I strongly suspect all solutions will either be invalid, or be limited to the speed of light.

The universe seems to have a lot of weird quirks (the speed of light being 1) what they have in common is that they make time paradoxes impossible. This points to some deeper physics causing these disparate effects. Anything travelling faster than C can be configured as a time machine, and so create paradoxes.

Hiding it would work. You just have to make sure you don’t miss any.

As for the danger. There are levels of exposure. You could leak something damning, but that could be played off as a 1 off. You might also be sitting on a huge amount of paperwork that proves it’s endemic. That paperwork might also expose others who wanted things changed, but don’t want to be outed. In this case, an initial leak can test the waters. The additional info can be rolled out, if it’s needed, or the results justified.

E.g. Initial leak proves they did something nasty. The additional info massively backs it up, but also implicates a VP in its gathering. You might not want to show that hand until later, either to protect them, or to gather more info on their reaction.

One of the less mentioned aspects is that a dead man switch should be difficult, if not impossible to detect and neutralise. If you are to the level of being unalived, you’re likely also a target for significant directed hacking. Such a dead man switch should be as resistant as possible to this. A simple email could let them detect and disable your dead man switch.

Replace “www” with “old”, it takes you to the old version, that they haven’t bothered updating to mess with you.

I still minimise my time on Reddit however, out of principle.

Interestingly, this software was not tested. Testing was actually bypassed as per management’s request because the code change was small.

I don’t think much needs to be said about this…

See if you have a makerspace or a hacker space near you. They are amazing for access to geeky tools, and knowledge.

The reprap movement was exactly that. A self replicating rapid prototyper. While it never reached true replication, it got close enough to cause an explosive growth of the community. That, in turn led to the huge number of low cost suppliers and designs we have now.

Our personalities are just a series of habits we have built up. Ultimately, my monkey brain doesn’t really understand that the voice it is talking to doesn’t belong to a real person. If I get into the habit of being rude, that will spill over into my interactions with real humans. It’s honestly less effort to be polite to an AI than to be rude to an AI, but polite to fellow humans.

I will admit though, I do sometimes drop into dog training mode. Short, clear commands with controlled tone. It improves reliability, but requires more mental effort. I generally wouldn’t use them to a real person, outside of emergency situations. Overriding this uses mental effort.

Further to the link. Tuvix is a character in star trek voyager. There is a transporter accident that ends up welding 2 other characters (Lieutenant Tuvok, Neelix) into 1 individual. The episode is spent trying to resolve this issue.

By the end, Captain Janeway is given a solution. They can reverse the process and recover Tuvok and Neelix. Unfortunately this will destroy Tuvix. Tuvix, meanwhile has developed on his own. He doesn’t want to die and makes that clear. Janeway has the dilemma. She can do nothing, and let Tuvix live, or kill him to bring Tuvok and Neelix back.

Basically, it’s the trolley problem. Do nothing, and 2 people die, or kill 1 yourself, to save them.

To me, the one of the right is FAR more readable. At least if your intention is to understand what it does.

For the left-hand one, you have to read all of it to understand its flow. For the right-hand one, just the first function is enough. You now know what it’s doing, and how (roughly) it’s doing it. Each subsequent function then explains a step, in detail. This allows you to focus, say, on cooking, without any understanding of the preparation phase, or the boxing phase. This vastly reduces the cognitive load, and lets me focus in on the small details.

This same set of properties is also what makes the right hand one easier to maintain. It lets you treat parts as black boxes, you don’t need to know, or care, what goes on inside. You can work on 1 with minimal references to other parts. E.g. the oven could be a simple warm up, cook, cool down cycle. However it could also be a complex, machine learning driven system, governing 100s of concurrent ovens and 10,000s of pizza for optimal cooking speed, energy use and maintenance requirements. Outside of the function, I don’t need to care. It’s just “Give me an oven, wait, here’s your cooked pizza”.

It’s not whether it’s low enough, it’s whether it’s lower than a minimum wage janitor. On a starship, it’s obvious it would be self cleaning. With Ferengi involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s some poor sod pushing a mop.

I think the holodeck actually uses modified transporter and replicator technology. That’s how you can get food and drink that last outside the holodeck. It’s not a huge extension to use it to purge the room of organic residue between uses.

Whether that is cheaper than sending in someone with a mop and bucket however, is unknown.

In theory, you can remelt. Unfortunately, the practicalities mean it’s not viable. Each remelt cycle degrades the plastic itself, so you can only put 20% or so ‘old’ plastic into the mix. Combined with the game of plasticisers (to remove brittleness) and reliable forming, even commercial systems struggle, let alone home ones.

If environmental concerns are the issue. It’s best to print in uncoloured PLA filament. PLA is corn starch based, and decomposes in a bio reactor environment (it rots quickly in an industrial composter).

As for speed. They are getting impressively fast. A calibration cube takes around 20 minutes, though less than 5 minutes is possible. My machine is effectively fire and forget. They mess around while you are tuning them in, but once you have a good calibration, they now tend to hold it well. You’ll sit there watching it in fascination for the first few months, but that wears off.

Android won’t track airtags, but will allow 3rd party tags to work via “find my phone” (becoming “find my device”). They have coordinated with Apple however for anti stalking measures. Both can detect longer term presence of each other’s tags, and sound a warning. Apparently they have delayed the release, to allow apple to implement the protocols properly before they do.

Google’s are simple BLE beacons. They ping out periodically, and any android phones nearby note and report its existence and strength (along with their location).

The steam deck is the first “console” I’ve brought in a LONG time. It’s definitely done right. The controls feel good, and have plenty of options for various games.

The default mode lets me play all my computer steam library. It’s slick and mostly just works, even with older games.

On top of that, if I need to, I can just boot to a Linux desktop. It works with Bluetooth keyboards and mice, as well as giving hdmi and usb sockets via the USB c port (needs an adapter/dock). This means it can double for word processing etc, if required.

I actually struggle to find a viable feature it is missing.

Part of the issue is compression. Most modern compression algorithms bias towards light areas of the picture. On high bandwidth streams, this is no issue. If the stream is highly compressed, the backs can become blocky and details are lost.

On top of this are suboptimal viewing conditions. Non HDR, background light, or poorly configured (or limited capability) screens. All of these punish the black parts of the image more than the bright.