squirrel-there

We were taught that Earth orbits the Sun in a closed circle. In reality, Earth has never returned to the same point in space once in 4.5 billion years. ​Right now, the Sun is carrying Earth and every planet around the center of the Milky Way at 230 km/s (828,000 km/h), more than 18,000 kilometers every 80 seconds. ​Because the Solar System is tilted 60.2° to the galactic plane and bobs up and down through the galactic disc roughly every 30 million years, the planets trace open 3D corkscrew helices across deep space rather than flat loops. ​The last time the Sun stood where it stands today, one Galactic Year (230 million years) ago, the very first dinosaurs were only beginning to appear on Earth. Since forming 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun has completed only 20 laps.

this guy figured out how to leak your exact location from any video with sound using the Doppler curves of nearby airplanes

My oil painting of grilled cheese and tomato soup

97-Year-Old Sues 'Toy Story' Star Over 58% Gold Markups As Bankrupt Dealer Owes Customers $49 Million zerohedge.com/precious-metal…

Peter Thiel on who will lose their jobs: "you will all lose your jobs"

This is unforgivable. When you're Bruce Springsteen endorsing some candidate, you say he or she "was born to run"!

But what does Billy Joel say?

When slowing down makes you faster...(& smoother...) ADB (Autonomous Decentralized Bearing) is a patented technology developed by Sosuke Kawashima (Coo Space Co., Ltd.) By introducing a small indent into the outer race of a deep groove ball bearing, the balls become self distributing & non-contacting without the need of a cage. Translation: the balls don't bump into one another so no cage is required, which then means sliding friction is virtually eliminated, energy consumption is reduced by over 90%, and no lubrication is necessary. That precise indentation I mentioned slightly decelerates and then accelerates each ball back to full speed as it passes over it. A small gap is thus created between the balls due to this change in speed. Any incidental contact between the balls acts as a restorative force, effectively transferring momentum between them and ensuring uniform spacing naturally. Pretty cool stuff (and so very simple) in other words. This technology is currently touted as being applied in deep sea & competition skate/bike/wheelchair cases, but seems like a prime candidate for any super low friction, demanding environment, and/or long life applications. (All original video footage from Sosuke Kawashima on yt)

By Tuesday, almost anything Claude helps you write will carry an invisible stamp, down to the wedding toast and the cover letter. Police departments and schools can apply for the scanner that reads it, but if you're the one paying Anthropic $20 a month, you're not allowed to run it on your own writing. The stamp is hidden in which words Claude picks. Every time it chooses a word, it leans a tiny bit toward certain options based on a secret key, and over enough words that adds up to a pattern a scanner can spot. It survives copy and paste. Anthropic says it can survive some editing too. It also doesn't care how much of the writing was yours. Anthropic's own help page says a hit means Claude touched the text, so a cover letter you wrote at midnight and asked Claude to tighten up can get flagged right alongside one it wrote from scratch. Anthropic even admits a positive result isn't fully conclusive. So you can be judged by a test you're not allowed to take, using a scanner its own maker says can be wrong. What gets me is that no law made them do this here. The EU's AI Act requires the stamp inside Europe and stops at the border. A freelancer in Ohio or a college kid in Texas is nowhere near it. OpenAI read the exact same law and only stamps ChatGPT for users in the EU, and everyone else stays unmarked unless a developer turns it on. OpenAI also knows exactly what this costs. Back in 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI had a watermark that caught 99.9% of ChatGPT text and kept it on the shelf anyway. An internal survey found nearly 30% of users would use ChatGPT less if it had a watermark and a competitor didn't, and 69% thought detectors would get people falsely accused. Anthropic looked at those numbers and signed up to be the competitor with the watermark, worldwide, in places where no law asked for it. The standard excuse is that a public scanner would teach people how to scrub the stamp. I get that, and it's a fair reason to keep it away from random strangers on the internet. Nobody's asking for that. Let a paying customer check their own text from inside their own account, a few times a day. If a school can run your kid's essay through it, your kid should get to see the result first.

About a year ago, my 2022 @Tesla Model Y inexplicably died in the middle of a Tesla software update. I didn't know what the issue was, so I assumed the battery died because of something I had done to the vehicle. That kicked off a wide range of troubleshooting, from popping the frunk to trying different methods to charge the low-voltage battery, none of which were successful. I even purchased a separate low-voltage battery from Tesla about three months ago, which was when I first learned that the vehicle actually went unresponsive because of a failed software update pushed by Tesla. To get my @Tesla Model Y repaired at my local service center, I had to talk down multiple Tesla service advisors, who told me that I would need to put the vehicle back to OEM condition for them to work on it at all. It turned out they hadn't even connected to it remotely because the low voltage battery was dead and they had done nothing to troubleshoot the actual issue. I know my vehicle isn't stock and that comes with different challenges, but I was frustrated at how little effort they put into actually troubleshooting the issue before they came back to tell me that I needed to put everything back to stock, with no specifics about any sensors or specific changes that caused the issue. All I needed them to do was to: 1. pop the frunk, 2. charge the low voltage battery with Tesla's proprietary battery charger, and 3. install the software update that failed in the first place Every other person I spoke with, it was like pulling teeth just trying to get them to move this forward for something that was caused by a failed Tesla software update. To get it fixed, it cost me over $1,500 ($1000 for the service visit, $150 tow, $400 replacement battery, numerous chargers, jump packs, etc). I'm glad they were able to get it fixed, but this should have been a very quick, simple fix and honestly something I would have expected them to cover because it was caused by a failed Tesla software update. I'm sharing this to encourage people to continue to modify their vehicles to make them work how they want them to work, to ask Tesla to improve the quality of their technicians understanding that the average car owner can't do this type of work, and finally to encourage Tesla to make it easier for DIY-minded owners to fix their own vehicles. In this case, there was no way for me to fix the issue because Tesla does not sell the charger for the low voltage lithium ion battery for the Model Y. cc @cjbarchet

Newly manufactured F.03 robots leaving BotQ and heading across campus