The author isn't saying there has been no progress, his main complaint is around the PR hype machine, companies cutting away from their livestreams of launches for their CFO to talk about investor confidence, promises of hotels on the moon. That sort of thing. There were a couple good points specifically about Space X in TFA:

"SpaceX’s Starship saga is another emblem of this phenomenon. Yes, progress requires trial and error. But we must stop measuring success by launch views and splashy animation reels. When the same core systems fail in similar ways, time after time, we must ask whether this is aggressive iteration or just poorly managed ambition. Failure alone isn’t innovation. Only failure followed by measurable, demonstrable improvement is."

"It was a baffling shift, almost as if the financial narrative mattered more than the flight outcome. The same disconnect can be seen in SpaceX’s messaging. While the company routinely frames each Starship explosion as a necessary step in rapid iteration, two consecutive full-stack flights, Flight 7 and Flight 8, failed during stage separation. That’s not fast learning. That’s failing to fix a known issue but the saying they will spend their investor’s money on a more ambitious attempt. At some point, calling repeated, preventable failures “progress” ceases to be engineering — and starts to look like marketing."

Spaceballs sits nicely between cannon built around elders coming back in shimmering blue and parody based on over-commercialization removing the soul of entertainment. I sincerely hope they are getting their AI version of Mel Brooks ready because finishing his movie in the event he dies by "recasting" a crappy AI version of him for the scenes he couldn't film sounds like parody gold to me.

No, that's a bad idea. A menu bar at the top of the screen is a much bigger target to hit, and easy to find by muscle memory. The file menu is always in the same place, regardless of what app you're using, and the buttons extend infinitely up above the screen. By contrast, a menu bar tied to the window moves around whenever the window moves, so you always have to visually find it again, and target size is just the size of the button and ends at the top of the window.

I really appreciate your post and stand with what you are saying. I volunteer with a local environmental nonprofit and they created a design for a trash catcher called the Trash Trout that floats on top of the water that can be installed on the streams and creeks that feed major rivers to trap the trash upstream of the major river. There was some push-back about releasing the design publicly and foregoing any licensing fees but ultimately they told the naysayers to pound sand and published a design PDF on their website because their goal is to clean up trash, not make money.

Just wanted to share an example of a group making the right call and also it's a cool, cheap design that nerds might appreciate. Link to the design doc below or you can google it if you prefer since the link is generic.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic1.squarespace.co...

I would suggest checking out mini-split heat pumps. You can get the best of both worlds without having to duct your whole house. I will be needing a new system in the next 5 years and was pleased to see mini-split heat pumps are available and work very efficiently. This is on the word of the people I've talked to for quotes as I'm not an HVAC tech but was curious about what options are out there.

Yeah, that's the position of the copyright office.:

The guidance goes on to instruct applicants for copyright registration to "disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions to the work" and "AI-generated content that is more than de minimis should be explicitly excluded from the application."

It's a test case. Specifically, he tried to register the copyright in the work naming the AI system as the author, and himself as the owner of a work-for-hire. The copyright office refused registration, because AIs can't be authors, and therefore there was no human author. He may well own the output, but it's not subject to copyright.

No. From the decision:

Specifically, the employer (including corporate entity) of a employee who creates a work for hire is the legal owner of the copyright, but they are not the author. The employee is the author, and ownership passes to the employer by law.

Not sure which fees you're looking at. Here's the fee schedule. Filing a provisional application is $325 for a large entity vs. $130 and $65 for a small and micro, respectively. But that's just a provisional, which never gets examined or turns into a patent. For a nonprovisional application, there are filing fees, search fees, and examination fees, totaling $2k for a large entity, or $730 for a small entity and $400 for a micro entity.

Legally, no - anyone can file a patent application pro se.

But it's like doing your own appendectomy. Legally, you can do that, too. But it's a terrible idea, and you are likely to make mistakes that are permanent and unfixable.

I agree that Trump is once again guilty of treason.