I really wish OpenSCAD had objects, so you could use something like box1.width rather than having to declare variables for such things.
I tried using Build123d, a Python library that lets you use all of the features of Python. And it's supposed to allow specifically things like box1.width, but it's always 0. Lots of other issues/bugs too, and severely lacking in ddocumentation.Maybe it'll get there some day.
Not sure about SDFs, but ray casting/tracing goes back a long way being used to design sundials thousands of years ago. A method of ray casting was published in the 1600s to show how to trace out the outline of the Moon on the Earth during a solar eclipse.
Don't forget the CloudStrike outage: One company had a bug that brought down almost everything. Who would have thought there are so many single points of failure across the entire Internet.
Too bad you're getting down voted because you're correct that congress is where the problem is. They could stop most of what he's doing, but choose not to.
But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.
I would argue it is working. The democratically elected congress just agrees with what he is doing. Whether they agree due to genuine belief or fear of him calling them out, doesn't really matter. We should be electing people that have a spine, if we don't then that is still democracy working. Checks and balances are there. Many people just don't like the choices they are making
Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to. But this prosecutor keeps getting re-elected, and nobody enforces the laws about their having to bring certain cases.
Both of the following may be true:
1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.
2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)
This is actually a good thought experiment.
In your example, democracy is actually fully working. The people though are voting to override the law (essentially something akin to jury nullification on a massive scale) and the prosecutor is breaking the system. So what is the solution?
Optimal solution is a check and balance where a higher level prosecutor, perhaps a federal or state level steps in and takes charge. Another optimal is courts rule that the prosecutor has to do their job.
But lets say that neither of these happen and there is no way to impeach the prosecutor.
You have a couple of scenarios.
1. Uprising. The people rise up and kill the prosecutor.
2. Dictatorship. A higher power even though they don't have the legal authority steps in and removes the prosecutor.
Now the real question is was this a good result? Democracy failed but you got rapists and murderers off the street.
I think we are very far away from this with Trump, he is still following the checks and balances, those checks and balances are just either
A: refusing to act or
B: acting in a way that some people don't like but I would add that many people do indeed like.
So I guess you could add civil war to the potential outcome as a portion of the population does not like the existing checks and balances and the results of the democratic election.
Now what is interesting is your scenario actually explains partially the rise of MAGA and Trump. For them, the law lead to open borders, what they saw as the promotion of LGBTQ amongst children (drag queen reading hour, etc) and DEI (discrimination against themselves and their children). All things they perceive as a grave threat to the future of the nation. So if they have to vote for someone that works outside the law in order to preserve their desired future they are willing to do so. They are willing to flirt with the dictator option if it means putting off what they view as a cataclysm.
I am not sure which is the best solution in your prosecutor scenario, what are your thoughts?
“Democracy” in the sense of “a government with large amounts of citizen participation via voting, strong rule of law, and peaceful transition of power” (this is an entirely fine usage; it’s the main way most political scientists use the term day-to-day, ditto ordinary people, that’s why there are so many openings for incorrecting people online with “ackshually only direct democracy is democracy, the rest is sparkling representative republics”, which, again, isn’t how people who study government generally use the term) is failing, because rule of law is failing. This is a (partial, in this hypothetical, but far more complete in the real thing I’m alluding to) clear failure of government.
“Democracy” as in people are voting and the people they elected are wielding power (nb it is not necessarily the case that voters like that crime isn’t being prosecuted in my hypothetical, even in cases that their system of presumably-also-democratic government legally requires it—it could be that this prosecutor is popular despite that) is working.
Maybe you just mean that votes are resulting in things happening, period, regardless of whether those things are legal according to laws established and upheld by prior elected governments, and even if the system isn’t operating anywhere near its foundational legal basis, and that’s the disconnect?
(Outside the hypothetical, rule of law has always kinda struggled at times but is simply collapsing this term in ways and to a degree that’s not been seen in living memory, certainly; voting has been under attack for decades and especially lately between the ‘00s-today baseless but effective attacks on confidence in elections, the “find me votes” and illegal electors pushes having no consequences and the guy behind them currently holding effectively all federal levers of power and quite a few state ones, increasing gerrymandering activity, and the VRA being on life support and likely soon to be dead; and we’ve not seen peaceful transition of power in as shaky a place as it is post-Jan-6th [and the reactions thereto]… maybe ever, aside from the actual civil war? Certainly not since the 19th century; taken together, yeah, American democracy in the former sense is doing extremely poorly and large parts of it are entirely broken at the moment, and it’s very much not clear how much, if any, of it will recover, and it’s a safe bet a lot of that’s going to get worse at least in the short term)
Youtube pays them per (ad) view, and also recommends the video to more people based on how many people click on it. So giving people another way to watch it will decrease their revenue and audience.
