The first one was tall and skinny and toppled over after a landing leg malfunctioned. So they sent a second tall skinny probe, loaded with expensive equipment. Aaaand it fell over.

Maybe somebody should tell them about center of gravity and redundant systems.

https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/

Some of the US contribution to the Ukraine war effort was in the form of older equipment or credits to purchase arms from US weapons sellers (i.e. the funds just recycled back to the US).

Wondering why these UK funds are in the form of ‘loans?’

It sounds like these may be to help Ukraine domestically manufacture their own arms.

Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.

BP brought on Bernard Looney as CEO to help steer the company from oil to ‘energy’ and renewables. By all accounts he did a bang-up job of it, but was forced to resign after a messy scandal involving relationships with coworkers.

The replacement CEO promptly undid all the work and did a hard U-turn back into hydrocarbons.

So all these museums that thought they were accepting funds from a renewable energy champion are now stuck holding the bag for a good old ‘Drill Baby Drill’ company.

That is one possible outcome. The other is they put so many loopholes and exceptions in it to appease a particular point of view and it becomes meaningless.

Either way, investments will likely be impacted.

Section 230 was foundational to shifting the risk of running social networks. This, good or bad, brought us to where we are.

Once they knock it down, the unintended consequences will be… interesting. 🍿

I have a friend who has been tasked to explain all this and the benefits to lay-people. Somehow, “able to break all your passwords” doesn’t seem to be very compelling.

Maybe this will be the reason they trot out at the next budget review.

So Rwanda’s “very lovely gap years” are back on the menu.

In the words of the late Molly Ivins, one of the best political columnists in the U.S.: “The first rule of holes. When you’re in one, stop digging.”

Makey Makey has been around forever: https://makeymakey.com/

Background: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18303012

“She states she did not regret her actions.”

The common benchmark ‘replacement’ ratio of birth to death is 2.1.

Once a country falls below that, they’re on a slow multi-generational train ride to extinction. There will be multiple stops along the way, where small towns get hollowed out (youngsters move to the cities), and the social safety net for the elderly goes away (not enough money coming in from fewer young, money-earning people).

Next stop is where there aren’t enough caregivers for the growing elderly population. After that, you start going down the dark alleys of Senecide, where the elderly are left out in the forest or ignored to die.

None of this is new. Japan and South Korea have been dealing with it for the past 20 years.

Only solution is immigration from high-baby to low-baby regions. But if the culture is closed and xenophobic, they’ll put barriers up to slow the flow. Second class citizen status. Sectioned-off neighborhoods. Laws to prohibit inter-racial marriage. That sort of thing. After a few years, those immigrants will trend somewhere safe and financially viable where they will get proper respect.

There will be partial stops, of course, where local nationalists will make angry noises about purity and poisoning bloods of the country, etc and win local elections (👋🏽 USA, Germany, Italy, France, and Netherlands!)

But the hard, long-term reality is: a safe, peaceful life is expensive and the cultural norms putting women down just don’t fly any more. The kids are just not making enough babies, and taking away reproductive rights just makes people angry and less likely to reproduce.

This is true for more than 50% of the countries in the world, including UK, US, and Canada. And the trendlines are pointing down.

I spent 1.5 years working on this stuff in my last job. There are tons of reports out there from WHO, IMF, and the UN, all backing all this using fun terms like ‘Demographic Time Bomb.’

tldr: We’re screwed if we don’t find a way to assimilate and encourage immigration, and reduce the cost of raising kids.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Edit: Current government of Spain gets it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/09/pedro-sanchez-unveils-plans-to-make-it-easier-for-migrants-to-settle-in-spain

Guarantee someone’s going to generate a bubbly podcast of Mein Kampf or Project 2025.

Ed is getting good at lobbing these darts at hype bubbles.

The thing that this writeup ignores is that the object isn’t to show short-term revenue, but to put all competitors out of business, be the last one standing, and create a monopoly. Either that or get bought out so the investors can move on to the next thing. But at $150B valuation, only MSFT or Nvidia can afford to buy them outright.

Google, Meta, and Amazon burned through cash for years, but they eventually outran all competition and then monetized the users who had nowhere else to go.

Dangit, copy-pasta from an unrelated comment. Fixed.

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment

The problem with Chinese EVs is that they show it’s possible to innovate, keep prices down, and mass produce.

Ford, GM, even Tesla, are spending all their time whining about how it’s just not possible to compete. They point the finger at worker wages, instead of improving engineering and design, materials, manufacturing processes, and not chasing stock-market gains.

Stop making $70K SUVs and start making $20K Taurus and Escort EVs. You did it once. You can do it again.

Where you rotate so far right you end up at the left.

TLDR: People need to go touch grass.

Tried bash, Make, and awk/sed. All hit brick walls. Finally landed on pyinvoke. Two dependencies to install on any new machine. Never had problems. Also, easy to debug and modify as projects evolve.