Decompiling binary blobs is a strong suit for LLM AI, right? Maybe progress on this will be faster than I expect? Does the FSF spend money on non-free AI services? That is, do they have ethical issues with that? Or do they only use AGPL licensed services (or similar)?
If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other.
Couldn't you make most of these arguments about the early days of most medical interventions? You don't need an x-ray to determine that patient A has a broken arm; it hurts when you twist it in this manner. Anyway, this seems like a way for rich people to subsidize up and coming technology for the rest of us. Maybe in ten years it will be meh and we can ignore it. Or maybe it will become cheap enough that everyone gets it with a yearly checkup. And maybe in 20 years some Star-Trek like body scanner will be in almost every gym in the country. And the hypochondriacs can get a scan every day.
The current Chevrolet Silverado EV has a 200 kWh battery option. Even with towing reducing the range to say 200 miles, you could do a lot of pickupy things with that.
That's pretty much standard operating procedure for any EV. That's one of the perks of owning an EV. Plug it in when you get home from work, and have a full "tank" every morning. Plus you get the cabin preheating using the wall electricity.
Aren't there plenty of countries which aren't exactly super-stable anyway? Might not take much to have select countries pushed over the edge. Especially if you have territorial disputes with neighboring countries looking to take advantage. For the U.S., what if Social Security payments suddenly stopped for 6 months? What if the U.S. lost records of Treasury Bills, and they couldn't be redeemed for a while? What if electricity went out for 30% of the population for three months? I would think it pretty cold comfort that the government didn't topple, because the next election results were a mix of democrats and republicans.