I don’t know if it’s real or just nostalgia, but reddit is massively worse than I remember. I’ve gone back to nose a few times, and it feels like a ghost town, compared to what it used to be.

HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

In short, Facebook are incentivised to increase conflict and hate, it improves user engagement. They have also leveraged their large user base to boost numbers in threads significantly. Threads is already a cess pip of bigotry and hate.

Federating with them would be like connecting your house’s drinking water pipe with the sewage pipe of an industrial pig farm. It would pollute our community to the point of destruction.

They might try and control this initially. Unfortunately, it would almost certainly be part of an embrace, extend, extinguish attempt. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish ). They play nice till they have control of enough communities, then they stop the controls, to increase profits.

The best bet is to let your local aviation authority know. They are generally the ones with the actual powers, as well as the knowledge to apply them.

At least in the UK, the laws cover anything that leaves the ground under an open sky. There are exceptions for RC toys and drones, but they have limits. One of the limits is you cannot fly within a certain distance of anyone or anything not under your control.

Basically, most places require your permission to fly over, or near to your land. If they are overflying, they are breaking the rules.

It’s worth noting, depending on the size of the system, it can be difficult to judge distances. The ones I work with are large. We regularly have officials insisting we are massively out of our flight area. GPS logs show that it was well within the entire time.

Screw thanking aliens, it’s an incredible team of engineers that have the skills and dedication to do what seems impossible. This was 100% humanity at its best.

They rebuilt the most critical core code on a near antique spacecraft that has effectively left the solar system over an equally ancient radio link. They had 1 shot, and nailed it.

My phone autocorrect has been ducking annoying recently.

Thanks for the heads up.

The consensus in the trans community is to let a potential partner know earlier, rather than later. It avoids the situation you’ve encountered. Some men also can react violently, when they find out, so it’s quite a critical dilemma to them.

Unfortunately, not all follow that mindset. They also tend to bust out a lot, and so lead a lot of men on.

It’s a bit like the scumbag dilemma women face. Very few men are scumbags, yet women encounter them regularly when dating. Most men try not to annoy the women they find attractive. They are careful in their approach mentality. This means they only make a few approaches (relatively). They also tend to pair off, and so exit the pool. Scumbags cast a wide net, and don’t hang on to women for long. This means they make a LOT of approaches, and so annoy a vastly disproportionate number of women.

Basically most trans people try to be as polite and careful about it as possible. A few, unfortunately, can destroy the reputation of the rest by being scumbags about it, at least locally.

It’s a prisoner dilemma situation. It doesn’t matter how effective the ads are on an absolute scale, but a relative one. The aim is to get more facetime than your competition. Unfortunately, any company that opts out gets flattened.

Incidentally, this is why tobacco companies loved the ad ban (at least in the UK). It had long reached the point where they couldn’t encourage many people to smoke. They were advertising to cancel out the poaching of customers by other brands.

I believe it’s common to have separate long haul trucks and last leg trucks. If the depot is right next to the motorway/highway, then it provides an obvious place for a handover. It also means drivers can stay in 1 area, and so go home each night.

It will likely be a mix. E.g. you might have 10 trucks on a particular run. You put a driver in the lead truck, as a human-in-the-loop safety. The rest play duckling to the mother duck.

What it will do is lower the skill level needed, and lower the stress. A driver having a nap isn’t a problem anymore. They just need to be able to get involved either if the autopilot has issues and has to stop, or if they need to fill out paperwork at the destination.

I’ve got a similar battery bank. It’ll turn 4 hours of capability into 12, with no issues.

Mine is a veektomx MAX65W. 20,000mah.

Just be aware of capacities. The limit is either 100Wh or 160Wh depending on the airline. That works out at 27,000mah or 43,250mah respectively. Most power banks are below this, but not all.

Depressingly, that’s around 2x the cost/Tb.

Depends how it’s done.

Full generative images would definitely start creating a copying error type problem.

However it’s not quite that simple. An AI system can be used to distort an image. The derivatives force the learning AI to notice different things. This can vastly extend the pool of data to learn from, and so improve the end AI.

