nkoren

We get them where I am in the UK, too.

Bless Dolly, she was amazing!

It would be less exhaustive to list what isn't.

Yeah, and the way the rest of the video is constructed, it doesn't seem like it was trying to claim anything other than being pre-expedition. That's why I'm inclined to interpret the ending "I went" as "by the time you see this video, I'll be in the skies and doing it".

Same. Watching it, I was ping-ponging between being grateful that people with such possibly lunatic levels of enthusiasm exist, and fearful that he was definitely going to get himself killed.

@volodia (Inception co-founder) has a comment here which is flagged/dead. That's weird; it shouldn't be. Can someone fix that?

I'm eight, sitting in the dentists office. There's a looped VHS showing kid's cartoons about dentistry. "Your teeth are THE MOST IMPORTANT part of your body," it intones. This is the moment I start to suspect that the whole thing is a load of horse shit.

I'm nine. The dentist has convinced my parents that my slightly crooked front teeth are a problem which needs to be solved with a retainer. The infernal device puts metallic bands around my rear molars, and makes my mouth taste like metal. Fortunately, I discover that this problem is easily solved with a bit of elbow grease and a pair of pliers. After ripping out several sets of retainers, my parents and the dentists surrender. Somehow it still takes another 38 years to be diagnosed as autistic. My barely crooked front teeth go on to have no effect on my life whatsoever.

I'm 15. A dentist informs me that I have half a dozen cavities which urgently need to be filled. I'm busy with other things, however, and keep postponing dealing with them. As years go by and no problems develop, I start to form paranoid theories that the entire purpose of dentistry is to replace all naturally-occurring tooth enamel in the body.

I'm 21. A wisdom tooth becomes impacted and infected. The pain is very much like having a hot poker shoved through my jaw, except less enjoyable. A dentist extracts the tooth, and I spend the rest of my life profoundly and eternally grateful for the existence of modern dentistry. At a follow-up appointment, I ask whether maybe I should finally get those long-neglected cavities attended to. "What cavities?" he responds, confirming that my prior dentist was a scammer.

I'm 30. My wife -- whose parents enthusiastically embraced getting her teeth perfected when she was a child -- is now having to get most of her teeth replaced. For the second time. On credit. Her complications are having complications. On the plus side, from a dentistry perspective, her naturally-occurring tooth enamel is almost totally gone. Meanwhile, I've forgotten to get a check-up for the last nine years, and am having no problems whatsoever.

I'm 50. I probably really should get that check-up one of these days. On the other hand, it's been 29 years since my last check-up, and my teeth are still causing me no trouble at all. If I were to make a four-quadrant chart of my friends whose dental circumstances I'm familiar with, I'd be one of a very small handful of people in the "no tooth problems, never goes to a dentist" quadrant. There's a LOT of people in the "serious tooth problems, regularly goes to a dentist" quadrant. The fact that there's FAR fewer people in the "no tooth problems, regularly goes to a dentist" quadrant continues to fuel my vague skepticism of the profession. Maybe that's a sampling bias, but still...

Not withstanding all of the above: the next time a tooth does go bad, I will once again be profoundly grateful that they're there.

A.) I understand this completely. I'm sure it's impossible for reviewers to keep up with the onslaught of AI-generated code.

B.) I worry what this entails for QGIS, and for the future of such community-built platforms as a whole.

Let's say I need some functionality which QGIS doesn't have. My options are to:

1. Learn to program QGIS, add the functionality, and commit it back to the community. From where I currently sit -- I've never developed for QGIS, I don't know its language -- that's an investment of several months, at a minimum.

2. Vibe-code the extension I need -- or just make a bespoke GIS application which has the small subset of GIS capabilities that I need, optimized for my particular use-case. Depending on the complexity, that's an investment of either days or hours.

By that math, (1) is never going to win, and now (2) is never going to be able to make a contribution back to QGIS. Moreover, the pool of people for whom (1) is a real option will be shrinking every day, particularly as those people have to compete economically with the people who embrace (2).

So it's hard for me to see how community projects survive in the face of these dynamics. And it would be a shame to lose them -- they create a lot of value that a bespoke vibecoded thingamajig never will. But for better or worse, I just don't see humans-only coding having much of a future.

Idealistically, I really wish I could disagree with you.

Living in this reality, unfortunately I cannot.

So I should restate the whale story: that's the effect it had on me, and I still strongly suspect that this was intentional on the whale's part. But YMMV.

I suspect they're more intelligent than that. By, like, a lot.

When I was a teenager, I took a rowboat out onto what was then called Scammon's Lagoon, in Baja California, where the Grey whales raise their young. A mother whale -- several times the size of our boat -- and her calf approached. The calf was curious but cautious, so the mother nudged it into approaching the boat, close enough that we could reach over and rub its nose, which everyone on the boat did in turns.

What did the whales get out of this? Certainly nothing tangible -- nobody was feeding them or anything like that. But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.

I'm certain the mother whale knew what she was doing. She was recruiting us to her side. MUCH more effective, in the long term, than merely running away.

I was working with a company trying to run a render farm. They were based in an old concrete warehouse with high ceilings, but as the company expanded, they ran out of floor space and decided to create a mezzanine floor. So now you had two very low-ceilinged floors instead. And you know what held up the mezzanine floor? Batteries. Huge banks of chained-together automotive batteries. Of course there were conventional Uninterruptible Power Supplies attached to every computer, but those wouldn't survive the entire blackout, so the car batteries and inverters and whatnot were upstream from those.

Looking back at it, it's hard to believe that nobody died...

Agreed that there should be real consequences, but I'm less convinced that "open the company - open weights, open training, per its original 'open' ethos" would be the right answer. That gets us into the kind of libertarian utopia where everyone is allegedly safer because everybody is well-armed... which usually doesn't work out so well in practice.

When I moved from the US to the UK, the use of quotation marks in news headlines was something that confused me. In the US, these would be "scare quote", with the quotation marks basically standing in for the words "so-called". In the UK, that is NOT their meaning. The quotation marks mean "we are not ourselves in a position to verify this, but it is the words that a source has told us". Very different meaning -- and once I got used to it, I think the UK use of language in this case is more honest and useful.

tl;dr: two countries, divided by a common language.

Fun fact: French Guiana is a part of France -- and very much part of the EU -- despite not actually being in Europe. In roughly the same way that Hawaii is a part of the United States of America, despite not actually being in America.

FANTASTIC accomplishment, congratulations!!!!

Now: please make it rapidly reusable and at least 10x larger. Europe desperately needs sovereign launch capabilities in that class. Today, you were the first to cross the starting line. AWESOME. Have a drink, get some rest, and get back to work. Everyone will be rooting for you!