The other lovely project of that ilk is www.dragonflytelescope.org whose key observation was that Canon's newest sport telephoto lenses have better stray-light reduction than astronomical telescopes can manage, and lots of work on extended structures is stray-light limited.

I love that someone has done the calculation 'a $5000 Celestron astrograph with a $5000 6k x 6k x 4µm camera covers ten square degrees of sky per shot, if we set up two thousand of those it covers the entire sky, it's about 144GBytes per shot but it's 2026 and we have big discs and fast networks'

One of them has now been converted into the Roman Space Telescope which is at the infinite-testing-before-launch stage and should launch within eighteen months, the other is in storage; transferring from the NRO to private ownership seems quite unlikely to happen.

I’m not sure how much the oil quality is a gotcha - Alberta’s crude is also heavy and sour and Canada manages, at the price of a hill of sulphur the size of a city block on Vancouver north docks.

And there aren't enough price-insensitive sellers of their dead parents' homes to get this down to '$250,000 house, 6.5% rate, $1500 per month'.

The software really ought to have been embedding the prompts and random-number-generator seeds in the image metadata from day one.

I must admit that my reaction to a lot of the last year has been 'this must have been what living in the Soviet Union under late Brezhnev was like' - except that there weren't climate science institutions for Brezhnev to personally abolish.

An organisation capable of auditing the Pentagon at any meaningful granularity would be an unspeakably dangerous espionage risk; there are lots of valuable assets whose existence let alone location is deliberately not at all widely known.

They are already given to people who don’t handwrite their own work, do not run the printing presses for their own work, do not do the marketing for their own work; if you can instruct an edifice of linear algebra to write a Nebula winning short story then you and Sam Altman deserve a Nebula.

I think this is absurd. If an LLM can honestly generate Nebula winning content then we are living in a pretty good science fiction future and complaining is Luddite nonsense; and this sort of attitude will go down like complaining that spellcheck destroys the jobs of copy editors.

I’ve still got a bottle of the tablets after a gout diagnosis in 2021, with instructions to use them only in event of an attack; I seem to be maintained OK by allopurinol.

What are John Deere doing wrong that they do not have an export market an order of magnitude bigger than the local one? Their name and colour scheme is pretty much synonymous with tractors even an ocean away.

Please stop posting AI garbage. Tent a camera, go to the Pantanal, and take real photos of real capybara.

Special forces problem in general: very strong focus on the mission, the mission is often a single chance, and they’re usually in a situation where you can’t take prisoners without aborting the mission.

aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh... is the press release; the performance and memory bandwidth benchmarks are against Trainium2 rather than against Nvidia.