Adobe obviously decided that the copying errors were worth the extended datasets.

One of the key thing that LLMs lack is a knowledge layer. In many ways, modern LLMs are hyper advanced predictive text. Don’t get me wrong, what they produce is awesome and can be extremely useful, but it’s still fundamentally limited.

Ultimately, a useful AI will need some level of understanding. It will need to be able to switch between casual chatter, and information delivery. It will need to be able to crosscheck its own conclusions before delivering them. There are groups working on this, but they are quite a bit behind LLMs. When they catch up, and the 2 can be linked/combined then things will get VERY interesting!

Valve are the only ones confident enough in their systems to do that. Valve’s mindset seems to be that trying to lock people in is a losing strategy, long term. Instead they are just making sure that their offerings are better than anything else available. If done right, it has all the advantages of locking people in, with none of the downsides. It also combines with the perceived openness, which gains you a lot of credit with the geek community.

Microsoft are too reliant on lock-in to risk opening it up.

Hiding it would work. You just have to make sure you don’t miss any.

As for the danger. There are levels of exposure. You could leak something damning, but that could be played off as a 1 off. You might also be sitting on a huge amount of paperwork that proves it’s endemic. That paperwork might also expose others who wanted things changed, but don’t want to be outed. In this case, an initial leak can test the waters. The additional info can be rolled out, if it’s needed, or the results justified.

E.g. Initial leak proves they did something nasty. The additional info massively backs it up, but also implicates a VP in its gathering. You might not want to show that hand until later, either to protect them, or to gather more info on their reaction.

One of the less mentioned aspects is that a dead man switch should be difficult, if not impossible to detect and neutralise. If you are to the level of being unalived, you’re likely also a target for significant directed hacking. Such a dead man switch should be as resistant as possible to this. A simple email could let them detect and disable your dead man switch.

I personally make use of the sonoff pow smart plugs, with Tasmota firmware. Though any Tasmota compatible smart plug with power readings will work.

The key thing is that with Tasmota, you can properly calibrate the readings. I have a friend with a high quality power meter. I used that to calibrate my smart plugs, they seem to track within a few % of the expensive one, once calibrated.

Depending on if you have access to an expensive meter or not, this will either be the best bet, or completely useless to you. Your local Hackspace might also be a good option for getting your hands on an expensive meter for an evening.

I design build and operate broadcast equipment. A good chunk goes onto UAVs. I’ve built small quads, and I’ve played around with equipment fully capable of some of the more complex tasks. E.g. live 3D mapping from an airborne capable computer.

I’m also friends with several people who used to design and build military equipment, including radar systems. Military tech is a weird mix of amazingly high tech, stupidly simple hacks and long lifespan versions of off the shelf technology. I’ve a fairly good feel for how hard or easy a good chunk of the bits are to build. Most of what I suggested I could personally design and build, or easily commission, given some time, a reasonable budget, and access to restricted resources as required.

In its simplest form, chaff is just tuned lengths of mylar foil. As it flutters, it glitters in a radar beam. This creates a large noise floor. While modern military chaff is more advanced, the old stuff will still cause problems for modern systems. It’s not trying to hide a tank, or pull off a missile’s lock. It’s trying to swamp the signal from a tiny, mostly plastic, drone.

I’m also not saying to reinvent the wheel. Chaff is now a fairly niche defence tool. It’s hard to use while advancing, and gives away your position. It also needs to be integrated with other countermeasures to be useful. It is still a fairly solved problem however. It’s cheap to make, quick to deploy, and available in bulk, if required.

Most modern military equipment isn’t expensive due to its inherent nature. It’s expensive because it’s a niche product, and the buyers have deep wallets. The same game plays out in broadcasting. A £100k camera isn’t that much better than a £5k one. It is better however, and buyers are willing to pay for that difference.

The reverse is also true, as Ukraine is proving. 100 $1k drones are more useful than 1 $100k, ultra capable, drone or missile. The point of a swarm is to allow multiple cheap systems to do the job of a far more expensive weapon.