Thoughts from Eric Drexler.
Category Archives: Mathematics
Tom Lehrer
Remembering “my mischievous friend.”
My parents had the “An Evening Wasted With…” album.
The Climate Movement
The bad science and bad policy at the heart of it.
[Afternoon update]
Climate science is baaaaack.
This is one of the biggest (and most needed) regulatory rollbacks in history.
More from Ed Morrissey and Stephen Green.
The Global Baby Bust
Three long-shot ways of solving it. One of them is space.
The Climate Apocalypse
…punctured. A new paper from Judith Curry.
Bringing Ancients To Life
Stunning sculptures when they are given life by AI pic.twitter.com/P0LoJVFKip
— Rose (@simple2work) March 15, 2025
Crew Or Automated
An interesting thread:
Will the flight crew get to “drive” Starship HLS during terminal landing on the Moon, or will landing be fully automated? The idea of a pilot landing something so tall and massive by hand on rough terrain seems a little… difficult? But if there’s no crew in the loop, how will… pic.twitter.com/338ApLPcLx
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) March 14, 2025
Linux Update Problem
When I ‘dnf -y update’ it downloads all the packages, but at the end crashes with this error message:
Importing OpenPGP key 0x7FAC5991:
UserID : “Google, Inc. Linux Package Signing Key linux-packages-keymaster@google.com“
Fingerprint: 4CCA1EAF950CEE4AB83976DCA040830F7FAC5991
From : https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
The key was successfully imported.
Importing OpenPGP key 0xD38B4796:
UserID : “Google Inc. (Linux Packages Signing Authority) linux-packages-keymaster@google.com“
Fingerprint: EB4C1BFD4F042F6DDDCCEC917721F63BD38B4796
From : https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
The key was successfully imported.
Transaction failed: Signature verification failed.
OpenPGP check for package “google-chrome-stable-134.0.6998.35-1.x86_64” (/var/cache/libdnf5/google-chrome-6ed7e4f336f6863c/packages/google-chrome-stable-134.0.6998.35-1.x86_64.rpm) from repo “google-chrome” has failed: Import of the key didn’t help, wrong key?
Any idea how to tell it to ignore this and just do the other updates? I don’t see any obvious options on “dnf update.”
Thanks for the advice in comments. Unfortunately, I can’t deal with it until I get back from a trip on Friday.
[Friday update]
The problem seems to have resolved itself while I was gone. I updated last night with no issues.
Cameras Versus Lidar/Radar
Why Elon dropped lidar for FSD.
The reason why Tesla FSD performs better with just computer vision than systems that have LIDAR and radar is a bit counter intuitive. Allow me to try to explain.
— Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) March 2, 2025
In the early days of self-driving, people thought if you built a really accurate model of what’s happening around the… pic.twitter.com/EY8nNa55fj
The AI Companies
What are they really up to?