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Comment Re: This is getting annoying (Score 1) 159

"Vaccines, COVID, masking, conspiracies, Trump. All in a gigantic doom loop that's not worth re-visiting ad nauseam."

But is 't the motto here, "news for nerds; stuff that matters." Those all sound like they matter.

"So just stop already. And please, stop with the microplastics while you're at it."

Ok, Chicken Little. Sticking your head in the sand and going LALALALALALALALALAL (*raspberries/fart sound*) because reality refuses to conform to your personal beliefs? Your head is so far up your ass! Grow up.

Comment Only ten years? (Score 2, Insightful) 23

"The botnet was used to launch more than 370,000 attacks in 80 countries, including China, Japan and the U.S., prosecutors said."

And no one was harmed or killed? Normally manslaughter to murder 1 (in the USA) is 10 years to life. A third of a million attacks targeting 37% of all nations on this panet gets at most TEN years? What the fuck is wrong with the US justice system?!?

They might as well start pardoning the criminals in DC (oh, right, they did that in January). What a banana republic

Comment OBLIG: Literally *EVERYTHING* is in space!!! (Score 0) 108

"... but few people are going to care. Its not like there's much to see out an airplane window anyways outside of takeoff and landing."

EXCEPT: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2F7Y3jRaUGg-A

How about you take a long, tall drink from a cup of shit-the-fuck-up? Maybe that'll be a relevant clue-by-4 to illustrate to you, that you -- have your head up your ass.

Other people do not think like you do.

Go learn something and stop being an arrogant, narcissist shit.

Comment So people reject reality and substitute their own (Score 1) 160

The entire reason we have a philosophy of science and peer-review and the null hypothesis, is this. Reality doesn't conform to your beliefs. If it did, people could wish shit into existence. Wish in one hand and shit in the other. Which fills up first?

Senses are fallible, too. Setup 3 buckets of water with cold, lukewarm, and hot water. Stick your hands in the cold and the hot water. Wait 5-10 minutes. Put both hands in the lukewarm water. Your hands will *NOT* report the same temperature. These people need to learn, not be lied to.

Additionally, the title is misleading. You don't lie to people when you want to express the truth. You tell them the truth. That they reject the truth indicates they lack critical thinking skills. Teach them.

I don't think lying to the gullible is a solution. Indeed, the article supports this: "Philosopher Byron Hyde and author of the study suggests that public trust could be improved not by sugarcoating reality, but by educating people to expect imperfection and understand how science actually works."

How is that proposing lying to the people who lack mental tools? The title is straight up misleading.

Teach them. Engage with them. Some might be incapable, but that does NOT support that they should be lied to. This is terrible reporting.

Comment Air India's "Perfect" Flight Record. (Score 1) 108

Hi. I think you are confused.

Air India crashes/fatalities:
* Air India Flight 101 CONTROLLED FLIGHT INTO TERRAIN -- https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
* Air India Flight 855 PILOT ERROR -- https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

What does the word perfect mean to you? Those are crashes. People died.

We can even add:
* Air India Flight 182 BOMBING -- https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Though that's also on the staff at the airport doing security screenings.

Comment Re:You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score 1) 72

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Comment I don't think he's far off. (Score 2) 129

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

Comment Re:We're headed for Venus, but still we stand stro (Score 1) 66

To be extra clear, here: titanium melts around 1,900 kelvin. The temperature of re-entry is 3,200 kelvin. Yes, 3,200 kelvin is "below" the temperature required to make titanium boil (by 300 kelvin), but you'll note that the 1,900 is 3,200 by 1,300.

Who honestly thinks titanium that's been heated to 'just below' its boiling point for half an hour, will be somehow intact once it's slow enough to not self-generate plasma due to atmospheric drag?

Ridiculous.

Comment Re:We're headed for Venus, but still we stand stro (Score 1) 66

How does a thing that isn't water, 'water in the ocean'? What? A thing can't water. The only thing that is water, is H2O.

Also, no -- it will not survive atmospheric re-entry. The atmosphere see to that. The heat of re-entry exceeds the temperature of Venus by *THOUSANDS OF DEGREES*.... It will not survive in 1 piece. This isn't a matter of atmospheric pressure, nor is this a matter of G-shock. It's plasma; it'll be in an envelope of super-heated plasma. Why do you think they can't use the radios on the Shuttle during re-entry? High energy plasma -- at THOUSANDS OF DEGREES.... Sheesh.

Comment It won't survive re-entry. (Score 1) 66

'"As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Langbroek wrote in a blog update"'

Uh, no.

1) High-energy plasma at 3,200 K upon re-entry. This occurs for 25 minutes or so. This is why Columbia became ... a large number of pieces of wreckage strewn across multiple US states.
2) Venera probes use drag-parachutes to reduce velocity to the point that they can survive entry into the atmosphere of Venus. But, this was built by the Soviet union -- it didn't get out of low Earth orbit. Do you think that parachute functions? It doesn't, it won't.
3) The reasons cited for it 'surviving' re-entry are ... G-forces and atmospheric pressure. None of those address the fact that, though the surface of Venus is ~= 737K ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... ), you'll notice that the surface temperature of Venus is 2,463 kelvin 'colder' than atmospheric re-entry. What material do you think the probe is made of? Unobtanium?

Ridiculous. It will not survive atmospheric re-entry. it will not be 'a single piece' when it (or most of it, the parts that weren't vaporized by high-energy plasma), gets to sea-level.

Comment This article seems a slant towards journalism jobs (Score 4, Insightful) 141

If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

Comment Utterly ridiculous. (Score 2, Insightful) 77

Given that humans didn't have microplastics in the environment of the past? Their hypothesis is that you have to prove they aren't doing harm (maybe they benefit). The null hypothesis is that no microplastics is the base case; and a demonstration of safety of introducing microplastics is required. The same procedure for making a drug for human use.

This is anti-science flim-flam bullshit. See also: cigarette companies saying no link to lung cancer -- and also, smoking is actually healthy.

Don't be taken in by the same lies as earlier generations.

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