00N8

That's a nasty crash, but I feel like having one wing stall & the plane roll past 90° from below 500 ft AGL would be equally traumatic whether or not you could see the cockpit view.

> the in-flight entertainment system, which featured a live view of the aircraft from a tail-mounted camera. The digital stream clearly showed a much more literal stream of fuel pouring from the left wing and into the aircraft’s wake, which was also visible with the naked eye from the lower deck. Johnson proceeded down to check for himself, at which point he also observed for the first time that there were two gaping holes in the top of the left wing, surrounded by jagged metal, where the turbine disk fragments had exited.

> According to Check Captain David Evans, the cabin crew were concerned that so many passengers were watching the live feed from the tail camera, but in a collective decision, the pilots elected not to turn it off because, in their view, the feed suddenly cutting out would probably be more alarming than anything that could be seen on it.

I appreciate this part. If I were ever in a similar situation, I'd want to be able to see what's going on. Suddenly cutting the feed would send me straight into a panic.

I don't think it's any slower than the dust explosions that occasionally happen in factories or grain silos. Although those do appear more violent due to the scale & damage.

100 or 200 km tall at point of release ought to do it.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks is largely about WWI, including trench warfare. And it's an excellent book, very moving & vivid.

WTF. What's the best option for an actual free operating system these days? I should be able to tell each app any birthday I want.

Not really - for either system, the transformer substations are the part that's vulnerable to drones. Any munition capable of breaching the outer containment structure of a nuclear power plant (let alone impacting the core, dozens to hundreds of meters further inside) is closer to a bunker buster than a drone.

What I'd really like to see though is heavy subsidies for synthetic e-fuel plants running a carbon negative process during off peak hours. That would work with both solar & nuclear.

IME yes, it absolutely can be. I am approaching middle age & still comfortably enjoy pushing myself in physical activities where falls are likely, with zero significant injuries aside from a couple sprained ankles from playing basketball (& technically the ankle rolling came before the fall in these couple mishaps; letting my body roll/fall out of it just helped reduce the severity). Also it's more about technique & familiarity/reflex training than safety gear, although I do wear a Zamst ankle brace on my weak ankle whenever I play basketball & started wearing a helmet for snowboarding a few years ago. Jackie Chan & Buster Keaton were even better at this, although they pushed it a lot farther & did sustain major injuries in their stunt careers.

However, there's a big caveat: I've been practicing falling safely since a young age & really mastered it in my teenage years practicing martial arts & snowboarding. I'm sure it's much harder & more dangerous to learn if you first start in middle age, although I'd imagine it's still possible with the right training & appropriate caution.

Speaking of earlier concepts of The Matrix, there's an old 1973 German movie/mini series World on a Wire that's really good.

I didn't propose any of those things you mentioned & am strongly opposed to them. If I were proposing anything, it would be more along the lines of ending theocracies, increasing equality, access to education, birth control & abortion services, & creating a social safety net so people don't have to rely on having as many kids as possible to assist in subsistence farming. But like I said, none of this is a popular goal - especially not among billionaires or the global south - so my comment was more of an idle musing than anything resembling a proposal.

It would be a lot easier if the global population stabilized at around 1 billion. It's conceivable we could get down to that by bringing 3rd world areas up to 1st world standards in terms of women's rights, access to birth control, education, standard of living, etc., since developed nations have had declining birth rates for quite a while. But it's not a cheap or popular idea & would take several generations anyway.

Good point. I've always found high humidity makes things a lot more unpleasant unless the temperature is in a fairly narrow range around 71°F or so. It intensifies the heat of course, but IME it also makes chilly weather a lot harsher too. I get uncomfortably cold really easily when it's e.g. 51°F with a cool damp ocean breeze in places like SF or Monterey, but when I go to the mountains in winter, 25-32°F is totally comfortable -- even in literally the same clothing. I think it must be partly a psychological effect, but humidity seems to play a role too (along with other factors like IR reflection off the snow).

