It’s a fair question. There’s precedent where malware is embedded in PDFs.

Then someone will write an utility that automatically sets timezone using geoclue location data.

There’s the environmental impact: these ultra-fast planes burn through massive amounts of fuel, releasing far more emissions than regular aircraft

Hypersonic flights are a way to get us to a NON-inhabitable earth faster than ever before.

This is why these people ask, among other things, to strictly limit access to adults.

LLM are good with language and can be very convincing characters, especially to children and teenagers, who don’t fully understand how these things work, and who are more vulnerable emotionally.

That’s a good point, but there’s more to this story than a gunshot.

The lawsuit alleges amongst other things this the chatbots are posing are licensed therapist, as real persons, and caused a minor to suffer mental anguish.

A court may consider these accusations and whether the company has any responsibility on everything that happened up to the child’s death, regarless of whether they find the company responsible for the death itself or not.

Thanks for the interesting details. Glad to see there’s an offline version that disables photogrammetry.

The church in england is a good example where a a generic rectangle building model doesn’t work. They could improve the offline version by adding a church model in the set of offline models, and use it for 90% of church in western Europe.

A fully realistic model of every single building may be cool for architects, future historians, city planners, gamers that are sightseeing… but don’t help much when learning to pilot. Having a virtual world that look similar to the real one, with buildings of the right size and positions, landmarks, and hero buildings is good enough, and doesn’t require that much resources. There are others parts of flight simulators that are more important to work on.

I happen to know a bit about game and simulators. From a plane’s point of view, houses dont look unique. A small number of models is enough to fairly represent most houses. There may be a minority of structures that are really unique (stadiums, bridges, landmarks, …) but the vast majority of buildings aren’t unique. Even if two building have different heights, it’s possible to reuse textures if they’re built from the same material.

MSFT appears to have designed the simulator by considering every building is unique, but if they compared buildings and textures, ideally using automation, they would see there’s a massive amount of duplication.

I’m not suggesting putting the whole world on a 120GB disk.

That being said, most of the textures and building geometries used for San Andreas may be reused for other cities in the west coast. Areas between cities that have a lower density could take much less space.

So doubling the physical area covered doesn’t necessarily require doubling the amount of data. But the bandwidth usage from MSFT’s simulator suggest they are not reusing data when they could be.

GTA 5 require 120GB of disk size, not 500GB. And this include everything, game engine, assets, and the whole area. https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/203428177/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PC-system-requirements

Because everything has to fit on the average game PC or console storage, they have some pressure to optimize data size. A simulator that streams everything have less constraints on data size, less motivation to keep size reasonable.

This shows they’re not trying very hard to optimize the simulator, but instead throw hardware and bandwidth at it, and expect users do the same.

Open world games like GTA allow flying over dense areas without using 180Mbps of bandwidth.

Update from Brewster Kahle:

Archive.org sub services coming back up when they can, safely. e.g. Email working.

Now contract crawls for National Libraries (important to keep collections whole)

Thank you for the patience. More as it happens. @internetarchive

Hovering over a checkmark will display a message that explains “Google’s signals suggest that this business is the business that it says it is,” which is determined by things like

I guess this due diligence cost time and money. And doing this due diligence for every ad customer might affect their bottom line.

Better late than never.

Once the war in Ukraine is over, weaponized drones won’t just vanish. They’re already made by companies with different level of ethics and any country able to pay is or will be able to buy them. Sooner or later, like many weapons, organised crime will get their hands on them, and use them outside of battlefield.

There’s no way to completely prevent it, but we could at least limit damage by regulating the shit out of drones.

🎻

There miners robot don’t exist yet, but they would probably require high tech components and manufacturing capabilities for all these different components (motors, electronics, batteries, sensors, …).

Self replicating robots is still science fiction. If we wanted to build such robots in space, we’d need to build and launch manufacturing facilities in space before we can actually build robots in space.

Hypothetically, it would only make sense to mine rare materials in space, and it would only have environmental benefits if we return significant amount compared to the mass of rockets we send into space.

There is no coal/gas/oil in space, and even if extracting these resources were cleaner, burning that stuff would still be disastrous.

Space mining would be at best viable for very niche uses for a few material. It won’t bring us infinite clean resources, overall we still need to reduce extraction of resources.

I was about to say people can walk and chew gum. But this kind of miss the point.

This is not space exploration, this is not for science’s sake. This is about extracting resources, and making a profit. I heard one of these companies perpetuate the idea that there’s virtually infinite resource, which imply we can continue with humanity’s exponential growth without negative consequences. That mindset landed us in the inextricable mess we’re in.

That’s unfortunate.

Technically this hasn’t been approved by the General Assembly yet, and then individual countries would need to ratify it. But press coverage suggest it’s a done deal.

For the treaty to go into force, 40 nations have to ratify it.

UN approves its first treaty targeting cybercrime

In many places, ratifying a treaty requires parliament approval, so it’s not going to be quick. Talk to your representative once this treaty comes up in your parliement’s agenda.

Bitcoin is not practical for small purshases, because transaction takes several minutes, and have around 50USD per-transaction fee. Note the cost of fees and value of bitcoin vary wildly, so the same amount of bitcoin may be enough to pay rent in August, but not in September.

On a more ethical level, it’s also quite bad because of the insane energy cost of bitcoin transactions.