Classrooms teach about reality (among other things) and there are many things in reality that don't involve obedience to the law, as it exists at a particular time and place.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

The stated justification for blue alerts is to warn the public of dangerous criminals. But they are only issued in response to attacks on cops, regardless of the level of danger to any other people. Also, at least in Texas, they're broadcast statewide. Texas is an awfully big state, and so the alerts are guaranteed to be irrelevant and non-actionable for the vast majority of people who receive them.

So it's fairly obvious to me that blue alerts are first and foremost a propaganda operation, aimed at perpetuating the stereotype that policing is a uniquely dangerous job. (It is indeed more dangerous than an average office job, but it has a much lower rate of fatal injuries than construction, or farming, or driving garbage trucks.)

> if: (github.event_name == 'issues' && github.event.pull_request.user.login != 'whitesource-for-github-com[bot]')

> However, on issues events, github.event.pull_request is always null.

This is extra dumb because even if you thought this condition was correctly testing the user's identity, it shouldn't have "appeared protective" upon even a moment's thought. If it worked correctly, it would obviously just exclude one bot user while allowing all other users, so it wouldn't provide any protection at all.

But more likely, this condition was never intended to be "protective" at all, and it's only being described that way because the writeup is LLM slop.

Reading the article and the linked government statement, it sounds like the issue is that the company did receive permits to ship their equipment to one location in Greenland, and then moved that equipment to a second location without permission, while the overall drilling operation is still waiting for approval.

Still bad in the sense that they're presumably trying to push boundaries, but it's a far cry from actually carrying out "illegal drilling".

With a partial eclipse, shadows look odd and the sunlight "feels" noticeably dimmer and more muted, but if you're not paying attention you might not notice much out of the ordinary.

An annular eclipse is much more dramatic and unmistakable. It's not as striking as totality, and of course you can't directly observe it without eye protection, but the "ring of fire" is beautiful in its own way.

We're all used to having to constantly update our browsers and phones to keep up with the security arms race. If a frozen model can't be updated, it will predictably remain vulnerable to any "exploits" or idiosyncratic quirks that people discover over time.

Let's say, as somebody suggested in another comment, that you buy 100,000 of these chips and deploy them to run fast-food drive-thrus. And then somebody discovers the model has a fondness for goblins[1], and if you role-play convincingly enough, you can get it to accept payment in shiny buttons and rodent skulls instead of cash.

What do you do then? I guess your options are to try and fix the behavior with a better prompt, or put some kind of filter in front of the model to catch attempted exploits. If the filter is cheap and dumb it probably won't work well enough, and if you use another model as a filter, you've negated the cost and speed benefits of putting the first model in hardware.

Of course the real answer is to just never expose the model to situations where an adversarial input could possibly lead to an undesired output. But that drastically limits what you can do with it.

[1]: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

I wouldn't be surprised if the designer of that CNC machine borrowed it from the popular Prusa MK2 3D printer, which uses a very similar design for its Y-axis belt: https://help.prusa3d.com/guide/2-y-axis-assembly_79992#81120

Looks like the misalignment is less than 1 degree. It's the kind of thing that stands out very noticeably in an image on a web page, when there are lots of perfectly horizontal edges to compare it against (e.g. the edge of the viewport). But I think it would be much harder to notice if projected onto a movie screen in a dark theater.

This is not at all what Le Guin is saying! It's right there at the end of the essay: "I agree with my reviewer that I don’t write hard science fiction."

All of a sudden, we had the ability to build complex interactive UIs in a web page, and we had to figure out how to use that ability. So naturally a bunch of people had the idea of just cloning existing desktop apps and styles, up to and including the full Windows desktop.

There were a few people who thought cloning the desktop UX into a browser would be "the future of computing" (see e.g. YouOS, a YC startup: https://www.benh.org/techblog/2006/07/youos-a-new-kind-of-co...) but I think most people just saw it as a fun way to show off your web dev skills.

I think it persists out of nostalgia, not just for the operating systems themselves, but for a particular era of web development history. And you still see this kind of UI occasionally in real products, e.g. Synology DSM.

> Fundraising is currently underway to complete construction this year and plan for the future of Star Axis. Star Axis will not open to the public for several years. Thank you for your patience.

> Your contribution to our fundraising campaign will provide opportunities for you to visit Star Axis between June and September 2026.

Which seems to hint that they're not planning to keep the current pricing model indefinitely. Hopefully it becomes more affordable once the construction has been fully paid for.

On the other hand, just looking at the pictures, it seems like the site might get pretty crowded if there were a significant number of visitors per day. So I guess there needs to be some kind of gatekeeping to prevent congestion. But maybe the remote location is enough to do that.

Of course, the justification is that compute and memory were at an extreme premium on the spacecraft. Accurately predicting the position of the moon at arbitrary times requires more complicated calculations. You can dramatically optimize the calculation by fitting a polynomial approximation which is valid for the length of the mission. And there's no reason to waste resources fitting that polynomial in space when it could be done on the ground, using much more powerful machines.

The AGC is what tends to get the press. It's easy to forget that the Apollo program relied on a cutting-edge distributed hardware and software stack, most of which was in Mission Control at the Real Time Computing Center.

I find it easy to envision a world, maybe 50 years from now, in which the very concept of "truth in advertising" is viewed as a lost, idyllic fantasy. Something people are nostalgic for, but feel powerless to regain.