This is a fluff piece aimed at driving interest for Fervo’s IPO - they are the only company mentioned despite being an insignificant player in the broader Geo space.

In fairness, seasons and varied terrain aren’t guaranteed.

Of all the bodies in the solar system, only Earth has such a wide variety of landscape. Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons. Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball. Etc.

Also, if humans were colonizing earth from outside, we would probably just build cities on the river deltas and skip the less habitable spots. Stories set here would then just be cityscape or river delta, even though the ice caps/mountains/jungles/deserts still exist. Colonized worlds will have different population distribution that organically settled ones.

The productivity increases are real for office work. Absolutely not for ‘generative’ tasks - using them to do anything that takes a modicum of thought is a recipe for frustration and burned time - but they make pretty good search engines for unstructured information.

Now, you don’t need a whole-ass model for that, a vector database would do just fine, but since everyone rushed to hook the models in to all their repos and internal wikis it is a convenient omni-search tool.

Now was that worth all the bullshit over the last 4 years as the bubble inflated? Not at all. But it is a real use case and has real value.

I even have leaders now pushing everyone to keep their docs up to date and to make sure tables have metadata fields and such so that agents can make best use of the information. This is particularly hilarious to me because they didn’t care to make this investment when people would benefit, but doing it now makes my life easier anyway.

Massachusetts is fucking empty. Boston is dense.

On mars, initial habitation would be underground/in canyons to shield from the radiation. Similar plans for the moon.

Of course excavating sub-surface dwellings on another celestial body is currently about as technically feasible as time travel, but that’s the heart of the most realistic plans for long-term habitation.

The port is great.

Device manufacturers putting said port deep in the bowels of Erebus where no mortal man could hope to actuate the locking mechanism is less great.

The US is the largest producer of oil in the world, and there is a very strong lobby for keeping that production up.

The US accounts for about 20% of total oil consumption, 2/3rds of that is transportation. If transportation were to be heavily electrified, it would be a meaningful drop in global oil consumption and cause prices to fall. Falling prices hurt US producers more than many overseas producers, as fracking is an expensive extraction method and most US production is from fracked wells.

Tests should be written from requirements. Using LLMs to write tests after the code is written (probably also by LLMs) is a huge anti-pattern:

The model looks at what the code is doing and writes tests that pass (or fail because they bungle the setup). What the model does not do, is understand what the code needs to do and write tests that ensure that functionality is present and correct.

Tests are the thing that should get the most human investment because they anchor the project to its real-world requirements. You will have tons more confidence in your vibe coded appslop if you at least thought through the test cases and built those out first. Then, whatever the shortcomings of the AI codebase, if the tests pass you can know it is doing something right.

The physics of radiative heat transfer haven’t changed and aren’t changing, the idea will be just as stupid in 5 years as it is right now.

But it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t a plan to actually build a bunch of orbiting data centers, it is just something Musk is saying to generate hype for investors pre-IPO.

There’s a Linux build.

IIRC we don’t know when life started on earth because records of the early earth aren’t available - geological activity recycled the surface. What evidence we do have is that life started pretty much as early as the records we have can show, meaning either it appeared very quickly once the planet cooled or was already present.

They were Polish territories because Poland held and administered them. They were also part of the PLC before the Russian empire seized them…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland

We can argue all day about what conditions grant a right to a territory. Or we can cut the bullshit and stop pretending that the Soviets sending the Red Army across the Polish border to conquer land, while raping the inhabitants, was anything but an invasion.

This is some tankie bullshit.

“They didn’t invade Poland, modern Poland is to the West, they invaded lands that belong to Ukraine and Belarus”

My brother in Christ - the entire country of Poland moved to the West because the Soviets annexed the east and demanded Germany cede territory to Poland when redrawing the map after WW2. This displaced millions of ethnic Germans who had lived there for centuries. The annexed land was then given to the Belarus and Ukrainian SSRs to administer, and inherited by these new countries when the USSR broke apart.

Your argument is like saying the US didn’t invade Mexico because that land is now part of Texas.

I have KDE + Wayland on Arch using an Nvidia GPU and I have tons of nagging issues that seemingly cannot be resolved with current drivers.

More power to you if it all just works, but that isn’t universal

As someone with an Nvidia GPU on Wayland, unfortunately quite a few places.

Resuming from sleep requires power cycling the monitors.

Glitchy transparent artifacting down to the desktop if windows are overlapping next the task bar.

Widgets in the system tray (KDE Plasma - I have temperature readouts) disappear and reappear randomly, and sometimes switch which taskbar they live on.

VRR support is pretty bad, causing black screens when using full screen applications.

2D-heavy games are flooded with thousands of vulkan draw calls, leading to abysmal performance and massive current spikes (and therefore coil whine). This is mitigated per-game with dxvk settings - often removing the whine without improving performance.

HDR is … technically available.

Overall I’m happy, but I cannot recommend this experience to anyone I know because it would drive them insane.

If doesn’t matter if you like it or not, when Trump does unhinged shit real people suffer out in the world.

They blame our country, they don’t blame just the president. And they shouldn’t - because all of us here going through our lives, going to work, paying taxes, obeying laws, keeping the economy going, etc. are instrumental to the power he is wielding as a club against everyone else.

If you don’t want to be blamed, then resist.

The peace prize is awarded by a Norwegian committee, the other prizes are awarded by Swedish committees.

In most games I find no matter how good the static assets look, the animations immediately break the illusion of ‘realism’.

One recent exception to this were some of the cutscenes in Expedition 33, the facial mocap was very on-point and, even though the game isn’t anywhere close to photorealistic, it felt close to watching real actors perform a scene.

Seahorses aren’t a great example here imo. Their biology is just different from ours, the sex that fertilizes is the sex that carries the eggs to term - that doesn’t make them trans that is just how male and female work for seahorses, different than humans.

A seahorse could make this meme calling cis women trans men because they carry the fetus…

Those folk really need to shave their elbows