Now there’s another shower thought.

What if one day airplanes just like…stopped working…

Spinning is better than not spinning.

And yet, without such people, these institutions will never change. If you want these institutions to be non-hateful, you have to get non-hateful people into them. We’re not going to get rid of Liberty University any time soon. And I would prefer to see it grow into a non-bigoted institution than to have it remain a bigoted institution indefinitely.

Sometimes you just have to work at places that are hostile to trans people, and you just have to hope they don’t find out you’re trans. If the only place that you can find a job in your field is at a Christian College, maybe you’ll accept the job and hope for the best. Potentially losing a job at some point in the future is better than not having a job today.

Full self driving should only be implemented when the system is good enough to completely take over all driving functions. It should only be available in vehicles without steering wheels. The Tesla solution of having “self driving” but relying on the copout of requiring constant user attention and feedback is ridiculous. Only when a system is truly capable of self-driving 100% autonomously, at a level statistically far better than a human, should any kind of self-driving be allowed on the road. Systems like Tesla’s FSD officially require you to always be ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. They know their system isn’t ready for independent use yet, so they require that manual input. But of course this encourages disengaged driving; no one actually pays attention to the road like they should, able to intervene at a moment’s notice. Tesla’s FSD imitates true self-driving, but it pawns off the liability do drivers by requiring them to pay attention at all times. This should be illegal. Beyond merely lane-assistance technology, no self-driving tech should be allowed except in vehicles without steering wheels. If your AI can’t truly perform better than a human, it’s better for humans to be the only ones actively driving the vehicle.

This also solves the civil liability problem. Tesla’s current system has a dubious liability structure designed to pawn liability off to the driver. But if there isn’t even a steering wheel in the car, then the liability must fall entirely on the vehicle manufacturer. They are after all 100% responsible for the algorithm that controls the vehicle, and you should ultimately have legal liability for the algorithms you create. Is your company not confident enough in its self-driving tech to assume full legal liability for the actions of your vehicles? No? Then your tech isn’t good enough yet. There can be a process for car companies to subcontract out the payment of legal claims against the company. They can hire State Farm or whoever to handle insurance claims against them. But ultimately, legal liability will fall on the company.

This also avoids criminal liability. If you only allow full self-driving in vehicles without steering wheels, there is zero doubt about who is control of the car. There isn’t a driver anymore, only passengers. Even if you’re a person sitting in the seat that would normally be a driver’s seat, it doesn’t matter. You are just a passenger legally. You can be as tired, distracted, drunk, or high as you like, you’re not getting any criminal liability for driving the vehicle. There is such a clear bright line - there is literally no steering wheel - that it is absolutely undeniable that you have zero control over the vehicle.

This actually would work under the same theory of existing drunk-driving law. People can get ticketed for drunk driving for sleeping in their cars. Even if the cops never see you driving, you can get charged for drunk driving if they find you in a position where you could drunk drive. So if you have your keys on you while sleeping drunk in a parked car, you can get charged with DD. But not having a steering wheel at all would be the equivalent of not having the keys to a vehicle - you are literally incapable of operating it. And if you are not capable of operating it, you cannot be criminally liable for any crime relating to its operation.

SpaceX has been paid extensively for services not rendered. The funds that are currently paying for their Starship development were ostensibly for a lunar lander. And they’re years behind schedule at this point. They haven’t even started on the lander itself.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

1. A set of securities fraud charges.

2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.

To me, it’s not even just about what it looks like. It’s what it represents. One cyber truck, if were unique, could be a legitimately cool work of art. But as a mass-market vehicle it’s just ridiculous.

Like, if there was only one cyber truck, and it was something a local gearhead had welded up in his garage, I would legitimately respect it as a cool and unique work of artistic expression. It would show that they have creativity and are willing to make a bold statement to the world.

But if you just buy one of thousands of cyber trucks that exist in the world? That no longer represents your original creative expression. That just represents having bad taste and having poor personal finance skills.

Building your own art car is cool. If Ford decides to start making them by the millions, then that would just be sad.

The cyber truck is the vehicle for the man who wears a fedora with a t-shirt.

Hezbollah clearly needs to seize a 20 km chunk of northern Israel to serve as a security buffer zone for the people of Lebanon.

So here’s the path that you’re envisioning:

1. Someone wants to send you a communication of some sort. They draft a series of bullet points or short version.

2. They have an LLM elaborate it into a long-form email or report.

3. They send the long-from to you.

4. You receive it and have an LLM summarize the long-form into a short-form.

5. You read the short form.

Do you realize how stupid this whole process is? The LLM in step (2) cannot create new useful information from nothing. It is simply elaborating on the bullet points or short version of whatever was fed to it. It’s extrapolating and elaborating, and it is doing so in a lossy manner. Then in step (4), you go through ANOTHER lossy process. The LLM in step (4) is summarizing things, and it might be removing some of the original real information the human created in step (1), rather than the useless fluff the LLM in step (2) added.

WHY NOT JUST HAVE THE PERSON DIRECTLY SEND YOU THE BULLET POINTS FROM STEP (1)???!!

This is idiocy. Pure and simply idiocy. We send start with a series of bullet points, and we end with a series of bullet points, and it’s translated through two separate lossy translation matrices. And we pointlessly burn huge amounts of electricity in the process.

This is fucking stupid. If no one is actually going to read the long-form communications, the long-form communications SHOULDN’T EXIST.

I too am disturbed by the noted decline in Austin Powers references among high school students.

It’s worse than that. The US is a net oil exporter. We make all the oil we need at home.

Additionally, you can point to the indiscriminate attacks on Oct 7th against nonmilitary targets to give evidence to their lack of distinguishment between Israeli people and the Israeli military.

The crucial fact that is always left out of this - by the Israeli military’s own admission, using their own numbers, the IDF and Hamas have the same collateral damage ratio. Hamas killed 2 civilians for every military member they killed on October 7th. This is the same civilian to military kill ratio that the IDF claims in their own numbers. Hamas is literally just as effective at avoiding civilian casualties as the IDF is.

That and more, and Bibbi himself said with biblical flair: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” Not out of context. The context was the “war” with Gaza.

I think it is high time that we acknowledged the elephant in the room.

“God’s chosen people” = “ubermensch”

“God’s promised land” = “lebensraum”

The reason is that Israel has been a steadfast ally in advancing and defending us interests for half a century

Tell that to the crew of the USS Liberty.

It’s a sense of guilt about the Holocaust and a complete failure to realize that nations are as individuals. A victim can become a victimizer; an abused can become an abuser.

Letting cars into cities was a mistake from the beginning. Cars should be required to park on parking lots or garages at the edge of the city. The only large motorized vehicles allowed within cities should be trains, buses driven by professional drivers, and delivery vehicles limited by governors to the speed of a bicycle. The only forms of motorized personal transit allowed should be e-bikes and scooters that can travel no faster than a human-powered bicycle is capable of traveling. Cars should be used only for getting between towns and cities, not for traveling within them.