Seems like herding cattle. I'm just waiting for more incompatible changes and deal altering to drop at any time at which point everyone is completely fucked with a few days to react.

Manual intervention to update certs is likely being replaced with manual intervention to deal with breakage of automation software... automation software that is itself a vector for compromise.

I hate everything about this house of cards. A few people deciding for the world, global fully overlapping trust anchors, everything being fundamentally based on leaps of faith over completely insecure channels.
The whole thing needs to go.

Similar thing in Japan. The food isn't expensive either.

I wouldn't want them to be relying on AI to do reviews though. Maybe two AI, looking only for issues and reporting them back, like you can have AI look for security issues with computer code. And a proper review done by a human.

I have a feeling that if they did that, the AI would flag up loads of critical, may lead to meltdown issues that are uneconomical to fix and deemed to unlikely to be worth spending money on. Which incidentally lead to both Chernobyl and Fukushima being far, far worse than they might have been. Both cheaped out on the containment building. Fukushima's were inadequate, Chernobyl didn't even have any because the risk of an explosion was deemed so low.

Firstly Starfleet Academy is set centuries after TNG and DS9, at a time when the Federation is trying to rebuild after the devastation of The Burn. The Academy has only just re-opened and started taking new recruits, and with the galaxy still recovering the feed of already accomplished cadets just isn't there.

That said, the TNG version in particular was ridiculous. They apparently traumatized cadets as much as possible to see if they were worthy of joining. Aside from not every cadet having the same traumatic experiences to draw on, that's just cruel and ignores the fact that the whole point of the academy is to prepare students for that kind of thing.

In SA the cadets are expected to be at the top of their game... Once they have been taught how to do that. We see them improving throughout the first season, until they are finally able to work well as a crew (under the leadership and supervision of Reno and other officers). Of course there is also an emotional and coming of age journey there, because that's what happens to young adults. Most Western militaries are aware of this and cater for it, as do universities.

Ake left Starfleet because she saw what it had become because of The Burn, and didn't like it. She accepts that was a mistake, and she should have tried harder to put it right instead of walking away. That's a great story and the reason she was chosen to lead the Academy - she both remembers Starfleet before The Burn from her long lifespan, and is strongly motivated to make sure the next generation of officers learn from her mistakes. That's also why she wants to recruit Caleb.

The rest is just because it's a TV show. We aren't there to watch lectures, and most of what they teach is made up pseudo-science anyway. Learning how to operate an imaginary starship that works however the writers say it does isn't very interesting for the audience. It's the same with the cadets getting into so much danger (and they do use the holodeck extensively when possible) - it's like how for some reason the various Enterprises we have seen over three seasons get into highly improbable situations literally every other week. On TNG they have families aboard, but regularly end up with the ship and everyone's lives on the line.

That's how TV works. Real life is repetitive and boring, so TV doesn't try to be realistic.

Ahem

That's the wrong way of looking at it. You could make the same argument about airbags. The Takata airbag recall was a huge disaster, cost billions to put right, and ended up with them going bankrupt. But airbags do save lives and prevent serious injury. On balance, even with the recall of millions of vehicles, they are worth having.

Matrix headlights do increase visibility a lot. The really good ones are fantastic. Reliability seems to be decent enough, so very likely the benefit outweighs the cost.

Many cars have a dial you can use to adjust the headlights based on the number of passengers and amount of cargo. Hardly anyone even knows it exists, let alone uses it.

Then you have auto high beams, which are supposed to turn off when another car is coming but tend to react far too slowly. Teslas are terrible for it, but I've never seen a particularly good implementation. They need to turn the high beams off when headlights become visible around a corner or over a crest, not a few seconds after they are directly in front of your vehicle and the other driver has already been blinded.

Finally you have matrix headlights, which again are supposed to block the beam that is shining towards on-coming traffic, or the backs of same direction traffic. It tends to work better but also has reaction time issues.

