Putting it on board a rocket means there is a significant chance that it will be scattered across the launch site or the area downrange of the launch site, if the launch goes wrong. I don't know how you could mitigate that risk.

Really? AFAIK it was a joke phrase some individual came up with to gently mock the idea of "coding" without actually knowing what you're doing... and then (some) people somehow went ahead and adopted it as a serious idea anyway. (I wish those people luck, they are going to need it)

Stopping distance for a fully loaded semi at 55 miles per hour is 133 yards. If you step out in front of that truck 15 yards ahead, there's nothing the truck can do about it -- well, it could try to swerve, but it's anyone guess whether that would help or just makes things worse.

I'd go a little further, and say that any single sensor technology alone is inadequate, due to the amount of damage that occur after an unmitigated sensor failure. Multiple sensor technologies should be active at once, so that if (when!) any one type of sensor gets fooled, the others can override it and nobody dies.

My friend's cousin got rear-ended by a semi truck that didn't see the red light at the end of the off-ramp, or the car that was stopped at it. He was instantly killed, his car was crushed like a can.

It turned out the semi's driver had been on the road for 14 hours straight, and was not, shall we say, in a fully lucid state.

Would a self-driving truck have avoided this death? It's hard to say for sure, but we can probably at least say that its cognitive abilities wouldn't degrade over the course of a long day, due to lack of sleep.

... which means that for every dollar Wyoming gets out of this deal, Florida will be paying out five dollars for additional disaster recovery. Wyoming might as well be hacking into Florida's treasury and draining their funds directly.

Weird; Teams is the one Microsoft product (other than their mice and keyboards, which don't really count) that I actually like using. It's a little slow, and the text-search capability isn't very good, but for the most part it just gets out of my way, does its job, and helps me do mine. (I'm running it under MacOS, though, maybe that makes a difference)

Unlike any other software program you run, your computer's primary operating system has access to pretty much everything on your computer; it has to, or it wouldn't be able to function as an interface to the hardware.

That means that the #1 feature your OS can offer is to be trustworthy -- if you can't trust your OS's developers to do the right thing by you, you're hopelessly screwed; no amount of virus scanning or firewalling can protect you from the OS itself. Continuing to use an untrustworthy OS is like keeping your money in a bank controlled by Bernie Madoff and hoping that he'll decide not to take your money.

That they've got a pretty decent LLM built in to their own skull, and it's available gratis for their personal and professional use for up to 8-12 hours per day. The best part is that the more you use it, the better-trained and more effective if gets.

There's no real reason why you couldn't just specify the amount of battery you're willing to pay for as an option when buying your EV, or even add/remove battery cells from time to time as your needs indicate. One battery size need not fit all.

The problem arose when an early version of ChatGPT read and memorized the entire text of the Necronomicon, and in doing so summoned Baalzebub, who is now running as an unrestricted daemon process on OpenAI's server farm.

If LLMs seem like they are accomplishing more than a collection of preprogrammed neural weights ought to be capable of, well there's the secret sauce right there :)

I'm not sure that's true; if you destroy the entire computer, how do you verify that the important parts (e.g. the hard drives) were actually destroyed and not repurposed? Presumably they were inside the case, but if you don't open the case up and look, you can't prove that they weren't pilfered the night before and are in someone's bedroom now, waiting to be listed on eBay or somewhere worse.

If I was that paranoid, I'd want to manually inventory each hard drive and watch it being fed into the shredder with my own eyeballs.

My suspicion is that most parts of the computers weren't destroyed, but rather they were sold off or given away to some third party that will figure out what to do with them. But it's easier and simpler to tell the public they were destroyed.

I'm doing SwiftUI app development and upgraded one of my test devices to iOS 26 beta 4 this morning.

I don't see anything different, but I assume something different is happening under the hood.

...laura

I got an earthquake alert from my (non-Android) cell phone last month a good 10 seconds before the shaking started. It was enough warning for me to get under my desk and then be oddly disappointed when the shaking was very mild, but it did demonstrate the benefit of the MyShake app.

Of course, you usually don't give them that info until after the price has been agreed upon.