i80and

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I don't want to be a doomer, but I think the FBI is highly unlikely to do an honest good-faith investigation here.

If midterms go well, and the special elections last November suggest they may, then at least we may be able to blunt some of the harm.

But the underlying point that about 35% of Americans just fundamentally do not seem to value civilization is a problem that has to be worked around.

A decade ago I put this stance into my LinkedIn profile tag line, and was a little surprised how many engineers reached out to praise that decision.

I think it's rapidly, finally, entering the realm of political viability.

The author is right that AI video is being used to propagandize and rot minds at scale in a way sort of unthinkable a couple years ago. Short-form video content wasn't good for us beforehand, but any balance has been fully upturned.

(I think that's all intrinsic to genAI in a way the author doesn't want to confront, but there is a crisis)

If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues alone, they would not be burning those world-changing engineering solutions on flying taxis.

I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.

EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread started with, and no, they have not solved any of the relevant problems.

You're bandwidth-limited on a sparse serialized landing site map no matter what, and you need far higher distance margins that will eat up basically all of the dimensional advantages.

If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).

It's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head:

* Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles

* Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof

* Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones

* Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't

These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.

This sort of thing has been a devolving disaster since the Settings App was included in Windows 8 as a partial replacement for the Control Panel. I'm not sure the current state of things, but as of the last time I used Windows, the sets of functionality remained only partially overlapping between the two different tools.

There really isn't that much GNU on a modern Linux system, proportionately.

I use an Amex as my primary and preferred personal card, and legitimately can't remember any place in the US where it wasn't accepted.

In Europe it is pretty hit or miss though, unfortunately.

Just so we're clear, the voter base of over a year ago asked for this because they were actively lied to, and were foolish enough to believe said lies.

Current polling however says the current voter base is quite unhappy with how this is

I think I prefer that AI-generated websites not be presented by search engines, thanks

Very few people want to walk 5 miles for groceries. I'm lucky enough to be able to walk to my grocery store, and even being healthy and able, 1 mile each way is the most I want to do.

Bicycling would make 5 miles a cinch, however.

I feel really sad about this -- I was amazed as a child to learn that I was allowed to just... GO IN to buildings and lectures as long as I was quiet and respectful. I always took pride in my university's openness.

Then I took my boyfriend for a tour a couple years ago and found all the buildings had signs warning that access was only permitted with a University ID card. Nobody challenged us or kicked us out, but it was a sour demoralizing shock.

Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.

People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.

I've found Organic Maps to be better than any paid app for hiking (and I've tried a bunch) for what it's worth

This is... I'll go with "dystopian". If you're not sure you can properly explain an idea, you should think about it more deeply.

I mean, 8 was easily the most functional of the new trilogy, if a somewhat overly ambitious muddle, so that's a bad example.

There is a real problem with too many sequels and adaptations though.

Star Trek was basically the only reason for Paramount+ to exist.

Once they axed Prodigy and sold season 2 to Netflix (ironic, in retrospect), the writing was on the wall.

The AI Overviews are... extremely bad. For most of my queries, Google's AI Overview misrepresents its own citations, or almost as bad, confidently asserts a falsehood or half-truth based on results that don't actually contain an answer to my search query.

I had the same issue with Kagi, where I'd follow the citation and it would say the opposite of the summary.

A human can make sense of search results with a little time and effort, but current AI models don't seem to be able to.

I'm not aware of there being a single lick of evidence to suggest that kookery, but even if he was a Russian agent, he certainly accidentally provided Americans a laudable service.

I'm a pretty prolific gamer, but at the start of the year I finally kicked Windows to the curb.

It's been fine. Surprisingly few games I'm interested in to begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash into kernel space at will.

...a complaint that definitely has not been continuously espoused since the ancient world.

With apologies if you're being ironic.

Those 90s LaserJets were genuinely incredible, and aside from (understandably) dog-slow PostScript processing, I think they were a pinnacle of office printer engineering.

We had one keep on trucking for... geez, as far as I'm aware it's still out there.

I dunno, I'm not fully anti-LLM, but almost every interaction I have with an LLM-augmented system still at some point involves it confidently asserting plainly false things, and I don't think the parent is that far off base.

Maybe in the sense that a CueCat is interesting to us today.

The Coral TPUs are closer if anything to what's in Pixel phones. In particular they're limited to iirc 8-bit integer types, which puts them in a very different category of applications compared to the kind of TPUs being talked about here.

> on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.

I think this says far more about your specific forum bubbles than anything else, to be honest.

At worst I see a perception that libraries are for children.

I'd be willing to bet that's the only time the teacher had to deal with that specific skulduggery.

Is it actually worth it for a teacher to spend time red-teaming basic lesson equipment? I really think not unless the teacher has reason to believe her students are particularly mischievous.