condensedcrab

It's not so much whether someone has hit anyone - speeding laws exist for a good reason to protect other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. There's a good reason that school zones are 25 mph for survivability in the case of a car hitting a pedestrian (especially for small children).

There's certainly issues with speeding laws and enforcement, but at the end of the day the US is so car-centric that removing someone's license for dangerous driving can severely impact their ability to get to work, etc.

Contract terms can vary greatly depending on the situation and the company you’re working with.

Early/frequent payment terms are always good to have but you may not always have the leverage for it depending on where you’re at as a contractor.

Takes getting ripped off a times before insisting on better terms I guess. It’s like bombing your first job interview… you can prepare but it just needs to happen.

At long distances the small cross section of the drone requires tight focusing (expensive optics) or a high power, preferably pulsed laser (expensive laser) or both.

Not impossible but many times more expensive than the drone

It's interesting progression from Gas Town, but it seems like the bottleneck is still translating ideas into actionable input/output frameworks for various agentic tasks.

Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.

The level of price discrimination enabled by the many middlemen of the US insurance system is insane any and all standards.

If our groceries and cars were priced the same people would be protesting in the streets… the author notes how much the drug manufacturers and the pharmacy groups make, but there’s also all of the costs from the intentional inefficiencies of the system that drive up costs for consumers.

But apologists would say that putting the data centers in LEO would mean that latency to a client via a ground station wouldn't be much more than ~50 ms extra. At least LATAM and Africa would be getting a good deal out of it with better coverage.

> SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!

I think Elon's taken one too many puffs of hopium

That seems to be the preferred path for many devs on Windows - unless you can get your hands on a Mac at work WSL is much better/easier. Most non-software companies may not even offer a Linux laptop.

Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running Linux don't stay on Ubuntu, etc.

I’d try applying to in office roles too - I suspect that most places have a soft hiring freeze regardless of work status.

At least, that way you know it’s not the remote work portion that’s keeping you from a job.

I’m in the US and everyone I’ve talked to who wants to move have been discussing the challenges of getting a foot in the door anywhere.

Airlines should recognize that middle seats are the lowest tier of service and adjust expectations accordingly.

Not to mention on long haul!

I think that the author has a point that LLMs need to make sense (and money) in the context of products.

Google’s Gemini integration from a consumer standpoint seems to be doing it right, even though Gemini on the developer side could mean many things.

We’ve probably been on the cusp of the transition from the exponential exuberance on LLM hype towards building products that make money. Still going up, but the hype is slowing.

Even small divergence angles add up if they’re trying to intercept at visual ranges outside of traditional munitions.

That being said, probably ~10kW/m^2 is enough to overheat or disable a UAV

That’s true. It’s more of a policy issue that’s like carbon credits… nice on paper but a big nothing burger. Look at F1 and Porsche talking about sustainable synthetic fuels.

When you compare round trip efficiencies and economics it makes sense to just not burn the hydrocarbons to begin with.

The density required for solar is also much lower - the coordination between different land parcels and routing power and getting easements increases the time required vs. on prem gas turbines.

Gas plants are not bad… but imagine 400 MW of gas plants in a concentrated area. You’ll always have NOx and SOx by products whenever you’re burning gas.

Direct air capture imo can’t escape the scaling problem - when the feedstock has CO2 at ~400 ppm the economics simply won’t work out despite various oil companies backing one off systems around the globe.

Capturing CO2 at the source (power plant, etc) would be simpler to reach economic viability but without incentives it’s dead on arrival. I believe the IRA infra bill had put a price ~$50/ton of CO2 captured.

From Rafael’s site: https://www.rafael.co.il/system/iron-beam/

100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy.

The pricing anchor concept is very intuitive and once you hear about it it’s hard to stop seeing at play.

Sure. To be fair, having gone down the path of porting and testing a problem to numba, it might be easier to just jump to Julia if you want to focus on the problem more than the implementation.

More so that the 1% have fewer loopholes, not the other way around.

Regular folks filing taxes don’t have particularly difficult returns, but if the government already knows what you owe/get back, why waste everyone’s time? Obviously deductions exist for a reason, but standard deduction folks shouldn’t have to file to confirm that their number matches what the IRS already calculated.

I mostly work with arrays in numpy but sometimes I get stuck with a problem that needs a for loop - only two things I can think of are parallelize the for loop or use numba/jax JIT functions and GPU acceleration.

Both don’t just work out of the box like Julia or MATLAB’s “parfor” loop, but seem to work well enough for non trivial for loop cases.

Tax avoidance for most W2 workers is basically impossible without committing blatant fraud.

Tax avoidance for the 1% has many more loopholes to exploit (depreciation, etc).

Simplify the tax code!

LLM “personas” seem somewhat useful for tuning output based on need, I.e. senior SWE doing code review on an established codebase vs. vibe coding proof concept demos, but you’re still right… you’ve only narrowed down the set of stochastic outcomes, not collapsed the output to a true senior SWE

I think that’s where a range extended EV makes plenty of sense, and why I don’t think it needs to be a blanket ban on ICE for pure EV only.

Rather disappointing as an environmentalist. But the established freedoms of the car culture and price sensitivity in NA (probably parts of Europe, idk) hard to overcome — “what if I want to road trip though!”

That being said, I think Ford’s shift to a range extended EV makes sense for the truck space. I’m sure someone has crunched the numbers on emissions but getting more market share on hybrid/plugin/range extended EVs are definitely better then ICE only. Plenty of manufacturers are offering hybrids- however, the government has historically been too heavily lobbied to push for hybrids by default and reduce ICE only uptake with some kind of sin tax.

Not to mention many companies speedrunning systems of strange and/or perverse incentives with AI adoption.

That being said, Welch’s grape juice hasn’t put Napa valley out of business. Human taste is still the subjective filter that LLMs can only imitate, not replace.

I view LLM assisted coding (on the sliding scale from vibe coding to fancy auto complete) similar to how Ableton and other DAW software have empowered good musicians that might not have made it otherwise due to lack of connections or money, but the music industry hasn’t collapsed completely.

It may just be me, but it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones.

That being said, I’ve enjoyed wearing my analog watch the last few years to tell time instead of having to pull out my phone all the time. Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way…

To be fair, the one thing Musk has going for him is bringing funding to opportunities and making the most of it.

I wouldn't say that Musk is the only person who could have brought SpaceX and Tesla to where there are now, and certainly there are many individuals who contributed heavily to get them there. That being said, not many people have the money and interest to do it.

Nobel prizes in Physics and Chemistry tend to be awarded long after discovery. It's part of the process in evaluating the impact of a specific discovery.

That being said, you get stuff like high Tc superconductors that are awarded the following year: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1987/press-release...