RDaneel623 said:

I am clearly in a tiny minority here, but I loved the ad. To me, this isn't a dystopia. Rather, this is one of the (many) things I want out of an AI... help me mediate my human interactions. If I wish to write something to another person why wouldn't I want to use the AI for that purpose if the AI is capable of writing something superior to what I would come up with on my own? If a human can do something better, then the human should do it... but if the AI can produce superior results then the AI should do it.

Sure, the girl in the ad could have written the letter herself, or written the letter in collaboration with her dad... but this is a letter to this girl's hero... if you were that girl wouldn't you want to send the most well written letter you could?

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Sure! Other opportunities to outsource heartfelt personal statements would be love letters, wedding vows, birthday cards, condolence letters... you know, anything to avoid having to embrace those pesky feelings you would prefer to keep at arms' length.

For the record, thank you for announcing exactly who you are with your choice of a username.

/rollseyes

Wow. Did not see this coming...

Looks like Boeing thinks NASA is going to bring them down on Dragon and does not want that to happen.

https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1819534540865441814

ranthog said:

A strong reminder of why we have the FDA to regulate the production of medications.

We really do need to get these medications to be more available and much more affordable. Otherwise, sadly, things like this will continue to be sold on the black market and risk people's lives.

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It's called nationalized health care.

We don't do it, of course, but if it's adequately funded, it actually improves productivity (profits, to you and me and psychopathic, for-profit CEO's) in addition to health outcomes.

That corporate America has no shits to give about improving human health while benefiting their own fucking investors is why I label all CEO's of any for-profit corporation psychopathic. For-profit health care CEO's doubly so.

I just got a Dell XPS computer 2 days ago with the i7-14700K. The over clocking in the bios comes turned off by default! That is the whole point of getting the K processor. Dell knows this is a problem and is turning it off. I was setting it up and went to lunch. When I came back it restarted on me when installing a program. On restart it came up and said this was the 3rd time it happened and will turn off over-clocking.

I then downloaded the drivers for a Brother printer and while it was unpacking it restarted. This is an Intel problem!!

I'm really feeling the dystopia as I check the article to see if it mentions the Canadian pharmacy I use to access respiratory medications I can't afford in the U.S. despite having two insurance providers.

C.M. Allen said:

If we had in-orbit facilities set up to receive 'gently' used rockets, a legitimate case could be made for refurbishing and refueling them. But not without that. The future is full usability, so single-use -- even second stage -- rocket systems won't be able to compete. As such, there's no point in bringing them back down to Earth to be 'reused,' so if they can't be refurbished and refueled in space, there's no other way to make them useful again. The materials in them just aren't particularly valuable. Their 'cost' was almost entirely in their bespoke construction.

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Was the SpaceX Starship fuel transfer two launches ago the first fuel transfer in orbit? If so, then we have a long way to go before refurbishment.

My gut feel is that when we get close to being able to refurbish we'll also be designing vehicles to be refurbished, and all these current junk ones will likely not be worth the extra effort since they weren't designed for refurbishment.

blindbear said:

The line can be a lot of gray. You heard about the bad things about certain races. Therefore, you automatically assume the worst when you interact with them. I think Muslim/Arabs have a very bad image problem in USA, and Palestinian are part of Muslim/Arabs community.

Both sides are victims and murders if I want to simplify it to black and white. They are both justify to defense themselves by killing. However, it is probably not the best path forwards if they want lasting peace.

In theory, we can have adult to separate them and make them cool off. However, it is impossible in practice.

I think the unconditional support is mostly from USA? I think Europe is kind of stay away from the whole thing?

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No doubt - marketing is a proud American tradition and Israel has succeeded in selling their version of the story. Combined with a lot of guilt post-WWII in Europe, Palestinians are at a marked disadvantage in getting a fair shake.

And we can keep digging into past grievances to justify current atrocities. But at the end of the day, it’s really not that complex:
The attack by Hamas was atrocious.
The past 9 months of either deliberate or reckless attacks by Israel on Palestinian civilians is atrocious.
Both can be true.