I depends on the orbit. The low Earth ones would usually be de-orbited and fall back to Earth. The geosychronous ones are usually just moved to a parking orbit out of the way to make room for more. If it's in a high but not very crowded orbit, they might just stop using it.
Rejecting bad data is part of what we should do to get people healthy. This isn't a controlled scientific study, it's just a news article about a government supplied statistic with a lot of unsubstantiated claims as to why.
The anti-satellite devices could be deployed in the same manner as the Starlink satellites. And they wouldn't need communications equipment, so they could be lighter and cheaper to launch. And you really wouldn't need to take them all out, just enough to make communication unreliable.
Starlink launches reduce costs by launching a bunch of satellites with similar orbits on the same vehicle, replacing one or a few satellites is going to cost a lot more per satellite. So just disrupting the network is a lot cheaper than fixing it.
Thought the cheapest is still probably paying an existing employee to break some stuff.
Taking out one or even a few dozen satellites isn't going to make communication unreliable. They can redistribute themselves to fill holes. You'd need to take out thousands, requiring hundreds of launches at least. And neither Russia nor China has reusable rockets, so the costs would be much higher than SpaceX's costs. The interceptors would take a long time to spread out to reach their targets if they were launched in groups like Starlink is, so it wouldn't be a surprise attack and SpaceX would have time to prepare. They would need to start launching on-orbit spares for each orbital shell, but there are only a few shells, not hundreds.
And in a few years when Starship is launching Starlink, the economics will be tilted even more wildly in SpaceX's favor.
There are satellites on a polar orbit, which will cover connections at the poles, but those satellites still cover a lot of non-polar ground.
If polar orbiting satellites are still working we'd expect to see intermittent or degraded connectivity away from the poles rather than complete outage?
I saw some people report that their dishes are pointing in unusual directions so it would explain that, and that my service is fine since I only use the polar orbiting ones ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not really anything in there regarding the sundial. I'm guessing that was put in there metaphorically for clickbait reasons.
Knowing quite a bit about sundials I was genuinely curious about how that would work, as a typical (horizontal) sundial doesn't have enough information to make a calendar. It's a time of day device, rather than a time of year device. You could teach the model about the Equation of Time or the Sun's declination, but it wouldn't need the sundial at that point. There are sundials like a spider sundial, or nodus sundial, that encode date information too. But there's overlap/ambiguity between the two solstices as the sun goes from highest to lowest, then back to its highest declination. Leap years also add some challenges too. There are various ways to deal with those, but I think you can see why I was curious how producing a calendar from a sundial would work (without giving it some other information that makes the sundial unecessary).
I'm sorry for the misleading title about a sundial, it was a metaphor, and based on the feedback here, if I had to do it again I would pick a different one. :-)
My only worry with these MCP "sensors" is that they add-up to the token cost — and more importantly to the context window cost. It would be great to have the models regularly poll as new data and factor that into their inferences. But I think the models (at least with current attention) will always have a trade-off between how much they are provided and what they can focus on. I am afraid that if I provide Claude numerous senses, that it will lower its attention to our conversation.
But your exciting comment (and again I apologize for disappointing you!) makes me think about creating an MCP server that provides like the position of the sun in the sky for the current location, or maybe some vectorized representation of a specific sundial.
I think the digitized information that we experience is more native to models (i.e., require fewer processing steps to extract insights from), but it's possible that providing them this kind of input would result in unexpected insights. They may notice patterns, i.e., more grumpy when the sun is in this phase, etc.
If it helps, I have several methods of computing the Sun's position at varying degrees of accuracy/complexity, and some sundial code at https://www.celestialprogramming.com/
I tried using Build123d, a Python library that lets you use all of the features of Python. And it's supposed to allow specifically things like box1.width, but it's always 0. Lots of other issues/bugs too, and severely lacking in ddocumentation.Maybe it'll get there some day.
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