Vertical integration by Starlink of the cheapest launch capability in the world (by far) is the reason there are no competitors, and there will be no competitors. The pace of innovation at SpaceX is not THE reason - it’s an additional reason that no one has a snowballs chance in hell of ever catching Starlink.
I’ve seen talk of competitor satellite networks or a possible competitor emerging. Folks it’s game set and match, the trophy has been handed over and the crowd has gone home.
SpaceX and Starlink have the same owner, both are private companies, with SpaceX launching 80% of the global space payload last year and rising, and Starlink has a constellation two orders of magnitude bigger than any competitor. It’s over. And IMO it’s awesome.
Without taking into account whether JPEG XL shines on its own or not (which it may or may not), JPEG XL completely rocks for sure because it does this:
.. $ ls -l a.jpg && shasum a.jpg
... 615504 ... a.jpg
716744d950ecf9e5757c565041143775a810e10f a.jpg
.. $ cjxl a.jpg a.jxl
Read JPEG image with 615504 bytes.
Compressed to 537339 bytes including container
.. $ ls -l a.jxl
... 537339 ... a.jxl
Do you realize how many billions of JPEG files there are out there which people want to keep? If you recompress your old JPEG files using a lossy format, you lower its quality.
But with JPEG XL, you can save 15% to 30% and still, if you want, get your original JPG 100% identical, bit for bit.
That's wonderful.
P.S: I'm sadly on Debian stable (12 / Bookworm) which is on ImageMagick 6.9 and my Emacs uses (AFAIK) ImageMagick to display pictures. And JPEG XL support was only added in ImageMagick 7. I haven't looked more into that yet.
This has kind of crystallised for me why I find the whole generative AI and "prompt engineering" thing unexciting and tiresome. Obviously the technology is pretty incredible, but this is the exact opposite of what I love about software engineering and computer science: the determinism, the logic, and the explainability. The ability to create, in the computer, models of mathematical structures and concepts that describe and solve interesting problems. And preferably to encode the key insights accurately, clearly and concisely.
But now we are at the point that we are cargo-culting magic incantations (not to mention straight-up "lying" in emotional human language) which may or may not have any effect, in the uncertain hope of triggering the computer to do what we want slightly more effectively.
Yes it's cool and fascinating, but it also seems unknowable or mystical. So we are reverting to bizarre rituals of the kind our forbears employed to control the weather.
It may or may not be the future. But it seems fundamentally different to the field that inspired me.
The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power.
Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation and has created a significant subclass of infantile or openly hostile actors.
Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure to step in and moderate their behaviour. It is an unfortunate side effect of what I can only describe as the infantilisation of society that I have watched happen over the last few decades.
It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics.
They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do.
I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to.
I've been frequently flabbergasted how these obvious observations come across as novel to people I talk to, as if 2 year olds have their own email address and password.
I even heard someone say unboxing and cartoon videos "somehow" are popular among women in their 30s.
First I would use unlec.com to determine where it is currently allocated. The SPID/OCN tells you who has it. SPID = Service Provider ID; OCN = Operating Company Name.
Then look at the LNP history, which is the history of who and when the number was assigned/re-assigned over the years.
Tell both companies that you will be involving the FCC and try to reach the "porting group" who will be able to fix this. Porting problems happen all the time, even with 99% of ports (that might be an optimistic number) happening in a nearly-automatic fashion. (EDIT: I mean the porting group at each company, not the FCC).
> A loan at 2.875% is almost like having free money, so even if I need to move, I'd prefer to rent out my house than sell it.
I've watched a lot of friends go through this thought process recently. Locally, the thought process grinds to a halt when they see the exorbitant prices that property management firms are charging for new customers these days. Apparently there's a huge spike in the number of people trying to become landlords because they don't want to give up their low mortgage rates, like you. Property management firms are taking advantage of this.
I also see a lot of people changing their minds when they do the math on the size of down payment they'd need and the monthly cost of a 7% mortgage on the types of houses they want to move to. There's a reason people talk about starter homes and trading up as opposed to accumulating additional properties every time they move to a nicer house.
OTOH, I know a number of well compensated software engineers who were trying to pour their money into real estate investments. All of them are very firmly paused on buying new properties at the moment.
Most of the satellites shown on the Leolabs site are too dim to see without a telescope because they don't reflect enough light. My site calculates brightness and filters down to the ones that you can see with the unaided eye.
There are still quite a few! ISS in particular is very bright and can even be seen before sunset. The new Chinese space station Tiangong is also a good one to try. In the next few weeks it's expected that the recently launched BlueWalker-3 will become quite bright too as it expands its enormous phased array antenna (64 square meters!). But the coolest is probably if you can catch a recently launched Starlink train, 50 satellites all visible simultaneously or within seconds of each other. (A few weeks after launch the Starlink satellites are no longer visible as they reach their operational orbits.)
Here's what will happen. He will lose the $7M civil suit. He will have a judgement of $7M that Bungie is free to collect on such as wage garnishments if his home state allows it or repossessing any assets the state doesn't protect (many states block repossession of your primary household). At this point his option is Bankruptcy.
