The pay-per-use API sucks. If you end up on the $50/mo plan, it's better, with caveats:

1 million tokens per minute, 24 million tokens per day. BUT: cached tokens count full, so if you have 100,000 tokens of context you can burn a minute of tokens in a few requests.

Drones and 2d compositing could do a lot. They would excel in some areas used in the video, require far more resources than this technique in others, and be completely infeasible on a few.

They would look much better in a very "familiar" way. They would have much less of the glitch and dynamic aesthetic that makes this so novel.

Yah. A lot of the complexity in data movement or processing is unneeded. But decent standardized orchestration, documentation, and change management isn't optional even for the 20 line shell script. Thankfully, that stuff is a lot easier for the 20 line standard shell script.

Or python. The python3 standard library is pretty capable, and it's ubiquitous. You can do a lot in 50-100 lines (counting documentation) with no dependencies. In turn it's easy to plug into the other stuff.

It's a page layout / word processing program. I see the icon and I think "maybe text editor, maybe drawing program".

#4 or #5 are best at conveying what it is for and for being distinct from other icons.

Everyone is going to be hurt, but if you're not the US you need to hedge. Being firmly aligned with the US is too dangerous right now. Lots of negative costs and outcomes come with that hedging.

Not really sure who it's going to hurt most.

China is the only vertically integrated economy left. In a multipolar/bifurcated/low trade world they will be the strongest.

The NAFTA/EU trade blocks were extraordinarily strong, this Greenland business is exactly the kind of issue which can shatter the entire block. It benefits no one to give Greenland to the US, so they won’t do it without a fight. It provides no benefit to the US to take it.

The only thing that would really be settled by the US annexing another country on a presidents whim is the formal end of the U.S. separation of powers.

Yup. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. They question is, place your eggs in one basket and become subservient to one country or diversify and try to play others against each other.

I'm looking forward to the Telo-- if they get to market. It's absolutely all about utility. It will be interesting to see if people only want pickups as a fashion statement or if a weird, very practical vehicle can win.

(Same bed-size as Tacoma; midgate that folds down to hold a full sheet of plywood; seats 4 people comfortably; same length as a Mini Cooper SE).

I'd love it if Telos were cheaper, though. $40-50k is enough to keep me buying used cars.

Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no address lines, etc, to push us to powers of 2 (though we may get a few powers of 2 from having a power of 2 number of possible symbols).

So telco rates which are multiples of 56000 or 64000; baud rates which are multiples of 300; ethernet rates which are mostly just powers of 10; etc etc etc.

Of course, there's occasional weird stuff, but usually things have a lot of factors of 5 in there and seem more "decimal-ish" than "binary-ish".

People always use bits for connectivity. 62.5kB/sec -- maybe really 55-60kB/sec downloaded. Or 18 seconds to get a megabyte.

This is simultaneously fast (on my 14400 bps modem that I spent the most time "waiting for downloading", I was used to 12-13 minutes per megabyte vs. 18 seconds here) and slow (the google homepage is >1MB, so until you have resources cached you're waiting tens of seconds).

It would be nice if everything were just a touch more efficient.

Is Google homepage consisting of a text input field and like ten buttons really over a megabyte? Damn.

I end up transferring 940kB (with a lot of blocking cranked up). Typing "hello" in the search bar takes it up to 1MB. Then the first page of search results is another 1.3MB.

Now, I assume all of this would start working before it's all transferred. But we're still talking about tens of seconds of transfer at 500kbit/sec.

(And Google at least acts like they care about bandwidth a little. So many 15megabyte pages out there...)

I think the point that's being made is-- it's a lot easier to stick together over the long term when you spend the first 20 years of your life together in a family unit. It's possible to build long term, stable bonds under other circumstances-- just less likely. It's also possible to screw the former up.

Sure. And I know people who have gained "chosen family" in that first 20 years of life.

I really wish I could make myself listen.

The times I have just sat and listened to a well-told, well-paced story have been magical.

But the dopamine hit of reading -too quickly- competes; the pressure to "be busy" wins and makes me impatient for the spoken word by default.

The defaults are too high. I'd be better off reading less but reading more slowly, and listening sometimes.

But this is not the highest priority problem to fix, either, and I can't fix everything.