Could it be that the handful of people with computer access were well connected & well regarded, & the people running the radio broadcasts wanted to cater to them especially? I'd imagine there could be some sense of personal & national pride & prestige around supporting these emerging technologies & promoting them to the public. (I'm just guessing though - I wasn't there & haven't studied the topic in depth.)

There was a similar situation last summer over a prediction market on whether Iran's Fordow nuclear facility would be destroyed by a certain date. That one was resolved as "yes it got destroyed" after the air strike on the facility. A lot of people on the other side of that bet were complaining because it seemed like an arbitrary guess: All we can really tell from publicly available info is that it was hit. The actual effect may have been anywhere from superficial light damage to comprehensive destruction, with no way to be sure without access to the underground facility.

I didn't bet on that one, but I'd seen something about it on Twitter & gotten curious how they could come to a firm conclusion one way or the other. AFAICT the market didn't have a solid way to be sure & were just taking a White House press briefing that said it was probably destroyed at face value.

I'll never buy a car manufactured after about 2014 for this reason. I'm planning to just keep getting repairs & upgrades done on my model year 2006 for at least the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps I will want to switch to electric, but I'll do it by electrifying something older.

Cars from around 1998-2014 usually have side curtain airbags & adequate rollover durability. The only improvements since then that I'd even want at all are better EV batteries & marginal efficiency gains for IC engines, but those can be retrofitted &/or aren't worth the anti features they also added IMO.

If car companies want my business they'll have to remove the telemetry & automatic updates.

I don't care if I end up paying more to drive an old car eventually, but this approach has also been saving me money so far.

> An AI may not produce information that harms a human being, nor through its outputs enable, facilitate, or encourage harm to come to a human being.

This part is completely intractable. I don't believe universally harmful or helpful information can even exist. It's always going to depend on the recipient's intentions & subsequent choices, which cannot be known in full & in advance, even in principle.

They wanted to keep accurate global positioning as a US military exclusive capability. It's definitely useful for guided munitions, & alternative satellite positioning systems didn't exist or were less mature at the time, so US GPS was the only system one could realistically use for that. A missile able to hit a target within a 3 meter radius is vastly more effective than one that can only hit within 100m, for instance.

There are still some restrictions around this sort of thing: IIRC a GPS receiver for sale to the public isn't allowed to give accurate data if it's too high up &/or moving too fast, to prevent unauthorized usage in ICBMs & other similar weapons. I think there would be a lot of red tape involved if you wanted to buy an unrestricted GPS device without this limitation.

0°F to 100°F spans the full range of temperatures I'd go out in & not consider it "extreme weather", so it's rather intuitive in that you can think of it as "how hot is it on a scale of 0-100". It feels very human centric & convenient for everyday usage IMO.

I see two main types of 'AI safety': (a) Safety for the business providing the model. This includes a censorship layer, system promoting, & other means of preventing the AI from giving offensive/controversial/illegal output. A lot of effort goes into this & it's somewhat effective, although it's often useless or unhelpful to end users & doesn't address big-picture concerns. (b) The science fiction idea of a means to control a hypothetical AI with unbounded powers, to make sure it only uses those powers "for good". This type of safety is still speculative fiction & often assumes the AI will have agency & motivations, as well as abilities, that we see no evidence of at present. This would address big-picture concerns, but it's not a real thing, at least not yet.

It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible.

There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.

It sounds like a fun & challenging record. Falling off a scooter at 110 mph would certainly shake you up, but it'd probably be a little safer than moto gp if you used similar safety gear. I wonder how it feels at high speed though - I've never ridden one anywhere near that fast, but the scooters I've ridden didn't feel like they'd be very stable at high speeds.

When I'm snowboarding on an overcast day, it can sometimes be hard to see the exact shape & conditions of the snow ahead so I have to slow down to make sure I don't catch an edge on a 'hidden' mogul. I'd like an AR system that used LIDAR/FLIR/etc. to augment my vision to see these features better.