The situation and history is convoluted and neither party is entirely without blame. But past wrongs cannot justify present ones. We don’t need to equivocate about 1200 years of history to judge actions being taken today, now.

The line may be gray, but it is not that gray. And if any country but Israel engaged in similar campaigns against a mostly civilian population, we would never have this discussion. We would likely ignore it, if it were far enough away, but it wouldn’t be defended as moral and proportionate.

unshavenyak said:

Fuck. That. I like having my own place that the government can only minimally fuck with and I'm not beholden to some HOA or Co-operative Board. Nationalized housing would be a nightmare.

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The current situation is a nightmare. None of the incentives guide it towards being less of a nightmare.

Might be worth hanging on for a couple of weeks til the Zen 5 cpus launch.. could help stretch the budget a bit.

What games are you playing? Are you doing anything else on the PC? At $1500 there will be tradeoffs, this info will help optimize.

Yeah, the minimum distance requirement is throwing a lot of people off with locus mines. I don't get it, but I also haven't played it yet, doesn't seem that bad to me being unable to detonate mines at our own feet, but maybe I'm just not seeing something.

Zylon said:

For the Martian atmosphere, sure. SpaceX has to have laboratory infrastructure it owns or can access for that kind of research in a lot of places besides Starbase. Doing it there, processing Earth atmosphere, to fuel Starship, would be a PR stunt.

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This isn't a laboratory scale task. A full 2300t propellant load for a single return ship every synod is going to eat ~2MW continuously. If not Starbase, you could do it at McGregor. Plenty of land, plenty of access to power, and you earn ~3s of full power testing per day per unit.

grant2 said:

Why?
What will RISC-V architecture bring to the performance table that ARM architecture cannot?

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Investors are throwing money at it, primarily in hopes that it is the next ARM.

TechCrazy said:

whaaaaaaat? No. You can't be serious.

Everyone on the internet is so honest and forthcoming.

Just like that friendly Nigerian prince who is going to give me $1,000,000 for helping him move his money to a new bank account.

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You joke, but I just got a knockoff version of one of those by physical snail mail a couple weeks ago. It was almost believable, except for the part that my last name is not common, and comes from a marriage that fell apart (what? changing it back costs money... plus hearing places butcher it has its own entertainment value). I shudder to think what might have happened had someone like my mom gotten sent something like that.

afidel said:

(plus that would mean buying cores from Amazon and pushing Kuiper further back).

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And nothing of value would be lost

pixelpusher220 said:

Energy aside (which is a significant issue), the simple physics of attempting to grab, attach, anchor and then stop rotation of an object...in zero/micro gravity are not trivial. The simple cube sat ion thruster now needs 3 thrusters for x-y-z control. Do Ion thrusters work for such tasks?

These things aren't designed for maintenance so they aren't at all guaranteed to have usable attachment points.

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You actually need 6, because you also need to be able to rotate. Granted reaction wheels also work, and in LEO you can use magnetorquers to desaturate the wheels. But if you’ve got good attitude control, then you only need 1 thruster.

Veritas super omens said:

First and foremost we need governments to, as accurately as possible, tax externalities to even the playing field. We need researchers spending serious time and effort on maximizing speed of production of Si PV's. We need goveernments to guarantee purchase of any PV's the market can't buy (basement price). We need governments to guarantee purchase any extra electricity below a basement price. We need governments to award that electricity to ccarbon capture ventures. We need researchers to evaluate installation cost techniques. We are really up against it and market solutions will be woefully inadequate. Okay team get busy!

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Agree with all of that -- that's the rollout phase of a transformation. New tech is pretty much superfluous at this point since we already have good enough (though more and faster and cheaper is certainly ideal as you note).

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, the company said, "While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation."

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TIL, Google obtains all of the people for its focus groups from in-house rather than the general public.

Not much of a surprise, though.

Number of world leaders have been successfully prosecuted, and were hold accountable. Both South Korea and Taiwan have recent examples of their presidents prosecuted for corruptions. The though that USA's president is unique and need additional immunity is not supposed by evidences.

odikweos said:

Silicon panels have such advantages it's really hard to imagine these displacing them in anything but niche applications. Presumptively safe for the environment, relatively simple to recycle .. those are really big and important advantages for earth-scale deployment. Want more power? Just use more panels. Efficiency isn't the only thing that matters in a world where silicon is already over 20%.

