Milton Keynes, in the UK, seems to have nailed this. It’s effectively a grid of roundabouts. When the roads are empty, you can race along at 60mph (legally). As soon as it starts to build, the road naturally slows to 40, then 30mph. No cameras etc needed.

It also has the red ways. You can walk most places, without having to cross a major road. It uses underpasses for pedestrians and bikes etc.

As a fellow aspie, be careful. Chat bots are the equivalent of empty calorie junk food, or masturbation. They forfill a biological itch but don’t produce the intended follow-on effects. In smaller doses, this is fine, good even. The problem comes when you overuse.

E.g. Junk food leave you short of vitamins etc. You tend to over eat, to try and compensate, and so gain weight.

As humans, we have a drive to socialise. When we chat with other humans, we get to know them, and also for bonds. These bonds are critical in life. The goal is 3 fold, mutual understanding, mutual investment, and mutual trust. The urge to talk to people is intended to assist with this.

LLMs offer none of these. They can be incredibly useful, but often only as a training aid. A LLM can’t offer you a couch to sleep on, if your house floods. It can’t put in a good word to get you a job. It can’t invite you to social event, or wingman you on finding a date.

LLMs are socialising on easy mode. Just like masturbation is starting a family on easy mode. Have fun with it, but don’t let it displace real relationships.

There’s still some various binaries. E.g. the expressif sdk generated code. However, it’s far harder to sneak something nasty into it.

Codespace is at an extreme premium on microcontrollers. Kb, and even bytes matter. A big, complex bit of malware would take significant space, likely enough to be noticed quickly.

As for smaller, simpler malware, this is a possibility. However, due to their nature, microcontrollers get a lot more scrutiny of their outputs. Random data dumps to an unexpected external address would be caught VERY quickly.

This is compounded by the fact that it’s not uncommon, at least in larger installs, to segregate IoT devices from the main network. It stops them cluttering it up, and slowing it down. This makes it easy to firewall off the network from the Internet. They can talk to each other, and the central coordinator, but only the coordinator can see the internet, unless explicitly allowed.

If my network were compromised via my smarthome setup, my first suspects would be the debian PC running home assistant, or my ubiquiti router. I’ve at least reduced my target area to business grade networking kit and a single Linux server. I’m not an impossible target, but far from a soft one.

Hey, at least drugs will now be lacklustre, and unforfilling. The factory must grow to meet the demands of the expanding factory!

A modern nuke is FAR from the “bang 2 rocks together” designs that were first designed. For a start, most are fusion devices. Fairly exotic reactions are used to make a small amount of fusion material to go critical. This creates a shaped charge on a fusion core. The compression wave sets fusion happening, which releases 95% of the energy. Most of Russia’s arsenal is of this sort.

The downsides of these is the use of exotic elements. They often have a short half life, e.g. tritium, with 12.5 years. This means they decay. Even worse, some of the byproducts will actually poison the reaction. E.g. Rather than producing a flood of neutrons, they absorb them.

If any of this chain fails, then your fusion nuke becomes, at best, a low yield fission nuke. More likely, it becomes a dirty bomb. It’s still nasty, but not the city destroying terror weapon it would be intended as.

It’s less being stripped, and more a lack of maintenance. Nukes have a shelf life. The elements inside then can decay, this means they need replacing. This is a highly specialist job. It’s also expensive, and can only really be cross checked by the same people who do the work (or detonating it).

Adrenaline with completely fuck up your higher brain functions, unless you’ve trained to cope with it. Its default effects are fight, flight, freeze or fawn. She went into freeze. She likely didn’t want to make matters worse, and couldn’t think it through, due to the adrenaline spike.

A rather dark survey I heard about years ago. Researchers couldn’t find anyone who has self rescued from a submerged car, who hadn’t planned for the eventuality. They had all worked out what to do if that happened to them. Many of the deaths had claw marks on the dashboard, and sometimes they hadn’t even gotten their seat belts off. In the moment, their monkey brain couldn’t even plan that far.

