So, for anyone else who became curious after this exchange:
I tried to look up how many there actually are. It's hard to give a single number, since there are many different ways to count them, but vaguely speaking it's in the range of dozens to a few hundred. GPS specifically has had 83 satellites built, of which 31 are currently operational, but most of the others still exist, they're just parked in a higher orbit for retirement. There's also GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, and IRNSS/Navic. QZSS and IRNSS don't have as many satellites, and the rest are kinda roughly similar in number (e.g. GLONASS has had 146 built and 24 currently operational).
So yeah. Nowhere near hundreds of thousands. Even Starlink, which now comprises more than half of the total satellites of any kind in orbit, has only about 10,000.
I live 3300 km away from Texas. That's almost half again as far as Kyiv is from Paris. It's not trivial to just pop down there for a march some weekend.
I didn't take apart a phone to get it, but I managed to buy a rotary dial mechanism from a surplus store near where I grew up when I was a teen (maybe thirty years ago?). I think I've still got it in a drawer. It's honestly a very clever design, and the sound is kind of weirdly soothing.
That's still about 1000x less raw CPU performance than the cheapest smartphone on the market, though.
(E.g. a Blu View 5 Pro, which is the cheapest Tracfone is listing as in stock, for $30. Its Helio G36 uses 4 Cortex A53 cores at 2200MHz and 4 at 1800 MHz, and between 1-2 instructions per clock, giving between 16000-32000 million instructions per second. The IBM ran at 16.6 million instructions per second, per that Wikipedia link.)
(Looking at Walmart turned up a TCL K33 5G for only $20, but it uses a Dimensity 6300 cpu which is actually a little more powerful.)
It's so disturbing. I actually saw part of an episode of it at the time, and I watched, thinking, "they can't actually mean that, right?" But it seriously is just footage of these people being tortured, with some vaguely sci-fi looking sets. I have no idea how this got approved, and every so often I'm reminded of it, and I think, "god, was that real?" I'm glad that Mother Jones article exists, because otherwise I think people would never believe it.
And indeed figuring out what problem you're actually supposed to solve. People assume they can just give an LLM the same spec they'd give a programmer, and that doesn't work, because the programmer will figure out all the hidden shit they omitted from the spec but which is actually absolutely critical to its function. They'll also anticipate future refinements of specs and how to leave room to accommodate those changes. Etc.
I really feel like the author of this piece got this strawman in their head and didn't bother looking into how people saying these things are actually using them, because most of the people I hear saying them are themselves programmers, and they're not trying to say "my job is trivial." They're saying "the thing the LLM does fast is not my whole job. it leaves out all the important stuff."
Yeah! Same kind of thing. My sister's kid would do it also for fairly minor things that had just become frustrating, like if they couldn't get a container open, or the clothes wouldn't fit on the Calico Critter, etc. They'd try, but then as they got frustrated, before they reached the point of actually crying about it, they would bring it over and present it to Dada and say "oh no wha happen!" And he knew he should give them his full attention as if they'd started crying, and comfort them in addition to solving the direct problem. It wasn't grammatically sophisticated, but it was very effective communication.
The documentary Century of the Self is also educational if you want an overview of Bernays' life and crimes against humanity. (Adam Curtis is such a good filmmaker.)
I'd like to point out that children do, in fact, get confused in this way.
When my sister's child (who now uses they/them pronouns) was quite young (maybe three years old? I'm not certain), when something upset them, they would say "oh no wha happen?" because they knew that when their parents responded with concern after they scraped a knee or something, they would always respond with "Oh no! What happened?" So even though the new situation didn't rise to the level of provoking crying or whatever, because they wanted that same level of attention and concern, they just directly asked for that response. It was pretty cute.
Similarly, when they wanted something to happen, they would ask it as a question: "want to make those guys talk?" (which meant "please make believe with me and provide voices for some of these stuffed animals"). Or "want to just bring the bowl down?" (which meant "I'm not sure which candy I would like! please bring the candy dish down so I can pick them by looking at them [and maybe take more than one]"). So they were definitely imitating things their parents said before understanding the full grammar of the situations involved.
If you haven't seen it, look up the German sci-fi comedy show Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot. There's a fan translation of the first season and official English subtitles for the second season. It's got a really good off-the-wall energy, and I don't think it's well enough known outside Germany.
It kind of reminds me of a thing from the Apple IIe. If you were running a program on that machine and it crashed, it would often crash into this built-in micro debugger mode that gave you a * prompt. The normal boot-up ] prompt accepted BASIC and PRODOS commands, but the * prompt was for working with the Apple microassembler, and it was NOT user-friendly to the average young geek. So I learned exactly one command, which was 3D0G. My understanding was that this was an unconditional jump command to the place that PRODOS was normally loaded into memory at boot, so if the program hadn't overwritten that, it would get you back to the ] prompt. (Otherwise you had to turn the computer off and on again so it would reload from ROM, which wasn't a huge problem anyway, but this was a bit faster.) But I'm not actually sure exactly what it did. Anyway, it was memorable enough (since the zero looked close to an O that I could remember it as "three dogs") that I held on to it. Not actually important, just, y'know, kinda fun.
I mean, I don't have the encyclopedia anymore, so I guess I can't really prove it to you. But it was sort of my introduction to the idea that not everything in an encyclopedia is necessarily true, so it's pretty memorable for me. I recognize the irony of using another encyclopedia here, but Wikipedia mentions in the History section of its Pain in Animals article, "Researchers remained unsure into the 1980s as to whether animals experience pain." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_animals#History ) I obviously don't know the story about how the line ended up in World Book, but I know they employ fact checkers for every line in the book, so presumably in the 50's the line reflected some kind of scientific consensus, as bizarre as that sounds now.
When I was a kid in the 80's, my sister and I found an old World Book Encyclopedia from the 50's that someone in our neighborhood was throwing out, so we brought it home. It had some interesting "facts" in it. E.g., did you know that guinea pigs are perfect as subjects for scientific research because they're unable to feel pain? 1950's worldbook did!
Really thought you were going to say leitmotif.