Animats

If the missile is spinning, you can do it with one. The original Sidewinder air to air missile worked that way.

The article is just restating US copyright law for people who don't know it. The title indicates a recent change in policy, and there hasn't been one.

Now, this is US law. Much of the world does have "sweat of the brow" copyright. But the US does not. See "Feist vs. Rural Telephone". There must be human creativity because the US constitution reads "(Congress shall have the power) To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That limits the power of Congress to change this.

So a lot of things are uncopyrightable in the US. Feist is the big case, and it was about telephone directories. No copyright. Useful objects are not copyrightable, which is why there are third party auto parts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are databases of facts. Nor are pictures of public domain art. Nor is automotive sheet metal, despite lobbying by automakers.

That's what leads to AI-generated content not being copyrightable. Model weights don't seem to be copyrightable either.

He's still on social media. He just wants a better bullhorn for his own position.

"Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick. Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreements with both of these trends." (This is the guy behind Ethereum.)

So he built a tool that allowed him to post simultaneously on multiple services. That's not digital minimalism. That's a spamming tool.

We're in trouble. Four of the top ten items on Hacker News are security breaches.

At some point, the pick and place machines, which can handle a limited number of different components at one time, have to be loaded with something. How does that work?

> sounding identical

In AI-generated entertainment, the names "Marcus", "Chloe", "Sterling", "Meridian", and "Apex" keep appearing. Those aren't common names, but LLMs seem to prefer them.

In my aerospace days, our buildings had both ionization and temperature detectors, plus water flow on the sprinklers. Any detection would sound loud buzzers locally, but two sensors, or water flow, had to trigger before everything powered off. That's common in big installations.

We once got an alarm because the heating element in a computer room air conditioner had turned on for the first time ever. It was defective and started to smoke. Smoke detection tripped, buzzers sounded, lights on a panel showed where the problem was, and alarms went off in the security control center. But this didn't trigger building evacuation or full power down. That took confirmation from a second sensor.

Someone ran into that computer room, saw smoke coming from the A/C unit, and pulled the big red power switch, installed by the safety people, on the air conditioner. Then we had time to shut down normally, the safety people came to clear the alarm, and the HVAC people came to fix the problem. I kept the burnt heating element on my desk for a few days for people to see.

This is typical for big industrial plants. Bad stuff will happen, and you have procedures for it.

So how is the part feeder setup automated? That's the big problem for short runs. Board making, solder paste, pick and place, reflow, and inspection were all automated already. The usual short run setup bottleneck is that someone has to put the tapes of parts into the feeders, then load the feeders onto the pick and place machine.

The video doesn't show how that happens. The robotic systems seem to be moving boards around, not parts. Yet that's the big manual part.