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Comment They all suck at some important things (Score 4, Insightful) 53

My wife is a sign language interpreter, and does a lot of remote work, especially since covid.

To handle a meeting on Teams, sign language interpreters need to pin two video streams - the current speaker, and the deaf client(s).

It is essentially impossible to do this in Teams - they routinely open up a separate Zoom session for interpretation.

You'd think the inability to do this would be an ADA violation...

Comment Dumb idea (Score 1) 72

What you really want is a dog-like robot with package grippers on its back, and one arm for doorknobs and elevator buttons - something like a Boston Dynamics bot.

Four legs - stable without balancing, so longer battery life.
Low profile - delivery vans could have more than one, in dog-house slots
Can't be mistaken for a human - give it a few cute dog-like mannerisms

Comment Chaos sucks (Score 3, Informative) 42

I'm a long time NASA contractor. The vibe I got from my management and agency communications was that we could have at least lived with Isaacman - he at least believed NASA did valuable things, things worth preserving and defending. Maybe that's what got him rejected, ultimately.

Now we're back to the drawing board again.

Comment AI won't take your job? (Score 1) 76

The problem is, by and large jobs aren't taken - they're given by business owners and their MBA-driven middle managers.

If you're a business owner and you have a task that can be done in two ways:

* Human + AI = more productive human, human level salary
* All AI = OK performance, little or no salary

You're going to choose the second one until it becomes clear that "OK performance" is actively alienating your customers.

I predict many spectacular AI failures while this lesson is learned and relearned.

Comment Don't buy 1.0 of anything from Apple... (Score 2) 120

if you're looking for long-term utility and support. I made that mistake with the iPad - the first iPad lost support quickly compared to iPad 2 and following.

Apple's design and testing people are good, but you don't really know what people really want until you have feedback from several thousand users.

To the people who bought Vision Pro - thanks for your input on Vision Pro 2, which we won't see until Apple can solve the obvious Vision Pro problems of weight, power, and cost.

Comment Go ahead with the cheap stuff, then (Score 1) 95

vast price disparities ($80 per ton for forest projects versus $1,000 for direct air capture)

Plant fast-growing trees on West Virginia mountains
Harvest them
Bury them in local abandoned coal mines
Repeat every 5-10 years

Jobs to replace lost coal mining jobs.
New uses for old coal mines (well, probably not the mountain top removal mines...).

I'm not sure you could grow and bury two tons of wood for $80, but you could definitely do it for $1000.
All that's needed for this to work is a guaranteed price for real not-faking-it carbon sequestration.

Comment Would you believe it's unconstitutional? (Score 1) 224

This opinion article (Washington Post, gift link so no paywall) says there's 20-year-old Supreme Court case law that says the Government can't treat people differently under the law just because they don't like some of them.

Those cases were under Roberts, and were unanimous where it counted.

Trump is repeatedly on the record saying he uses US law to go after his enemies. A Supreme Court with any spine at all could use this to shut down the worst of his behaviors.

Submission + - Trump Pardons Founder of Electric Vehicle Start-Up Nikola, Trevor Milton (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Trevor Milton, the founder of electric vehicle start-up Nikola who was sentenced to prison last year, was pardoned by Donald Trump late on Thursday, the White House confirmed on Friday. The pardon of Milton, who was sentenced to four years in prison for exaggerating the potential of his technology, could wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution that prosecutors were seeking for defrauded investors. Milton and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund less than a month before the November election, according to the Federal Election Commission.

At Milton’s trial, prosecutors say a company video of a prototype truck appearing to be driven down a desert highway was actually a video of a non-functioning Nikola that had been rolled down a hill. Milton had not been incarcerated pending an appeal. Milton said late on Thursday on social media and via a press release that he had been pardoned by Trump. “I am incredibly grateful to President Trump for his courage in standing up for what is right and for granting me this sacred pardon of innocence,” Milton said.

Submission + - DOGE to Rewrite SSA Codebase in "Months" (wired.com)

frank_adrian314159 writes: According to an article in Wired, Elon Musk has appointed a team of technologists from DOGE to "rewrite the code that runs the SSA in months". This codebase is currently 10 million lines of COBOL and handles record keeping for all American workers and payments for all Social Security recipients. Given that the code has to track the byzantine regulations dealing with Social Security, it's no wonder that the codebase is this large. What is in question, though is whether a small team can rewrite this code "in months". After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Comment Small problem (Score 4, Informative) 84

NASA is odd compared to most federal agencies - the NASA administrator reports directly to the President, not like, say, NOAA which is under the Commerce Department.

IF NOAA closed its DC area headquarters, the stuff it does would be absorbed by Commerce, and the executive chain of command would still work. If NASA closed its Washington DC headquarters, the current administrators would have literally nowhere to go.

Bureaucracy aside, they do perform the important function of deciding what functions are performed at which NASA centers. Without them, Congress would have to do it directly in legislation. Which is how we got some of the current absurdities like Houston Space Center, which takes control of manned launches after they clear the tower (LBJ got Houston as his fee for getting the man-on-the-moon legislation through Congress).

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