dgriffith

Australia and NZ have country wide coverage for SMS via starlink.

Australia is a huge landmass , and being able to send/receive messages just by having a view of the sky is quite significant for emergency situations.

Here is a map showing phone coverage in Australia from all providers. There's about 5 million square kilometres with no service at all, that now has basic communications via starlink.

You can ship 1 ton/1m3 of cargo via any international air freight company to the other side of the world for less than 10,000 dollars.

(Source: I've done it plenty of times)

A day for pickup and transport to the airport in Sydney, 24 hours for actual transit, a day in customs in LA, a day for a truck to deliver it to that location. 5 business days to get that IBC to your destination in LA, tops.

Slow charge/discharge rates, cycle efficiency (in vs. out) is much lower than lithium, much heavier and bigger for the same capacity, liquid electrolyte to spill, generates hydrogen gas when charging.

Basically, it's the wrong battery for this kind of application. Great for a house battery charged off a lot of solar that you want to keep for 50 years. Not so great for a scooter.

Qualcomm has its "IZat" system where:

- every AP's BSSID your phone sees is sniffed by a program running continuously in the background, mapped to a latitude/longitude if possible (via GPS or any phone location means) and sent to their servers,

- So that other devices can send a list of AP BSSIDs and signal strengths and get a triangulated location within 5-10 meters.

So the server ends up with a global database of AP locations, and also the location of every device in the world using the service within ~5-10 meters.

They've had this in action since 2012.

Owned by Akami now for 4 years, I think.

I've several small linodes and have been using the platform since 2018 or so. No difference seen so far in the linode plans or features I'm using with Akami, except for more in-depth monitoring available (for a price).

Now if you turn anything off (like that stupid autobrake that brakes for cars in the left hand turn lane beside me), they’ll use that to say “it’s not our fault, the driver turned it off!”

Don't try and spin this as a convenient liability-limiter for manufacturers.

Unless it is an actual failure of a safety critical system, with no warning, that then directly leads to harm, manufacturers are in no way responsible for how you operate the chunk of metal and technology that you bought from them.

All this stuff absolutely helps to reduce the overall risk of injury when operating a vehicle. Is it also a pain in the ass sometimes? Sure it is. Can you turn it off? Sure you can. But sometimes that shutoff is just temporary, because governments - not manufacturers - mandate that some things are now required, because they're sick of hosing body parts off of highways.

Why not both?

LLMs looove to commit things. Every little thing. It is handy for them as they can use commits as their own memory store that they can scan easily, but it leads to very wordy-but-minor commits.

Things that humans would just lump together in a single commit like "updated docs" gets broken into commits for every single change made over the course of a few hour session.

This is not like the days of old where television/radio/newspapers pushed their opinions to the public en masse. It's social media, where everything is tailored to you, personally, available to you on your personal device that you carry with you everywhere 24/7, and it makes it so much harder to resist it.

That couldn't happen with the mass media of old. It wasn't tailored for you, so there were enough rough edges that you could stop and say "Hey, this guy's an asshole!" and break the loop. It wasn't with you all the time , sneaking in during that 30 second scroll of your phone when you're bored.

Now, it's continuous reinforcement where a tiny aspect of your profile matches a tiny part of their message, so you see it in your feed, and then it slowly cycles you through more and more of what they want you to see, until your interests match their interests and their opinions seem normal, because you see them all the time.

Brainwashing, essentially. And it's very hard to get yourself out of it.

I don't know what they used on the moon landing, though.

An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.

Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of "fly a spacecraft" tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.

Apollo 11's crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with "pay attention to me" interrupts, and it couldn't service the radar and run through it's task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.

To the programming team's credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.

The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.

At this point, I'm just hoping that when we are sifting through the smoking wreckage of the AI crash we'll find a hundred million books that we can add to Anna's Archive.

And some RAM. RAM would be nice.

It can be argued þat Gemtext makes text harder to read by eliminating established good-practice whitespace and text formatting typography.

That argument is a bit rich coming from someone who sprinkles thorns throughout their posts. 👀