Depending on his total assets, a judge will either allow Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. Chapter 13 happens when you negotiate with your creditors based on your income. In Chapter 7, you discharge the entirety of the debt. If he does not file Bankruptcy, then Bungie can reinstate the judgement every 10 years (time depends on the state) and continue collecting until his death.
After Bankruptcy, the debt will follow him for 7 years (possibly more as unscrupulous debt buyers will give him a taste of his own medicine filing invalid, but hard to prove, claims on his credit report). The size of the debt may make seeking employment difficult. Having a judgement of any size will limit his ability to rent houses or getting any sort of credit. And good luck getting any kind of government clearance. This is the real debtor's prison which will regulate him to living under sleazy landlords likely in questionable locations, getting loans with insanely high APRs, and having to use his own money to generate credit (secured credit cards). Even though judgements last for 7 years, after bankruptcy you are usually out of this prison in 3-4 years. FWIW, many loan officers may look at that judgement as a clerical error (someone pressed 0 too many times) but once they ask for clarity all bets are off. But I've heard many stories of people climbing into a $50K car loan a year after bankruptcy so his mileage may vary
EDIT: Bungie and this gentleman could settle out of court with no judgement as well. The filed civil suit will still be a public record but that is much lower weight on one's credit score. The out of court settlement could stipulate no more bungie content being uploaded or posted on the internet for a period of time. There are many different directions, what I outlined is if this person does not respond or otherwise loses the civil suit
Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child.
Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to use it. When the father died, the stuff in the shed was mostly junk to be sorted into scrap metal or put in the skip. A very few useful tools, a bunch of valueless obsolete tools, and a little antique/collectable stuff. The mother’s stuff was useful or precious to her, mementoes and knick-knacks. Plus some hoarder mentality that made sense given her background. Mostly valueless stuff to anyone else. What value is a drawer of your smalls?
I want my parents to pass their problem down to me and my siblings. I think forcing parents to tidy up or downsize can be cruel. Why be selfish and needlessly make my parents sad?
This is my favourite feature of gitignores.
Everytime I need "drafts", sample code, etc, in a repo, I create a folder in that repo, but then I have to remember to not add it to commits, and I don't want to add it to the .gitignore that is versioned, so I do "mkdir drafts && echo '*' > ./drafts/.gitignore", and it ignores my drafts without having to add a new ignored dir in the versioned .gitignores.
And obviously, it also "ignores" the .gitignore itself because it matches "*", while still taking it into account, which is what I need.
The US Navy's submarines are run with CO2 levels varying from 300-11,300ppm.[1] The military did plenty of studies in the 60s and 70s and failed to find significant cognitive effects in environments as high as 4% CO2.[2]
> Thus, CO2 at 40,000 ppm for 2 weeks did not affect performance on multiple tests of cognitive function in physically fit young airmen, a population probably not unlike submariners.
> A number of studies suggest that CO2 exposures in the range of 15,000-40,000 ppm do not impair neurobehavioral performance. Schaefer (1961) reported that 23 crewmen exposed to CO2 at 15,000 ppm for 42 days in a submarine showed no psychomotor testing effects but showed moderate increases in anxiety, apathy, uncooperativeness, desire to leave, and sexual desire.
> In a 5-day exposure of seven subjects at a CO2 concentration of 30,000 ppm, Glatte et al. (1967) reported no effects on hand steadiness, vigilance, auditory monitoring, memory, or arithmetic and problem solving performance.
> CO2 exposure did not affect performance on the tracking task or any of the six RPM subtests (Storm and Giannetta 1974).
There's also an argument from biology. When sitting around, people exhale 4-5% CO2. That's 40,000-50,000ppm. An extra 2,000ppm is far less than the variance across a typical breath, and it won't increase ppCO2 in the blood stream nearly as much as standing up and walking around. If CO2 hurt cognition as badly as these studies claim, then even minor physical exertion should turn people into drooling idiots.
It's for these reasons that I am extremely skeptical of the recent claims about CO2 impairing cognition.
It genuinely shocks me that there are still people who don't disable sending the referer header cross-origin in the browser: I have not encountered a single website that breaks when setting `network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy` to 1 in Firefox, and only 2 or 3 sites that break when setting it all the way to 2.
It not only completely prevents stuff like this, it profoundly increases your privacy on the web by preventing sites from tracking which domain you came from. There is no good reason any site needs to know that. I am surprised that Mozilla hasn't simply made this the default setting for all users.
I've seen this issue in a slightly different context. A few years ago, my Android phone began dying much more quickly than before. Looking at the built-in battery stats, nothing was amiss and there were no apps causing excessive wakeups. It was only when I used Android Battery Historian that I saw there was a ton of bluetooth wakeups caused by Google Play Services.
But why would it be waking up so much? Usually the wake requests originate from some other app, but I didn't see any associated wakeups in the stats dump. After a while I remembered that I installed GasBuddy recently, and a Google search revealed that other people had Bluetooth battery drain issues after installing it. Apparently GasBuddy had an ads SDK that aggressively scanned for Bluetooth beacons. Removing the app stopped the drain.
