Somewhere, some of the kids I mentored are probably working on real-world robotics. That's awesome.

FIRST Robotics is such a cool program. I mentored a team maybe 20 years ago and had so much fun with the young people working on their robot.

I think I'm onto something here.

Literally every single time I eat a quesadilla, the universe doesn't end.

Love the little arrow pointing to the unviersity.

We live in a time of reflexive condemnation, guilt by association. Ex: Someone argued to me that the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket "is a bad rocket" because they understand (rightly) that Musk is evil. The Falcon 9 is the most successful rocket of the modern age, a miraculous achievement. But, musk bad.

Yes. I also think that modern audiences, even if they got the above issue, would be unwilling to identify with the protagonists because they'd blame them for having been working on lasers to begin with. "Surely they knew it would be a weapon, they're just evil engineers!"

The rockets NASA builds - and the payloads carried on them - are also built for profit, people don't work for free! I don't see companies making money as something bad and, indeed, see that economic activity as a good thing, for NASA and for the country/world.

What's up with the purple? I'm used to seeing gold foil, not purple sneaker fabric.

2020 election, probably.

There is an anti-progress, know-nothing sort of refusal at the heart of these attitudes toward space travel. People react reflexively, in anger, and truth suffers.

I get that when people see a privately-built rocket do something unexpected it feels like a free win, an opportunity to diminish Musk or Bezos. But all doing so reveals is that one doesn't understand the industry, or the goals, or that one is grinding axes without regard to truth.

And, some value judgements:

It is GOOD that we send human beings to space. It is GOOD that we intend to explore. It is GOOD that will try to conduct industrial things away from Earth. It is GOOD that we're going to build moon bases, Mars bases, orbital bases.

...these are ALSO TRUE:

5. Government rockets ALSO sometimes blow up and fail
6. Those same "government rockets" were also largely built by...private contractors
7. Space travel is hard regardless of who built or operates the rocket
8. There is nothing magical about government space v private space

Several things are simultaneously true:

1. Musk & Bezos are bad people
2. Private space companies have behaved badly in some ways
3. Sometimes their rockets blow up
4. Sometimes their rockets fail to do things

BUT....

The "guy against wall with many swords pointing at him" meme

Bluesky is, broadly speaking, wrong about space travel.

It would be interesting to know how the legislation defines "data center," how it distinguishes one kind of "building housing computers" from another. I assume they don't intend to just ban "buildings that house computers," e.g.

Yep. The whole effort is misguided and will both fail to achieve its intended result and lead to significant problems. Ultimate effects will be: reduce privacy, increase data collection, drive people away from mainstream OSes.

We need a Universal Bill of Software User Rights, or something, a way to enforce user expectations around tracking, logins, behavior logging, etc.

I want my tools to serve ME, not their fabricators.

A recent piece of email from them said something like "here are the new features we've added since the last time you used Affinity" - which implies obviously that they know when I last used the app.

Good software doesn't spy on people. Good software doesn't track people.

What happened to Affinity Photo is really depressing. We had an excellent, affordable piece of useful software that helped us get out from under Adobe, and now we have a login-so-we-can-track-you piece of spyware full of AI crap.

I still use Google search, for the reasons you offer here. But I refuse to use gmail or other google services that require login (docs, drive, etc).

I DO often try a duckduckgo search first, but holy cow are the results inferior.

I continue to believe that Ukraine will win this thing.

And the change below comes right when Ukraine has already started to turn the tide - this will only accelerate its coming victory.

Some of the other stories I gathered here include the time Prince invited me to his house, a glimpse at the Myst-like CD-ROM game he released in the 90s, some digital artifacts that I had the only copy of—including Prince’s own notes on his greatest hits, and the message behind his Super Bowl show.

You had it right up until the word "guardrails." Guardrails are not what is needed, permanent termination of the agency and legal prosecutions are what is required. Guardrails are an insult to the dead, abused, and deported. There is nothing wrong with ICE that guardrails can fix.

Looks like he has a (not recently used) account here, too:
@akshaaat .bsky.social

Death of the universe thwarted yet again by the Power of the Quesadilla

A barebones Mac motherboard in ATX size, with empty RAM, PCIe, nvme slots. And nvidia drivers.

Colbert is an obvious choice, as would be Letterman, Craig Ferguson, Galifianakis.

The J is probably pronounced with a 'zsh" sound, fey-zhoa. Genus named after a Portuguese, so that language's J sound seems like it would apply. But I understand that in NZ it's more like your pronunciation above.