I regret not catching that myself, that’s good 😁

My brother’s lab (not at MIT) has been 3D printing optically clear glass for years. They can do all sorts of shapes and figures, though I’m particularly fond of the Yoda heads. If I’m reading this article correctly, the breakthrough they made was with the temperatures they can do it at, and it’s much less to do with the novelty of 3D printing glass. So it’s much less “hey, this is amazing, nobody has ever done this before,” and far more “we did this cool thing in a new and harder way!”

Waymo can absolutely drive at night, I’ve seen them do it. They rely heavily on LIDAR, so the time of day makes no difference to them.

And apparently they only disengage and need human assistance every 17,000 miles, on average. Contrast that to something like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” (ignoring the controversy over whether it counts or not), where the most generous numbers I could find for it are a disengagement every 71 city miles, on average, or every 245 city miles for a “critical disengagement.”

You are correct in that Waymo is heavily geofenced, and that’s pretty annoying sometimes. I tried to ride one in Phoenix last year, but couldn’t get it to pick me up from the park I was visiting because I was just on the edge of their area. I suspect they would likely do fine if they went outside of their zones, but they really want to make sure they’re going to be successful so they’re deliberately slow-rolling where the service is available.

They’re still working on it. All the dev is by a single guy, who also runs Pixelfed. He says he’ll be open-sourcing the code soon so more people can contribute and help get things going, but he wants to finish getting the web interface working first. And apparently he’s been spending a lot of time keeping everything online during the surge of interest, which has slowed everything down.

I’m in the Discord for Loops, but not affiliated with it. The dev said they’re rate-limited by their email provider, so it does take a long time to go through the queue. The queue is also split between Pixelfed and Loops, since they have the same developer, so that slows things down even more.

It took about three days to get my invite as well, but it may be a bit faster now since I think the initial surge of signups has tapered off a bit.

Turns out communism was just a red herring!

There are a couple animated adaptations of some of the books, and the live-action adaptation of Hogfather is pretty good!

I’m one of the admins who manage CrowdStrike at my company.

We have all automatic updates disabled, because when they were enabled (according to the CrowdStrike best practices guide they gave us), they pushed out a version with a bug that overwhelmed our domain servers. Now we test everything through multiple environments before things make it to production, with at least two weeks of testing before we move a version to the next environment.

This was a channel file update, and per our TAM and account managers in our meeting after this happened, there’s no way to stop that file from being pushed, or to delay it. Supposedly they’ll be adding that functionality in now.

VASAviation has the audio of this, along with a radar view of what happened and video from the ground. It was very, very close, and appears to be completely the controller’s fault.

https://youtu.be/KmI6pVTjCt0?si=Q39JOnyE37QYlCwB

Depends on where you are.

I’m in the Midwestern United States now, where summer is often pretty frustrating due to the high humidity. But I’m originally from Phoenix, where I really enjoyed summer (in the shade), because I love the feeling of warmth soaking into my bones, and I never got sweaty.

“It’s only 13% and not 100%, so it doesn’t count!”

The Supreme Court blocked his attempt last year to forgive debt for another 43 million people, which was set to take effect before repayments started back up. He’s trying to help but is being blocked by conservatives who want him to fail so Trump can be reelected.

Leverage is one of my favorites. The reboot is pretty good as well.

I use this too. I’ve had people over who wanted to connect to the Wi-Fi, pulled up the list, and waited for a minute because “it’s still loading!”

11/10, no regrets.

It’s not exactly a remake, it’s an adaptation of the Mean Girls musical.

I’m going to jump on the Kobo train along with everyone else. I have a Kobo Libra H2O that I really love. I had a couple Kindles before deciding that I really didn’t want to stick with an Amazon product, and chose Kobo because of its integrations with Overdrive. It’s really nice to be able to check out a book from the library directly on my e-reader.

The screen is bright when it needs to be, but dims down quite nicely. The touchscreen is fairly responsive, though it’s e-ink and there are limits to refresh rates. The physical buttons to turn the page are perfect, and I still can’t believe Amazon took them off their Kindles (though I guess I understand them removing the keyboard… even though I liked it).

I actually like mine so much, I bought a second of the same model after I somehow managed to lose my first one. So the one thing I wish they had was integration with Apple Airtag or one of the other device tracking networks!

While you’re not wrong about there being other constellations in the works, Starlink is the first to actually launch more than a (relative) few. Over 50% of satellites in orbit, total, belong to Starlink.

So while there are other projects planned or under construction, Starlink is the most visible by far, and that’s a lot of why we hear about it the most.

Also yeah, it’s owned by Elon Musk, so that alone guarantees it’ll stay in the news.

That’s great! Like I said, it’s dependent on your employment contract. But for people who aren’t as certain, separate work and personal devices as much as possible just to protect yourself.

Depending on where you work, your employer may be able to take that personal device you’re using for work in the event of a lawsuit against the company (where they need to retain anything that may be relevant to discovery), or in the event of a security incident (where they may need it for forensics).

I work in information security, and I practice strict isolation for that exact reason. Two laptops, two phones, because if anything ever happens they can and will take devices for analysis or evidence. If you are using an issued device, they’ll assign you a new one; if it’s a personal device you’ll get it back when they’re done with it, which could take years.

Edited to add this is dependent on your employment contract, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Cover your camera and use your work computer.

If a police aircraft gets shot down, they’re just going to arrest everyone they can find nearby and work it out from there.

That’s what they do when a police helicopter gets hit with a laser pointer, I would assume it would be the same in this case.

I know you’re being facetious, but for anyone thinking seriously about this, shooting down aircraft, which drones are categorized as, is a Federal offense. Same with shining a laser at it, trying to jam its communications, or spoofing GPS to throw off its navigation.

And if the cops are the ones operating the drone, they’ll probably be highly incentivized to arrest and prosecute you.