I'm also bad at learning & remembering a lot of people's names at once in social settings, so I'd like a discrete pair of AR glasses that used a local model to add virtual nametags to people in certain situations. (Assuming I controlled the data - I wouldn't like it if this meant data about my acquaintances would be sold behind my back).

So there's at least two potential AR applications I'd be interested in, assuming they could be made to work in a trustworthy & reliable manner for under $1k.

In terms of microplastics, I would think 100 of the old flimsy single use bags would be much worse than 5 reusable plastic bags, even if the total mass is the same. The heavier reusables have less surface area per mass, so they'll be degraded more slowly by the sun. They also are less easily blown by the wind, so it's more likely someone will dispose of them properly or that they'll naturally end up buried somewhere that does a better job of containing the eventual microplastics. Fewer bags in total would probably be better for sea turtles than thinner bags as well.

I'm not sure if that makes the reusables better overall, but I don't think we can say they're 10-100x worse based on weight alone.

Are you sure about that? AFAIK effective laser drone defenses are not yet widely deployed proven technology, but I don't think small beam size is a limiting factor. Getting enough power onto the target to disable it is a big challenge, but part of that is fighting the natural tendency of the beam to spread out & be attenuated by the atmosphere - not that the beam affects too small of a spot on the drone.

Having a laser that spreads out to e.g. 30cm radius at 500m is not hard to do if you need an area of effect weapon & can push enough power (ie. your laser is powerful enough, but not so intense that it ionizes the air & blocks itself). Reflections seem like a bigger problem: If the most effective defense includes guys with shotguns &/or there are a lot of unprotected personnel in the area, how do you make sure stray reflections don't end up blinding them?

I often see pop sci articles saying something like '400 dB would represent a sound strong enough to tear the world apart', or 'military sonar is X dB -- strong enough to liquefy your organs at Y distance'. It's rarely clear to me which of these usages of 'dB' are directly comparable. I think the dB measurement for sonar is a different scale/unit than the one for hearing damage thresholds in air, but I couldn't figure out how to convert between the two last time I spent a few minutes trying to look it up, so in my opinion it can be fairly confusing.

I worked for a 3rd party food delivery service in the summer of 2007. Ordering was generally done by phone, then the office would text us (the drivers) order details for pickup & delivery. They provided GPS navigation devices, but they were stand-alone units that were slower & less accurate than modern ones, plus they charged a small fee for using it that came out of our pay.

Some cars like the Mini Cooper S do lift a rear wheel when turning sharply under braking -- I've seen this a lot in autocross racing. I normally only see front engine/FWD cars with limited suspension travel do it though. Trikes are less stable & will lift a wheel more easily overall.

The Wikipedia article says it's "self sharpening" on impact. I think this involves the projectile's leading parts ablating away into burning pyrophoric dust as they interact with the target.

The future is now: Check out Lightning On Demand, https://lod.org/ (Tesla tower approach & scientific motivations) & https://youtu.be/lix-vr_AF38?si=w78LyF9tlxGJB8Ay (capacitor driven Lorentz plasma cannon demo)

I found this bit at the start surprising: "Lightning is one of the leading causes of climate-related deaths worldwide. In recent decades, there has been a considerable increase in lightning due to worsening global warming [1], [2]."

Increased lightning makes sense, but I'd still have expected most climate-related deaths to be caused by flooding, heat waves, disease & crop failures, with lightning being a much smaller factor. Do they just mean it's in the top 5 or 10 climate-driven causes, or is lightning really killing people on the same (or greater) scale as these other things?

You'd get better energy density that way, but I think it's offset by worse efficiency & more damage to the engine. The inert gas fraction (N2, CO2, H2O) provides a useful working fluid to convert combustion heat to force pushing on the piston. Burning pure O2 would mean a lot more heat is needed for the same amount of force. Higher peak temperatures & more available oxygen will tend to create hotspots & knock/pre-detonation, & possibly erosion of the cylinder wall & piston from directly burning the metal.

Using nitrous or cool compressed air keeps most of the benefits while mitigating the problems of using pure O2.