Cocodapuf

And with font discussions comes this guy...

Well that was a fascinating and hilarious read. Thanks for posting that!

That said, 2006 was a long time ago now, I think that kind of issue with the calibri font in particular is going to become less and less relevant.

The original law? What's the wording on that I wonder...

Well one could possibly coat the license plate with a material that left those cameras unable to scan the plate, while any human could read it just fine, not even knowing there was something different about it. I would be totally in favor of that.

Yeah, I think it needs to be "wipe if a specific pin is entered", so you can wipe it only when you intend to.

Side note, my son has called the cops on several occasions by hitting the emergency button on the lock screen. Kids just have to play with it...

Once you automate something, the corresponding skill set and experience atrophy. It's a problem that predates LLMs by quite a bit. If the only experience gained is with the automated system, the skills are never acquired.

Well, to be fair, different skills are acquired. You've learned how to create automated systems, that's definitely a skill. In one of my IT jobs there were a lot of people who did things manually, updated computers, installed software one machine at a time. But when someone figures out how to automate that, push the update to all machines in the room simultaneously, that's valuable and not everyone in that department knew how to do it.

So yeah, I guess my point is, you can forget how to do things the old way, but that's not always bad. Like, so you don't really know how to use a scythe, that's fine if you have a tractor, and trust me, you aren't missing much.

Yeah, it's not there yet. But soon.

I mean, I wouldn't doubt that it will achieve its goals, it's very close already. If all they wanted was a single use rocket with a reusable booster and greater payload to orbit than the Saturn V at a fraction of the cost, then that has already been achieved, and that is not nothing.

Hey, I'm sorry to break it to you, but...

Irreparable damage will be done and nobody is really going to pay. The most you can expect is a patsy to take the fall, and it will probably be some military officer who wasn't the problem.

The Trump administration has argued that the US is at war with drug traffickers and that such strikes are legal under the rules of war, but most legal experts reject that rationale.

I would like to shut that shit down. You are not at war.

Have the "drug runners" struck at any US targets (preferably targets of military significance)? If not, then what I see is one party ruthlessly attacking another party repeatedly. If these were individuals that would be called a serial killer. And for serial killers it's never been a good defense to say "no no, this is legal, look how many people I've liked, I'm clearly at war, and this is legal in war". That's idiotic.

Furthermore, WE ARE NOT AT WAR! If you want a war, get Congress to declare war, we have a fucking process for that!

And finally, if this isn't a war, then it should be more of a policing situation. In no scenario should police fire missiles first and ask questions never. An acceptable way to handle this might be to disable the boat with munitions, and then detain all ~~fisherman~~ narcos aboard. Bonus, this would allow you to seize all the ~~fish~~ narcotics in their hold, which would prove you had the moral high ground and aren't just crazy murders. I mean can you imagine that, if you were just murdering people because you could and making sure to send all evidence and survivers to the bottom of the sea... Man, that would be nuts! People would be all like "who put these psychopaths in charge?!"

I think that's probably right. But personally, I want more and I think it's worth caring about, worth encouraging people to think about.

I have models of both Hubble and Chandra telescopes hanging in my room. 😃

It's a great telescope, it made a whole slew of discoveries possible. But yeah, digital imaging has improved a lot over the last 27 years, do you remember what digital cameras were like in 1998?

What we have is great, and what we've managed to do with it is astonishing. But... I believe we are doing ourselves a disservice by not updating these space observatories more frequently and by not building enough of them for all of the observations we want to make. Because we could, but we aren't.

Oh absolutely! But why not more?

Why are scientists around the globe competing for small chunks of time on the jwst when we could have several more telescopes like it? Or perhaps even a few slightly less advanced telescopes. I know designing it was a huge challenge, but even with the design complete, just constructing it presented a number of serious challenges. Given that the jwst was such a complex project, I wonder if a series of telescopes with optics and instruments still significantly more modern than Hubble would still be useful to astronomers as well as much easier to produce than the jwst.