Is mirror glass legal in your jurisdiction? In the UK it used to be popular with commercial vehicles to stop people seeing what is inside them, but I haven't seen it for a while. You could get it as a film you apply to the inside of the glass.

Another option is to put beanies with a reflective strip around them on the rear seat headrests.

I try to take comfort in the knowledge that when it does all come crashing down there will be large numbers of these things on the used market at bargain prices. Then again, the pent up demand for them may spoil it.

Don't we all! Hard drives, RAM, *and* GPUs, I'm in the market for it all.

I also want to buy silver-tin alloy for casting, and hey, what do you know, silver and tin are also both at astronomical prices due to in no small part the AI boom.

At one point you have to just stop waiting. Prices could start falling tomorrow, but then again, that could have been said at any point for the past several years.

They don't have the revenue to survive much longer,

They were profitable in Q2. You can't extrapolate that endlessly, but they're not a cash incinerator anymore. And they have $15-20B on-hand pre-IPO. They're fine.

Anthropic is more or less breakeven *despite* being engaged in a massive 10x YoY scaleup for approaching 4 years running. Companies undergoing even "normal" scaleup rates are almost never profitable, let alone 10x/yr. Any slowdown in scaleup, or any shift in market pressures from intense jockeying for position to starting to pay back investors, and this drives them into deep profitability

The threat to Anthropic has nothing to do with whether its current business is sustainable or deeply profitable at its core. It is. Its threat is one I've been highlighting for years and now we're really starting to see: once something is "good enough", people start to question why they should be paying more for better. We now have the rise of a bunch of crazy cheap, yet quite coding-competent models like GLM 5.3 Flash, Qwen 3 Flash, MiMo 2.6 Pro, MiMo 2.6 Flash, Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor, etc. The latter two are almost too cheap to meter. Now, you still need an orchestrator, for planning, supervision, management, etc; it can either be a human or a higher-end model. But you don't need to pay for, say, Opus to get good coding done these days. Anthropic, like OpenAI, is built on charging a sizable premium over inference costs because they have the best and people will pay for it. And sure, in non-verifiable fields (say, medicine), maybe people keep paying for the best, whatever it may happen to be. But the more of the "bulk" coding and the like moves off these premium models and into dirt-cheap models, that seems to represent a real threat to their business model.

Anthropic's response thusfar seems to be "join them". Claude 5.5 Haiku is a good model "flash" model, and they've set quite affordable pricing for it, definitely fitting into the above category. But that doesn't really solve the problem. Their best hope is that Jevon's Paradox kicks up: that now that big projects are so cheap to implement, people keep taking on even bigger projects, scaling their income from cheap flash models like Haiku, orchestrators like Sonnet and Opus, and non-verifiable tasks where people will generally always want to pay for the best. But will that compensate? Hard to tell. This is the threat to Anthropic.

Huh, does stuff like this work in vim? /prompt write me an implementation of the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition in python, with a sleek modern GUI and test geometry

Unrelated aside, but back in the day when there was just vi, there was always a debate as to whether it's pronounced "vee" or "vie". Eventually my friends and I agreed on a way to settle the debate: we'd have a text-to-speech program read it out for us, and treat whatever it said as canon.

It said: "six".

At the colleges I've been at most vehicals are unmarked. The exception is student parking which has a pass.

Season 2 was already filmed by the time season 1 aired. They cancelled the show after season 1 finished, but are still going to finish and release season 2. Apparently it ends on a cliff hanger.

Academy was a great Trek show. It captured the spirit of Star Trek and showed us how Starfleet helps young people develop into officers, while also giving us some new and interesting ideas. The characters were interesting, the legacy stuff wasn't obnoxious and actually added to what came before (especially for The Doctor after what B'Lanna did to him), and the overall writing and presentation overall was good. There were a few issues here and there, but nothing major, and it managed to be both funny and exciting, while also being genuine and intelligent.

Unfortunately some fans were triggered by a line in the trailer and never managed to get over it.