The other was reflections. The camera with its 80MP resolution RAW was great in general, not hard to get better results than an Epson V600 could. The slides were easy, I rigged up a little black box to keep stray light out and backlit with it with a clean source of light, but reflections on glossy prints killed the whole operation. My last idea was taking the photo at an angle so the picture would be angled toward something featureless (and preferably black) and then correcting the perspective in post, but that had the potential to introduce focus issues (my DoF with my setup was roughly 1/32") and maybe slight (probably imperceptible?) differences in resolution across the image. Tried polarizing gels over the light and lens and that reduced the problem but didn't eliminate it.

Some people on YouTube claim to pull off this feat but I think they're either tolerating slight reflections or engaging in magic.

I for one am content to be digital from the start with my images.

Edit: Oh, and keeping prints flat was another engineering undertaking. Glass introduces all kinds of variables, including megatons of dust. I settled on a DIY vacuum box system of sorts with a shop vac, lots of little holes drilled into a box to create some suction to hold a piece flat.

The company has, I'm sure, probably tripled all that by now. In their case it compressed really well, but still.

All that to say, YMMV, significantly.

But for commercial use, IDK, you'd want to dig into the details of their system. Not exactly S3 levels of resilience, but perhaps enough for some people, I leave it to others to judge.

Even today, the primary concern when I'm talking to other managers dealing with job applications from family members (including kids) and even friends of existing employees is "How does the existing employee react if it doesn't work out and we have to fire their spouse/kid/best friend?"

Better to avoid that drama entirely. (edit: EASIER to avoid that drama, I should say, but perhaps not always better)

And if you don't think management isn't at least 60% drama control between team members you've never been in management of a diverse set of people, which is why the best engineer, the best electrician, etc doesn't necessarily make the best manager, etc. Different skill sets, different universe of concerns.

https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty

Random citation, I think the situation is actually a little better than they do, but that'll do since they present some data in an easy to read way.

The standard of living went up because productivity and value creation went up significantly. That's the only way that happens.

Real estate is a very local thing, so I can't speak to your area, but 1950s equivalent homes in my area are still impressively cheap. Why? People aren't interested in a 900 to 1000sqft home with no central AC. There's cities in this country that will give a run down property like that to you for free if you agree to live in that little town for a certain number of years, or at least there used to be. Those things come and go.

Also, because that's not what they want, the neighborhood becomes a meth lab. But if people actually wanted those homes that issue would resolve itself.

The data doesn't all support this common misconception. Really, it's an intentional deception on the part of many people who know better.

Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.

I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.

There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).

I tried DDG many times but I think they use Bing on the backend, and, well, Bing doesn't suck just because Microsoft gimps the front end. Bing sucks because enormous indexes are hard. Kagi pulls from multiple sources so gets fundamentally different results.

Hong Kong I think used to be a popular option as well, before the handover from the UK.

Being terminally 'online' can make people cynical about everything, but have to temper things with reality a bit too.

Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.

And if you want Astra/Fable/Opus frontier level, then there's no option at all.

But if you don't need that, or you don't need speed... That opens up the discussion. I've been impressed even with how Siri's been doing with the Apple Foundation Models in MacOS/iOS 27 given how small they are.

Edit: I can't even fully spec the M5 Ultra Mac Studio you'd need for GLM5.3 Flash since 512GB isn't available yet, but it's already at $9500 for 256GB RAM.

Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.

Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.

Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.

Of course, some things are too good to be true, they apparently lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort before closing it down earlier this year. At least they did in my area in January, my understanding is they ended it everywhere they didn't have a physical store presence.

If you don't want Google to be able to do anything at all with information you put into their system, easy, don't open an account!

I can agree with some of the other points, Google shouldn't be hoovering up mountains of data, etc. Just have to be careful of extremes. If you enshrine something bad in something as difficult to change as a constitution, you're stuck with it, and all your unintended consequences, potentially forever. You say "you can't actually enforce this totally in practice" but have you ever met a law firm? They would absolutely take the most extreme possible interpretation and milk all of society for billions a year if they can find an appropriate avenue.

This kind of extremism is what derailed some constitutional reforms in South America over the past decade. It started with reasonable center-left people saying some reasonable things, the radical left seized the process and wrote the final draft and faced with a choice between insanity and an unsatisfactory status quo people made the only palatable choice.