Having access to dark skies doesn't mean you automatically appreciate them. I suspect this may be one reason we lost them so easily. As I child, I grew up at 5000+ ft with dark skies and the Milky Way was often visible. Funnily, no one seemed to be aware of it. Once I learned what it was (from a magazine), I pointed it out to a grown up and they dismissed it immediately as a cloud. Much later I learned that clouds from dark sites look dark, not light.
I just came back from a trip to Yellowstone, staying at an RV Park in Idaho that had designated themselves as a dark sky RV park, which mean no external lights after 10pm. The night sky was glorious with the Milky Way visible almost from horizon to horizon. I wish more city dwellers could experience this so we could do something to tame the completely unncessary and wasteful light pollution.
The effort to reduce electricity theft has had an interesting side effect. One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods. This also makes them safe for monkeys to use as 'roads' with the result that roving gangs of monkeys move from neighborhood to neighborhood with ease and also have access to the upper floor of apartment buildings because of the proximity of the power lines. I saw this in person a few years ago.
The Bambu Labs mobile app doesn't work with LAN mode. I found this app for Android, "LanBu" which does a decent enough job. It's still in beta and wants to display ads. So far my PiHole has blocked all its ads so it's tolerable. I wouldn't mind paying for it, if it's a one-time free and it allowed access from outside my LAN.
This is a bad take. When the stste is either unable or unwilling to offer security, what is the alternative? The 'vigilantes' are doing the honorable thing, protecting their communities from criminals and oppressors. I wish them all good luck as it seem like they need it.
The danger always is that these militias can themselves become corrupt and oppress their own people.
Have LLMs produced something novel like Cantor's diagonalization procedure once was? Come up with new concepts like set theory once was and axiomatized it? Is there any indication or evidence LLMs can do this? If not, I would wager mathematicians are still going to be a profession in the future. Maybe not as theorem provers in a particular axiomatized system where LLMs can be effective tools but the wider project of synthesis and unification, and the discovery of new modes of mathematical thought will still require mathematicians.
I read through most of the article but didn't see motion sensors mentioned. A lot of suburban streetlights are lighting up empty streets at night. With a combination of motion sensing and LEDs, lighting could follow pedestrians. Cars really don't need street lights in most cases but even then, in higher risk areas, motion sensors could turn on streetlights just as long as needed.
35 years ago I had to program a Z80 by "assembling" programs by hand and punching hexcodes into a board. This was made easier by writing an assembler for it. This was my way into tools which took me eventually to working on a major C++ compiler.
Not really as large capacity capacitors (this one seems to be 4V) tend to be low voltage as well. You can touch the terminals without harm but attempting to short them is going to be, er, entertaining. I have accidentally touched a 200V capacitor and it was not fun.
I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.
They can ban immigration from the third world all they want but at some point, they'll have to confront the economic reality of a 1.42/couple fertility rate.
You missed the point - understanding comes from working through the code, not just reading it. This is nothing new: nobody has learned or done new mathematics or physics or whatever by just reading a textbook.
During the last few months when AI usage was mandated in our team and usage exploded, our team's throughput has barely changed. Now, if this was due to people working 2 hours a day and painting, cooking and playing golf the rest of the day, this would be a great result, but I see many people work past 6pm, and yet the output is mostly the same. We are not tackling harder problems or fixing more bugs despite authoring numerous skills for AI. Eventually the reckoning is sure to come, and I think it will not be pretty.
As I am continually amazed at how well Claude 4.7 deals with highly complicated C++ code, I am also becoming painfully aware of the developing situation mentioned in this article: I no longer completely understand the code it is editing, not because I'm incapable of doing it, but because I have not authored the changes. I am trading throughput for understanding, and, eventually, judgment.
A colleague once told me, the difference between software engineering and civil engineering is that they build the same bridge repeatedly while we never build the same thing twice.
Pascal, as defined by Wirth, had no "low level" features. E.g., no control over memory allocation other than the language provided new/dispose, no bit operators, clunky strings of fixed size, no access to system calls, no access to assembly, not even any hex or octal constants, all features which a language allowing "low level" access is expected to have (e.g. Ada, Modula-2/3, Oberon, all Pascal-derived languages). Things like conformant array parameters showed up much later in the ISO version but were not widely adopted. No modules either but this is not a low level feature. Turbo Pascal attempted to fix all this on the PC later on and it was deservedly well loved. Still, Wirth successfully wrote Pascal compilers in Pascal without --- obviously -- having a Pascal compiler available. [Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)#...)