I think they’re referencing the app/engagement model.

Being pornography is… tangential, sort of. But part of what makes OF and all those other services so addictive is the way they’re structured. Living on your phone, pinging you, targeted personalized offers, FOMO, and engineering the app to form parasocial relationships in particular.

That’s different than randomly watching porn on the Internet, IMO.

One other common factor is the “primal” addictiveness hook, e.g. gambling, food craving, or the draw of porn.

It’s just a tool, another piece of technology to increase efficiency with some liability.

But if such advances aren’t leading to quality of life advances for workers, that’s a societal issue sucking all the gained efficiency away, like how software uses more and more processing to do the same things as computers get faster.

It means the system is fucked up.

I know scientifically minded people who view it both as ‘hysteria,’ and for what remains, something that geoengineering can solve in the future.

In other words, look up the WSJ article advocating for fossil fuel production maximization as a net economic optimization in the long term, basically ‘better to maximize efficiency and minimize suffering now, to better geoengineer solutions in the future.’

…I read geoengineering papers. They are horrific. As in “our state-of-the-art-solution would… pour acid rain over the ice caps. And it’s still economically unfeasible, but less unfeasible. And maybe it will blunt things some?”

I’m offended such arguments are being presented.

But I can see right where those opinions come from, as with every twist of climate change denialism.

The environmental conspiracists are right. It really is Big Oil and such groups, from what I can see.

Reddit seems to be highly algorithmic now, so I think it has more of the “doomscrolling effect” that does accrue a lot of engagement.

Sad, but makes sense. I always wondered how they could fund the dev effort for Linux/Windows.

These comments though, whoa… it seems everyone either loves or hates Orion.

What are they built on outside the US?

Ah. Good. I thought it was only available from Amazon in a few regions, but it appears that isn’t the case anymore.

Pantheon, the TV series.

One of the best shows ever, IMO, so good I can’t say much without spoiling the premise in a Outer Wilds kind of way.

Yet it was trampled by AMC and their failed streaming service. What a mess. I’m not sure it’s possible to even watch legally?

IIRC Google researchers have publicly used it for machine learning experiments. For example, for grabbing a sample video as part of some demo code.

Ah, sad. I asked because some of the Xiaomi phones themselves (AFAIK) now use a LOFIC sensor.

…If this camera module doesn’t, thats kind of perplexing. It would make the phone camera on some phones better than this dedicated attachment, in many shooting situations.

Aside note, but I love that crazy camera module on the phone.

Is it LOFIC sensor, too? It doesn’t seem to specify.

Its not very big. 8700 lb of fuel is 25% of its MGDW, which seems pretty normal to me?

Same, a long time ago.

I never posted anything close to political or “sketchy” either. Was never impolite; it was just a place for niches. I still don’t know why I was banned/shadowbanned…

NASA is researching quieter supersonic flight, and I can’t help but think of how the (also Lockheed Martin) X-59-

-has a extreme wing profile/nose, not unlike SR-71:

On the contrary, NASA mounted stuff to it for research in the 90s:

The part that provides value is dirt cheap, though.

Deepseek 4.1 and Mimo 2.6 are basically free compared to Claude, and TBH it feels like the harness/wrapper, not the LLM, is the limitation for doing useful things with them.

Where would it even come from?

Everyone’s retirement.

Admittedly, no, but this is slowly improving. Stepfun published their SFT dataset, smaller labs are publishing their datasets for task specific tunes. I believe there was another Chinese lab that published bulk pretraining data, but I can’t find it in my history at the moment.

And, notably, these comparatively tiny labs generally aren’t scraping the internet so abusively like OpenAI/Meta. They don’t need as much. Going by statements in their papers, they tend to use existing archives of web data, buy commercial data, or (more recently) generate a lot synthetic data.

If you run Nemotron, from open datasets.

See the dataset table here. There are sections for pretraining and for specific tasks/topics, like STEM, code and such: https://huggingface.co/nvidia

Chinese models are starting to open their pretraining datasets too, albeit slowly.

It’s scientifically priceless. For instance, a permanent space telescope/excavation base on the dark side of the moon would be incredible.

…But realistically, post 2026, that should be handled by drones. Doubly so for expeditions to other celestial bodies.

The people pushing for human habitation in space aren’t really technical; they don’t have a good scientific background. But they think they are because they’ve seen some sci-fi, maybe they hold some high office, and their egos are the size of the moon.

They’re also surrounded by bubbles telling them they are right.

There was similar financial angst around the Apollo Program, FYI. The political question was “why didn’t that money go to social programs instead?”

I’m against that. I think the space race was scientifically priceless. But… TBH, I think funding winding down made sense, too.

But that should be distinct from the more recent flights of fancy. Let me be clear: humans (as we exist now) living in space makes zero sense, no matter how much we don’t want that to be the case. It certainly won’t fix any Earth problems.