Thousands of military drones have been remotely piloted for decades. This news isn’t as ground breaking as it might seem. Some of these drones are large: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Hawk

I know a military drone isn’t the same as a passenger carrying airplane, but for cargo I think the only reason this isn’t already a thing is because drones are military tech and most governments don’t want that falling into the wrong hands.

This is simply not true. Starvation isn’t the only thing that kills people - they die of easily treatable medical issues all the time because of lack of health insurance. Unhoused people die of exposure every summer and winter.

Not trying to defend Jeff here, but generally these kind of space megaprojects rely on manufacturing materials in space. I.e. capture an asteroid and use its material as the radiation shielding. Not that that’s currently anywhere near feasible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Are kernel maintainers not unpaid volunteers?

Yeah I had convinced myself that I would only do it for a year and be able to retire much much sooner.

I once applied for a “database admin” job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically “run all our Oracle databases” and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo’ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)

In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said “if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute”.

Anyways I didn’t get the job, but they’re not all underpaid.

My business daddy pays for my Apple machine and it’s great for ssh-ing into various cloud-based Linux boxes.

Makes me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentition#Dental_formula

Teeth can tell you a lot about an animal. Their size, shape, number etc can tell you what it eats or how it eats or how much it eats. Dental formula can give you clues for how animals are related to each other. If two different animals have the same dental formula then maybe they share a common ancestor or have a similar diet. If two animals are already very similar but have different dental formula then maybe they’re only very distantly related or there’s been some convergent evolution elsewhere.

This article is worth reading if only for this line:

However, though drug companies have had some success targeting the Death Receptor-5, no Fas agonists have made it into clinical trials.

Yeah, I think the argument is that you shouldn’t need the cars to get people where they need to go. This can be addressed two ways: either we don’t use cars or we don’t need to go (as far).

People should be able to travel with other modes that require less salt to deice, and cities could be built to not require cars for most trips. Salting sidewalks and bus lanes is better than salting those things plus roads and highways.

It’s also worth considering that yes, people should be able to just stay home. People shouldn’t be at risk of losing their job/home because they couldn’t safely make it into work. Parents shouldn’t have to rely on school as daycare.

I’d be curious to see if urban heat Island affects salt use. Maybe if we build dense enough, we don’t even really need salt to cover 99% of the population.

I wish the US had better passenger rail infrastructure so people traveling long distance didn’t need to road trip.

I’m lucky to be in a position where I can ride a train to the two closest cities so I’m picking up an EV. Anything longer distance and I’ll either fly or rent an ICE.

Brave is based on Chromium, not Firefox.

There are Firefox derivatives, but most “alternative” browsers are based on Chromium.

I at least had the cathartic experience of being told “hey we need to shut down EVERYTHING before 7pm because that’s when the email will turn off, so log into every service you know we use and delete it all.” And then I spent the next couple hours clicking every delete button I could.

K8s clusters? Delete. Prod DB? Delete. Prod DB backups? Delete. S3 buckets? Delete. Cloudflare account? Delete.

It was actually kinda fun.

Randomly got a message from one of my reports asking what this “Mandatory Team Meeting” was on his calendar. I hadn’t been invited, but it was our whole company shutting down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