be a full-fledged (linux-based) PC.. hopefully with everything that entails.

>What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?

Maybe nothing in "gaming mode," but in "desktop mode", it's Arch running KDE Plasma. It's essentially a Linux-based PC with a gaming option. (Or vice-versa, depending on your primary use case and point-of-view.)

Given the fact that the desktop mode exists and is leaned on as an important feature, I'd assume a lot of underlying functionality will be exposed.

>It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.

I too am interested to see how they will handle this, but based on their website copy I would not be surprised if you could at least apt-get upgrade the desktop portion, with the gaming mode running either on top or separate from it.

You can just surround the new plants with the plant guards that come with the robot.

>Crimea and Ukraine are geopolitically not very useful. Taiwan is extremely useful, especially if it allows defense access to e.g. American warships.

A large reason for the annexation of Ukraine was the question of control of Russia's only warm-water seaport at Sevastopol. I doubt Russia would have bothered (given the international consequences, i.e. sanctions and potential military intervention) if their access to the Black Sea wasn't threatened by Ukraine's increasing ties with the West.

Interesting article. As you mentioned, NASA is justifying the >6x price increase with:

>In announcing the policy change, NASA said it had previously subsidized transportation to and from the station in order to foster the development of commercial space applications.

>“Since making these opportunities available, there has been a growing demand for commercial and marketing activities from both traditional aerospace companies and from novel industries, demonstrating the benefits of the space station to help catalyze and expand space exploration markets and the low-Earth orbit economy,” the space agency said. “As a result, NASA has updated its pricing policy for commercial activities conducted on the station to reflect full reimbursement for the value of NASA resources.”

While I don't have any reason not to take this explanation at face value, I am curious about the timing. Did they just have too many potential customers to justify subsidizing the cost?

I was also surprised to see a "trash disposal" line item in the price catalog. It doesn't sound like ISS-generated waste. Does anyone know if this is literally people paying thousands of dollars per kg to transport cargo to space in order to dispose it by burning it up on re-entry? What could justify such a cost? Are there examples? What kind of restrictions on items are there?

(Perhaps I should just Google this myself! :)

This is the exact question I came to the comments to find.

The abstract states:

>Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.

To give some context, chance is 50%, human guess is 55% and a 100-question questionnaire is 66%.

Personally, I am surprised that the accuracy remained that high when controlling for the three variables I would have considered most telling in the determination (age, gender and race).

I'd be very curious to know what exactly the algorithm is determining from the face photos outside of those obvious variables. I know with a ML algorithm it's practically impossible to determine why the classification was made, but does anyone human here have any thoughts?