Even a 60% replacement tech that came with any degree of environmental cost, or was hard to recycle would be a bad replacement IMO.

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First and foremost we need governments to, as accurately as possible, tax externalities to even the playing field. We need researchers spending serious time and effort on maximizing speed of production of Si PV's. We need goveernments to guarantee purchase of any PV's the market can't buy (basement price). We need governments to guarantee purchase any extra electricity below a basement price. We need governments to award that electricity to ccarbon capture ventures. We need researchers to evaluate installation cost techniques. We are really up against it and market solutions will be woefully inadequate. Okay team get busy!

Mute999 said:

Lots of talk about revenue but, no mention of the profits?
Over 21B profit. 21B. A quarter. This company has no clue what to do with all the money they make (of course, giving more to the employees is not an option), but still, line must go up. For the shareholders, for the C-suite. Must. Go. Up. Always.

All this money, and so preciously little good is actually done with it, when you get right down to it.

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Over the years I have written several comments on Ars about comparing Apple and other companies, such as Google. I’m not going to go into the details of why Apple benefits certain customers this time just to say that Apple products do provide a benefit for some.
I’ll also not go into the need, due to economics, for Apple to have lots of extra money.

As for what is good from personal computing, if there is anything good at all from that, then Apple has been part of it.

RDaneel623 said:

I am clearly in a tiny minority here, but I loved the ad. To me, this isn't a dystopia. Rather, this is one of the (many) things I want out of an AI... help me mediate my human interactions. If I wish to write something to another person why wouldn't I want to use the AI for that purpose if the AI is capable of writing something superior to what I would come up with on my own? If a human can do something better, then the human should do it... but if the AI can produce superior results then the AI should do it.

Sure, the girl in the ad could have written the letter herself, or written the letter in collaboration with her dad... but this is a letter to this girl's hero... if you were that girl wouldn't you want to send the most well written letter you could?

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Because human interactions are not about "performance." In fact, the best, most lasting, and most memorable human interactions often involve lots of awkwardness, mistakes, and self-deprecating laughter.

If you're worried about performance in your non-business interactions with friends, loved ones, and idols, you may want to reconsider your approach.

Happysin said:

Come on, if it's Shaggy, you know what that first word is.

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In the original scripts it was motherfucker, but the censors killed that.

Not trying to be mean, but what possible reason could anyone have for buying anything with a 386 gen processor? I would actually be interested if they built a decent unit with a ryzen processor. Yes, I have worked on 386 and 486 and even an old AT with a 286 chip. Just don't. That is likely a couple of hours of your life you will never get back.

HandymanHandy said:

Purchase from reputable compounding pharmacies, as they will require a prescription.

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Absolutely. There ARE good, reputable ones, with FDA oversight.

I know of four people at work, using two different FDA overseen compounding labs who have not only lost hundreds of pounds, but damn well didn't spend $900/dose.

RDaneel623 said:

I am clearly in a tiny minority here, but I loved the ad. To me, this isn't a dystopia. Rather, this is one of the (many) things I want out of an AI... help me mediate my human interactions. If I wish to write something to another person why wouldn't I want to use the AI for that purpose if the AI is capable of writing something superior to what I would come up with on my own? If a human can do something better, then the human should do it... but if the AI can produce superior results then the AI should do it.

Sure, the girl in the ad could have written the letter herself, or written the letter in collaboration with her dad... but this is a letter to this girl's hero... if you were that girl wouldn't you want to send the most well written letter you could?

Click to expand...

If you're considering using AI to do the work for you, then you didn't want to write a letter to that person. If you want AI to mediate your human interaction for you, you're likely a sociopath (which, no judge... I've got high functioning sociopaths in the family and they are fine, they just aren't warm caring individuals).

Meanwhile, net negative for society as a whole if it catches on for this use case... Possibly even the end of it, interacting with each other is literally what society is.