dboreham

I think this one was on its wheels. But presumably the key factor is that it was owned by NASA, which makes it I assume much easier for NASA to do...whatever with it.

What conflicts of interest? Why would installing someone with some flare for showmanship be a bad thing if the issue is funding?

Aware. I've seen one being fueled, started, and flying.

Why would that happen?

It belongs to NASA.

The people involved know all about those things, and probably knew them since 10 years old.

The story is almost certainly a leak. The amateur hour reporting can be ignored.

This doesn't make much sense. NASA famously has killed two shuttle crews through bean-counter/suits mis-management. Why would having someone who has flown to space (twice) and both flies and manages the maintenance and restoration of fast jets be worse?

Granted there are likely many obstacles to getting this airframe flying again, but the V8s probably isn't one of them. All those V8s did (and I've seen them in action) was turn a shaft. There's an infinite number of alternate options available to turn the same shaft.

Ugh. It's called engineering because in the beginning each university built or bought one computer. That machine was either owned by the mathematics department or the electrical engineering department (for hopefully obvious reasons). Fast forward a few decades and we have the twin disciplines of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

Ok I'll say the same thing.

Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).

Pretty sure that's not why US administrations support Israel's actions.

This is all covered quite well in the documentary "Blackadder II".

In some ways I'm sympathetic to this: after all I'm trying to make money by being that person who does know stuff. But honestly that capability never seemed to be terribly valued by the people with the money. Anyway, it would be nice to see some examples where AI tools didn't "know" about architecture or intent. My experience has been they know plenty. More than most human developers. They do tend to follow certain fashions, which can be overridden by debate, or by introducing new fashion via skill text. But that's today. Surely these tools are only going to get much better in the next 10-20 years. I'm skeptical there's going to be a line of thinking that "it's smart but doesn't know the things humans know" long term. Whatever it is that we think only humans know today will be learned by the tools tomorrow.

I have the $100 subscription and it pretty much does allow me to endlessly prompt Claude to fix bugs (and other stuff).

There's nothing to prevent people from having a blockchain subject to court jurisdiction. In fact probably all blockchains are anyway, modulo the problem of enforcement.

Live captions on what?

Here's my regular engineer explanation:

TLA+ is a specific kind of formal verification framework for software. The overall idea is that you can "prove" that some software works, rather than the typical "seems like it works" we aim for.

But under the covers, all formal verification schemes are (imho) best viewed as "very fancy testing". There are a few kinds of this fancy testing. TLA+ is the kind that can auto-generate all the relevant test cases for your code (there's more to it than that, but this definition works for now). So now instead of "I wrote a bunch of test cases, all that I could think of, and they pass" you have "I used TLA+ so I know I'm exercising all the possible test cases and they pass".

Here's the problem though: to achieve that trick, you have to write your code in a special language (TLA+). It isn't a tool that can be just pointed at regular production code.

So what you get to "prove" is a translation of your actual code into TLA+ code. It may be possible to auto-translate one to the other (I asked the original author if they did that, but no reply yet). Usually it's a manual process. Therefore you have "proof" but not quite as you know it, because you proved something different than what runs. But still more useful than a wet finger raised into the wind.

For this reason it's typically only used on narrow risky pieces of code (quorum voting is the canonical use case).

Nothing but it would be more ironic if they were driving Mercedes.

Have you ever been to Europe?? Things they are building: proper trains; proper roads; proper particle accelerators; proper airliners; proper bread; proper cars; the AI that the USA thinks is so amazing; ARM CPUs; ...

And speaking of "a less prosperous society" -- have you been to most of the USA recently? Doesn't look very prosperous to me vs most of Europe.

I was struggling with the inversion of containment: usually planes are on carriers.

Yes but anyone who posts something about "loads of innocent people arrested for just voicing their opinion (man)" is implicitly disingenuous. I say that because the first time I heard someone say this (a friend who lives in the UK no less) I thought "that doesn't seem right" and so did a few minutes of Google searching. And of course it isn't right. People have been arrested for being threatening a.holes which seems perfectly fine. For comparison here in the middle of the US we have a lady in town who liked to send death threats (via mail) to the town manager, based on his chosen policies for street crossings, or something. Well she was arrested and put in jail for a while. She said she really didn't mean it, it was all a joke. Still in jail.

I've seen this headline floating in my feed for a while and assumed it was about some place called Portobello in North Carolina or similar. But having discovered it's about the real Portobello...down the rabbit hole...

At first I thought the bell chime controller was a hobby project. Long ago there were many electronics firms in the Edinburgh area so someone who worked as an EE could easily have knocked up the controller using "appropriated" parts from work. But the soldering is not quite right. It's too good for a total beginner, but not good enough for a professional. Also the single chip I think implies an MCU of some sort, so it's not going to be more than about 30 years old. A date code from the chip would be nice.

Then I realized that "box to control church bells" is probably a thing and a quick Google search dragged up this: https://www.electronics-lab.com/project/church-bell-controll... note that the PCB in the 5th picture bears a more than passing resemblance to the one at Porty.

Fun fact: my Dad's mother's family ran a shop on the High Street in the late 1800's. The building is still there and is on the next block down the road from the police station.

It's a place in Scotland, but they're both named after the same battle over a port in Panama in 1739.

There's zero chance of that ever happening. Pure delusion.

I'm sure people laughed at Oppenheimer when he said perhaps we don't make this atomic bomb thing. They said "of course he's saying that because he knows it won't work".

Local people know where they are because once upon a time a D8 drove through pulling a big orange spool of fiber conduit and passers by chatted about how another fiber was going in. Also around here the contractors seeded the disturbed ground with a wildflower mix (presumably to discourage weeds) so you can also look for straps of wildflowers.

And of course there are marker posts that say "buried fiber optic cable do not dig".

What's not real about it?

Dave posts frequently about his work, some on YouTube and some on Facebook. You have to be in the right groups on FB.