I was shocked that no battery stats screen showed GasBuddy was the culprit. Even the Battery Historian tool (which requires the user to run a Docker image and dump a bugreport) only hinted that there was some Bluetooth wakeups, but didn't show which app they originated from.
This AirTag seems to be a similar issue, especially if a less experienced user doesn't realized all the "Find My" wakeups are caused by nearby AirTags.
I think Apple needs to make the "deep sleep" states of their devices more strict so they can minimize drain when sitting (both when sitting overnight on a nightstand, or for a week in a living room). Notifications (besides calls) can usually afford to be batched since users are asleep or not nearby. As for AirTags, if one is being carried through an area, there's probably other iDevices that are being actively used nearby. They're already awake and using RF, so they can handle the AirTag ping with virtually no additional power consumption.
There are many things one can do which lead you to have less profit.
One can run false advertisements, hire mercenaries to attack your factories, dump below-price goods on the market (and jack up prices once you're out-of-business), sign exclusive anti-competitive deals with your suppliers, vandalize your employee's homes so none want to work for you, and so on.
No one would argue that any of those are ethical, but none of those are theft.
Confusing words like this is a standard tactic, but it's not conducive to having reasoned discourse.
It's also not conducive to attack a straw man. You put a lot of words in my mouth. I said we shouldn't impose Western IP regimes on other nations. You somehow changed this to music piracy in the west. There's no logical connection there either.
As a footnote, on the topic of piracy in the west: when I was in college, there was a lot of copyright infringement. None of those kids had money to buy what they were pirating. A couple of decades later, no one I knew from college infringes on copyrights. The lost profits were zero. Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. It's in discussing scenarios like that when the analogy to theft breaks down. The tools for addressing it are different. As a matter of policy, it makes the most sense to target places where there is the most capacity for losing profit. One example of an IP regime which I thought was clever -- from an Eastern European country shortly after the fall of communism -- only criminalized copyright infringement for non-minors. If I child wanted to copy a $5000 CAD program or a $200 IDE to learn to use it, it was legal. Copyright enforcement started once kids hit 17 (and was enforced). The West forced the country to shut down that "loophole," but it seemed like a reasonable policy to me.
Much of the research on the topic indicates the former. Gender bifurcation in jobs is even more pronounced in more egalitarian countries [1]. Babies exhibit different gender preferences for toys at ages less than a year old [2] [3].
This is the conclusion I have come to for myself. I got the initial COVID vaccine but the flu vaccine doesn't seem worth it for me and I won't be getting any boosters or further vaccines.
I've said this before here and got downvoted for it, but bioethicists as a profession are responsible for more death than pretty much anything else I can quickly think of.
People are dying from heart disease all the time, very often in predictable conditions. Literally millions every year. Statistically this means we should hear about such failed procedures many many more times than we do now - there is literally no downside from doing this much more often, and a strict upside: a chance to live longer and a definite advance in medicine leading to other lives saved. Sure, it may mean more stress for a dying patient, but quite a few would prefer their death have some meaning. But they can't chose this because it's not "ethical".
Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there - I'd really like to see an argument where we had three major companies create mRNA vaccines, only one failed (harmlessly!) but we shouldn't have used this technology a few years early. mRNA tech is incredibly versatile - it should have applications from curing cold to curing cancer. But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical".
We knew from month 1 that the young and healthy are not hit hard by Covid. Mortality in those groups was always comparable to flu, more or less. But we didn't do challenge trials. We wasted ... I have to take a break from typing, tbh, I'm overwhelmed. We wasted almost a year while literal millions died while wondering if Covid is transmitted by touch, aerosols or airborne when we could have fixed this in two weeks with a bunch of 25 year olds. We spent half a year before even realizing masks help, and we still don't know for sure how much and what's the difference between each kind. We had Omicron - we knew it was different, we had good reason to think it's not significantly worse from the start, but we still had a _lot_ of questions. But two years from the start of the pandemic we STILL didn't put a bunch of healthy volunteers through a completely harmless study to find out things early. Because it wouldn't have been "ethical".
This isn't ethics we're talking about. It's pure and unadulterated cowardice. We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for. Joe from the street would be excused from making these decisions, but when you deal with the people directly charged by the society from making these decision, it's just failure to do their job. And in a supermajority of case we're dealing with volunteers anyways.
I have always struggled with how to advise my friends & family on this path of learning. It seems like everyone wants to be a WFH developer these days, but I don't know how to enable them to succeed on that path. "Go build something you want to build!" is something I keep reiterating (as does this article). But most don't seem to be interested in that for whatever reason (presumably because its fucking hard).
Maybe I should just leave it at that - I am getting to a point where if someone doesn't have the willpower to go burn a whole weekend on a pile of bullshit that won't even compile (i.e. because they really want to solve some problem), then maybe they won't have the necessary pain tolerance required to truly master the skillset.
I’ve seen talk of competitor satellite networks or a possible competitor emerging. Folks it’s game set and match, the trophy has been handed over and the crowd has gone home.
SpaceX and Starlink have the same owner, both are private companies, with SpaceX launching 80% of the global space payload last year and rising, and Starlink has a constellation two orders of magnitude bigger than any competitor. It’s over. And IMO it’s awesome.