It’s a combination of both, I believe.

The initial conditions had a definite rotational bias. This is preserved in the current orbital plane and direction.

On top of that, anything massively off that plane is liable to hit or interact with the material in the plane, given enough time. It will be flung around, eventually either out of the system or into the plane.

Stuff orbiting relatively close to the plane will have a biased pull towards the “average” plane. This will slowly flatten the orbits out.

All these processes take a lot of time. The solar system, in general, has had enough time to settle. The ort cloud and other outer bodies are still quite chaotic. We see a lot more off plane than within the traditional solar system. They experience the latter effects far less, and so take longer to equalise. They still have a bias towards the initial spin however.

It depends on your exposure profile.

Installing malware and bloatware into an OS is relatively easy. Doing the same to a bios is doable, but a LOT harder.

If you’re after a mini PC for home use or even a small business, wiping the os is likely fine. The concern would mostly kick in with larger organisations or government level targets.

It’s a question of how many man hours of effort hacking you is worth. Even if they are compromised, they are unlikely to risk outing the breach for anything less than a high value target.

Vertical farming can make sense. Effectively you capture energy from places or sources unsuitable for farming, and focus it into a small area optimised for farming.

E.g. farming on the side of a building doesn’t make sense. Covering the sides in solar panels however is fine. Wind can’t grow crops directly. Wind powered grow lights can.

Human waste could be used. It requires more processing to keep it safe, however.

There is also the complecating factor of chemicals. Night soil needs relatively little work. Toilet cleaner, however, needs more processing.

It’s currently nowhere close to viable to do in a city environment, that could be changed in future.

I suspect it’s related to the difficulty in processing. Kiwi fruit are quite small and non-trivial to extract the flesh from. This would make it more expensive to extract.

This is less of an issue now that a few decades back. However, most people are quite conservative on their juice choices. Low sales still mean higher cost, which reduces sales.

The issue is that carbon fibre is strong, hard, but brittle. When it fails, it fails catastrophically. It also doesn’t show many/any signs of failure, till it fails.

A carbon fibre hull, under those loads, could be good for 5 dives or 100, depending on the vagaries of how it was made. It won’t show the wear, until it fails. That is why most companies won’t trust CF under those sort of loads.

You can always introduce your other half to multiplayer mode… :D

Most people have an addiction button. The version for geeks and engineers is VERY hard to exploit at scale, to make money. Factorio pushes that button perfectly. It’s a sustained dopamine stream that little can match.

On a completely unrelated note. Less than a month now! 😀

E.g. a competitor “encourages” multiple individuals to open cases. Perhaps with some “financial assistance”. Suddenly, the company is dealing with the costs of 10 cases. Even worse, they can no longer use economies of scale to cope (e.g. have an in-house lawyer). They are on the line for the complainant’s cost. The cases don’t have to go far, the company pays the opposing lawyers either way.

Also, if you can’t see how ambulance chasing lawyers couldn’t exploit a guaranteed payout system (to the lawyers at least), I would question your imagination.

That would be very easy to weaponise, particularly against smaller companies. Once you’re dealing with lawyers, you need to assume that worst case scenarios will rapidly become the default. You also then end up with even more red tape, deciding who should pay what, prior to the trial even starting.

Now, how do you define what a reasonable budget is? That basically becomes a fee to sue.

If anything, that would be worse. Imagine, you sue, and have a single lawyer, on a discount rate. They respond with a team of 100 highly paid lawyers. Your now paying 50-500x what your own lawyer is actually charging. This could also work in both directions.

It’s a steal, even at full price, particularly once you account for the various mods.

FYI, I’ve several friends who veto playing, or even talking about factorio. They can’t afford to lose 100s of hours of their lives again to cracktorio, and dont want to be sucked back in again. Take from this what you will.