me_again

The Earth's surface area is ~ 510,000,000 km^2. For simplicity, say exactly half of it is receiving sunlight. If the satellite perfectly shadows 16 km^2, it would reduce incoming solar energy reaching Earth by 16/205,000,000 = 0.00000078%, I think.

So not really. There are some proposals for space-based geoengineering, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290112... has a summary. I can't say how plausible any of them are.

Stocks and bonds are different things, and the bond issue is separate from the IPO. Both are ways for companies to raise money, SpaceX did both. This thread's nominally about the bond, but for some reason everyone's talking about the stock.

Was VMWare dying prior to the acquisition? I don't really know the financials but that wasn't the impression I had.

Amused by how many X's there are: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#1100B

Did you mean Aegean Check Mark or Old North Arabian letter Teh?

That would be significantly less than one person, regardless of how off the population estimates are ;-)

I think there are 2 claims which this article conflates. I'll jokingly call them "Weak Whitney" and "Strong Whitney".

"Weak Whitney" is the claim that this very terse style is comprehensible given sufficient study. I find this plausible.

"Strong Whitney" is the claim that in many circumstances this style is _better_ than a more normal style, with full variable names, whitespace, etc. I am much less persuaded by that claim. When the article says things like "Note that d probably stands for “dimension” or perhaps “depth”; I’m unsure on this point." I'm like, yes, congratulations, that is exactly the point of using more descriptive names and/or comments.

I don't think we have enough information to conclude exactly what happened. But my read is the researcher was looking for demo.filevine.com and found margolis.filevine.com instead. The implication is that many other customers may have been vulnerable in the same way.

Lawyers can and will send cease and desist letters to people whether or not there is any legal basis for it. Often the threat of a lawsuit, even a meritless one, is enough to keep people quiet.

ArXiv has always had a moderation step. The moderators are unable to keep up with the volume of submissions. Accepting these reviews without moderation would be a change to current process, not "just like arXiv has always worked"

Hillel Wayne posted a followup https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/three-ways-formal... which may be interesting. Essentially the issue is "what does the Length of a string mean?"

"As soon as profit can be made" is exactly what the article is warning about. This is exactly the "Human + AI" combination.

Within your lifetime (it's probably already happened) you will be denied something you care about (medical care, a job, citizenship, parole) by an AI which has been granted the agency to do so in order to make more profit.

As I understand it, they persuade their marks to transfer bitcoin to accounts they control.

But what do you do when the primary and backup disagree?

Actually no - there's a "please help fund us" but you can read without paying

Not exactly the same, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome... is a technique used in radio astronomy which uses two receivers a long way apart and a very accurate clock to approximate having a radio telescope the size of the distance between them. By putting one receiver on a satellite, measurements have been made with a separation of 300,000km.

Vulnerability reports are interesting from a trust point of view, because each party has a different financial incentive. You can't 100% trust the vendor to accurately assess the severity of an issue - they have a lot riding on downplaying an issue in some cases. The person reporting the bug is also likely looking for bounty and reputational benefit, both of which are enhanced if the issue is considered high severity. So a user of the supposedly-vulnerable program can't blindly trust either party.

The grandmother hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis is reasonably well-established. The corresponding 'grandfather effect' has not really been demonstrated, as far as I know. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2007...

Donald Trump, champion of the locavore community. Now I've heard everything.

There's an awful lot of "35% this, 27% the other" numbers in this article, and exactly 0 citations for any of them.

Seems to me private equity is often, though not always, a terrific way to run a previously-stable business into the ground in short order. See for example https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3423290 .

I don't believe there is really any interest in balancing the Federal budget or saving money. It's a flimsy pretext for purging every person and program not ideologically aligned with the incoming administration.

Would anyone like to bet whether the national debt will be lower in 2029?

Marco Pierre-White recommends grating onions, which ingeniously avoids the entire issue.

Grating the Gordian knot, if you will.

https://youtu.be/glIUUrh6qtQ?t=40

As I understand it (not completely), according to the SHIELD act, the losing party in a patent dispute has to pay legal fees for both sides, which are usually substantial. If the lawyers who really own the patent represent themselves, they are in danger of having to pay out if they lose. So they effectively hired a plaintiff that they could 'represent'. Handing out 10% of the proceeds if you win against halving the costs if you lose is a reasonable hedge.

However a legal firm is not supposed to do that, which is why they are in trouble.

Not a direct answer, but Ethernet is sometimes brought up as a successful example of Worse is Better. At one point Token Ring was a serious competitor - it had careful designs to avoid collisions when the network was busy, prioritize traffic, etc. But it was comparatively slow and expensive. Ethernet just says "eh, retry on collision.". And that simplistic foundation has carried on to where we have a standard for 800 Gigabit Ethernet.

A lot of "why TF would anyone you do this?" questions can be answered with variations like this. Borrowing from economics, the discount rate defines how much more valuable something is RIGHT NOW vs at some point in the future. If the system is down and we're losing money by the minute until it is up; if the company will be broke next week unless we make customer X happy; if you have to get to the airport in 2 hours - it is completely rational to make the quick fix. The costs of not doing so outweigh the costs of doing it again properly.

It really becomes a problem when the same short term calculation becomes the standard - you can quickly rack up costs that future you or future company will never pay down.

I sometimes wonder about the commercial impact of source code leaks. In this case, nobody noticed until the product was commercially irrelevant, but what might have happened if some competitor had noticed?

My guess is probably nothing. Having the interpreter source code is a liability for other companies in case of an infringement lawsuit. Are there good examples where a source code leak actually led to significant consequences for a company?

This was one of the ideas pursued in the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars. They weren't able to develop a system that would work against ICBMs. Powering an aircraft is both easier and harder; the aircraft presumably isn't making evasive maneuvers and trying to stop you from powering it, but the economic and safety constraints are harder.

That doesn't sound like an airline I would care to fly!

During takeoff a 747 consumes power at a rate of about 90MW. Having something outside the plane, whether in orbit or ground-based, pumping that much power into the plane while I'm in it, sounds quite alarming. Not to mention issues with aiming, power loss, etc.

To power a plane with renewable sources, it seems most practical to generate power on the ground and use that to produce synthetic fuel.

Patents are a stronger signal of a company focused on financial engineering than a company focused on innovation.

IBM is to software as Boeing is to planes.

I will not be taking questions ;-)