I don’t know why you are mentioning Starship when I made no mention of that. Starship HLS is also a dumb idea, but that’s beside the point.

SLS is horribly expensive for what it provides.

The Defense Production Act could be used to meet these ends. SpaceX is a defense contractor and exists at the privilege of the US Government for the US Government.

Coming from several people who work with SpaceX, there is a dedicated group of people that exist to distract Elon from all vital SpaceX functions.

SLS is on track to be more expensive when adjusted for inflation per moon mission than the Apollo program. It is wildly too expensive, and should be cancelled.

This coupled with the fact that the rocket is incapable of sending a manned capsule to low earth orbit which is the the lunar gateway is planned to a Rectilinear Halo Orbit instead.

Those working in the space industry know that SpaceX’s success is not because of Elon but instead Gwynne Shotwell. She is the President and CEO of SpaceX and responsible for all things SpaceX. The best outcome after the election is to remove Elon from the board and revoke his ownership of what is effectively a defense company for political interference in this election. Employees at SpaceX would be happy, the government would be happy, and the American people would be happy.

The technical definition of AI in academic settings is any system that can perform a task with relatively decent performance and do so on its own.

The field of AI is absolutely massive and includes super basic algorithms like Dijsktra’s Algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph or network, even though a 100% optimal solution is NP-Complete, and does not yet have a solution that is solveable in polynomial time. Instead, AI algorithms use programmed heuristics to approximate optimal solutions, but it’s entirely possible that the path generated is in fact not optimal, which is why your GPS doesn’t always give you the guaranteed shortest path.

To help distinguish fields of research, we use extra qualifiers to narrow focus such as “classical AI” and “symbolic AI”. Even “Machine Learning” is too ambiguous, as it was originally a statistical process to finds trends in data or “statistical AI”. Ever used excel to find a line of best fit for a graph? That’s “machine learning”.

Albeit, “statistical AI” does accurately encompass all the AI systems people commonly think about like “neural AI” and “generative AI”. But without getting into more specific qualifiers, “Deep Learning” and “Transformers” are probably the best way to narrow down what most people think of when they here AI today.

This is truly a terrible accident. Given the flight tracking data and the cold, winter weather at the time, structural icing is likely to have caused the crash.

Ice will increase an aircraft’s stall speed, and especially when an aircraft is flown with autopilot on in icing conditions, the autopilot pitch trim can end up being set to the limits of the aircraft without the pilots ever knowing.

Eventually the icing situation becomes so severe that the stall speed of the ice-laden wing and elevator exceeds the current cruising speed and results in a aerodynamic stall, which if not immediately corrected with the right control inputs will develop into a spin.

The spin shown in several videos is a terrifying flat spin. Flat spins develop from normal spins after just a few rotations. It’s very sad and unfortunate that we can hear that both engines are giving power while the plane is in a flat spin towards the ground. The first thing to do when a spin is encountered is to eliminate all sources of power as this will aggravate a spin into a flat spin.

Once a flat spin is encountered, recovery from that condition is not guaranteed, especially in multi-engine aircraft where the outboard engines create a lot of rotational inertia.

Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.

People’s number one concern is inflation. If that tariff is created we will see 100% inflation over night!

You do realize that every posted on the Fediverse is open and publicly available? It’s not locked behind some API or controlled by any one company or entity.

Fediverse is the Wikipedia of encyclopedias and any researcher or engineer, including myself, can and will use Lemmy data to create AI datasets with absolutely no restrictions.

It took Hawking minutes to create some responses. Without the use of his hand due to his disease, he relied on the twitch of a few facial muscles to select from a list of available words.

As funny as it is, that interview, or any interview with Hawkins contains pre-drafted responses from Hawking and follows a script.

But the small facial movements showing his emotion still showed Hawking had fun doing it.

When I go back to being a Beltway Bandit, I need to remember these!

Agreed.

Nevertheless, the Federal regulators will have an uphill battle as mentioned in the article.

Neither “puffery” nor “corporate optimism” counts as fraud, according to US courts, and the DOJ would need to prove that Tesla knew its claims were untrue.

The big thing they could get Tesla on is the safety record for autosteer. But again there would need to be proof it was known.

I am a pilot and this is NOT how autopilot works.

There is some autoland capabilities in the larger commercial airliners, but autopilot can be as simple as a wing-leveler.

The waypoints must be programmed by the pilot in the GPS. Altitude is entirely controlled by the pilot, not the plane, except when on a programming instrument approach, and only when it captures the glideslope (so you need to be in the correct general area in 3d space for it to work).

An autopilot is actually a major hazard to the untrained pilot and has killed many, many untrained pilots as a result.

Whereas when I get in my Tesla, I use voice commands to say where I want to go and now-a-days, I don’t have to make interventions. Even when it was first released 6 years ago, it still did more than most aircraft autopilots.

The victims have beed identified as the owner of the flight school, a flight instructor, and a student.

https://www.wtnh.com/new-england-news/no-survivors-after-plane-crash-in-greenfield/

I hate that I am defending Israel when I say this because what is occurring in Gaza is tragic, but a lot of people are confusing “Genocide” for perceived “War Crimes” as defined by international law and also confusing “Hamas” for “Palestine” or the “Palestinian Authority”.

Hamas is terrorist government (similar in nature to the Taliban) that receives a lot of external funding from countries that actively wish to see the death of Israel and all Jews, making Hamas the chief perpetrators of Genocide in this conflict despite how ineffective they have been in their goals.

Israel was attacked by this terrorist government, and is now defending itself with the expressed war goal of destroying Hamas. While Israel has had a tenuous relationship with the Palestinian people (namely the government’s active efforts to limit the Palestinian Authority and drag their feet on grant the PA more autonomy and their own state which is deplorable and inexcusable), they do not and have not wished to kill an entire culture of people.

Complicating matters, Hamas commonly employs warfare techniques that go against the Geneva Convention like placing government and military headquarters in basements of protected buildings like Hospitals and places of worship. The moment they do that, and abuse those international recognized sanctuaries, they become legitimate military targets leading to the tragic deaths of unwitting civilians.

People can object to the war on the grounds that war is tragic and results in many civilian casualties, but to make meritless claims is detrimental to both international institutions and to the definition of a Genocide. South Africa calls what Israel is doing a genocide, but also explicitly looks the other way with Ukraine and continues to forge close ties with Putin? (For the record, Russia’s actions in Ukraine are also not considered genocide under it’s strict international definition, but they have been found guilty of war crimes).

Israel has an internationally recognized right to defend itself, and it is doing that by dismantling Hamas through force. The Palestinian people are unfortunately caught in the crossfire. With that said, Israel’s methods to this end are not above criticism, and they have faced pressure from the US and Biden to limit civilian casualties wherever possible, and use ground forces to directly attack Hamas rather than relying on airstrikes that have resulted in many innocent deaths.

For those reading who think all war is bad, I’ll leave you with this quote from John Stuart Mills:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

It’s literally an area chart. There’s no way to “skew” it in this format. $800B of $6,300B in spending is always going to be 12.6% no matter how you slice it.

You are looking at two different tax systems. The effective US tax rate (the rate you actually pay is much much less). Our household makes $300k per year, and we have a $650k net worth. Our income taxes every year? Less than 7% of that, which is absurdly low. The ultra wealthy are taxed even less than that. The US is propped up by taxes from the middle-class because the more you makes, the easier it becomes to optimize and lower your effective tax rate. We need to tax the rich more.