How sure of that are we, really? I'm just a grump on the internet, so what do I know, but it sure seems like that's a huge assumption to be making.

Perhaps we should fund some research to make sure of this? For a long time, all Swans were White, until they weren't. If we do find extant mirror life, we can all rest easier knowing it's unlikely to cause the end of the world, since it hasn't gotten us yet.

You go to a 4 year Engineering school, get an actual Engineering degree. Then you apprentice with an Engineering company, and study for the state's license examination, one of the hardest tests you'll ever take. If you pass, then and only then are you an Engineer.

Real engineering is nothing like the slop portrayed in this article.

Engineering schools showcase failures of the past as a teaching tool. I still remember learning about the bridge that shook itself apart during my freshman year. Engineers value safety margins and failure analysis.

Engineers DO learn from history.

While there's a lot if good logic elsewhere, provided LLMs continue to improve, we will eventually get to AGI, we all just disagree about when and how.

However, there is zero chance that government regulation will work. Regulatory capture is a long established fact of life.

Fortunately the current build out is part of a bubble, and we're heading to the next AI winter. We'll be sorting this out in other ways in the meanwhile.

My understanding is that the magnetic amplifiers used in the V2 rocket kicked off a lot of interesting uses of magnetic cores.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_Solid_State

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_logic

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US2709798A/en

Later, Brian Mathewson from Case Western wrote up a really good manual for it, and I actually got paid a few times for it. (Shareware, back in the day)

At one point, I had a self contained boot floppy with OS/2 minus it's GUI, Forth/2, and a bit of room left. You could load up Forth/2 and do a directory and play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor simultaneously. I thought that was pretty cool.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/forth2/code/HEAD/tree/

  C:\Users\User>curl -i http://longbets.org/601/
  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:49:33 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 178
  Connection: keep-alive
  Server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
  Location: https://longbets.org/601/
  X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN

  
  
  
  
301 Moved Permanently
  
nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
  
  

I am quite impressed that the bet included above redirection as part of the terms.

There should be arbitrary and orthogonal ranking dimensions, that can be created by users at will. You should be able to have your own algorithms to decide what you want to see.

For instance, a post could be funny 0, in US English 1.0, political 0.5, physics 0.0, etc.

Every rating tied back to the person or bot that did the rating.

And of course you can rate the ratings or raters.

Confusing, but soooo powerful

Obviously we need open source designs.

Perhaps the easiest way would be a Raspberry pi set up with an opto isolated CGA/EGA/VGA/SVGA capture that could be viewed via the internet? (I mean, we're probably talking systems still running MS-DOS or Windows 98 running these systems)

I still haven't managed to get it back to a nice, easy to mow lawn yet. 8(

80 years, yet we still can't mark up hypertext without copying and then modifications to the source.

The fuzzy way we depreciate the term Engineer shows up in situations like this. An actual Professional Engineer, with a state issued license, would be assuming liability for their actions, and would know better than to bypass an air gap in this manner.

Someone who uses the term willy-nilly, as most programmers seem to do these days, has no such restraints, nor caution, nor deep consideration of consequences.

I expect it'll get fixed in Tuesday after the special election date passes, and we finally mourn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

You add server to the network, it's purpose is to query, the SCADA system and get the status, error logs, process parameters, whatever you need, and spool them into a directory on a drive. A second process on that server then spools them off via a one-way optical link (high speed optocoupler, specially modified fiber link, etc) using some sort of protocol that broadcasts all the collected information, along with some form of error correction, on a continuous basis. It will do this until the end of time, never knowing if the information was recieved.

The outside server then monitors the broadcast stream, using it to update it's own directory with the relevant data, and makes it available like any normal server to an internet connection.

Because the connection has only one physical link, and it CAN NOT be reversed, ingress of control is completely prevented. Yet you can monitor the system from the outside, and never have to worry about compromise of the air-gapped network.

A pair of raspberry pi's with ethernet (and not wifi/bluetooth) could do the job.

Once it works, the "outside" host could be hacked, but it won't, CAN'T influence the other host, so things remain actually safe from remote hacking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network

Adobe acrobat has "exact match" as part of its document search results, which is amazing

If you can, learn a bit of machining. You're going to be in a place where you can pick up a ton of skills unrelated to your major, with almost no effort. Plus those can be completely ungraded, and at your own pace, so there's no stress. (Again, quite valuable at unexpected times, and fun!)

As you make friends, take the effort to keep in touch with them, it doesn't have to be pushy, just don't succumb to the natural tendency to follow "out of sight, out of mind". (I've done that too much)

You don't need a full bidirectional internet connection for remote monitoring, and data diodes are a relatively cheap way to monitor them in complete safety.

Completely stopping ingress of control (using above mentioned data diodes) is relatively easy, and should be legislated into being the norm.