To someone who grew up under an authoritarian regime, using your skill to outsmart a government or a big corporation is an ultimate high. There are a number of contradictions, like if you grew up under socialism you may not have much genuine respect for private property, especially less intuitive intellectual property, and at the same time learning about all the abuses and corruption of USSR makes you despise any super powerful entities.

Of course, someone working for Putin and targeting a children's hospital today can hardly claim to be standing up to power. I think the best examples of anti-authoritarian tradition are revelations of Snowden or say someone hacking DRM to help people control devices they own fair and square. These folks get a pass in my book, and they are not doing these things to enrich themselves. But, it appears that such tradition has largely died out in Russia itself. Someone exposing Putin and his cronies would be super cool though.

Sure radioactive stuff can be bad for your health, but so can non-radioactive stuff. California is full of sites contaminated with arsenic and mercury from gold rush era and who knows what from manufacturing plants. There are many does and don't about eating locally caught fish - what kind, how much, which parts, not when pregnant and so on. On the other hand, the issue is always concentration - topsoil in Chernobyl, a lake in California. When same things are diluted in enormous 3d volume of ocean, it doesn't really matter. Not to say that we should strive to have a lot of nuclear accidents, but we should be more uniformly concerned about oil spills, radiation from burning coal and so on. I have a feeling that building a reactor on top of a deepwater oil rig could be safer than actually pumping oil, because if there is a meltdown it will just sink to the bottom and have abundant cooling.

...against tech? I would take it as a proof that they need to go find new job. Sure, AI is at its infancy and will simply summarize and paraphrase other content rather than offering unique insights. But the job of tech enthusiasts is to push boundaries, and strive to make it more like Lt Cmdr Data. Back in the day, growing up in USSR, a popular science magazine featured games that you could hand type into a programmable RPN calculator. Obviously a very limited platform, but introduced entire generation to programming. I expect today's tech magazines to experiment with AI, VR, AR, quantum computing and other cutting edge stuff and gradually push it into mainstream.

You made a specific claim that I have not given $100 to homeless over my entire life. Since it is false and you pulled it out of your behind in the first place, you have no business criticizing people who assume that $5 they give to someone who claims to be a homeless army vet will just be spent on crack. Also, it's clearly useless to debate more nuanced and abstract concepts with you while you are busy stereotyping people based on a few paragraphs they wrote on a social media site. If you are interested in personal development, ponder if care has to include 24/7 free WiFi, or if can and even should have limits and responsibilities.

If your kid sees a homeless person and is understandably upset at seeing what happens when the world writes off human life as unsalvagable junk, consider it a teachable moment.

Again, if you had kids, you would know age and circumstances for teachable moments. You do not comfort a two your old with a CRT lecture and you do not ignore the practical danger of a deranged man with a knife for the sake of their future enlightenment. What you do is resolve to not take your family to such a hellhole again and vote to make sure your town does not become like SF.

Now, teenagers can volunteer at homeless shelters, under direction and protection of trained stuff. That's the right circumstances to learn compassion and importance of doing something about the problem rather than just looking the other way.

Since you are making random and false assumptions about me without knowing anything about my life, I don't see why I should pay attention to anything you say. Also I don't see what is your moral authority to lecture people who assume that all homeless are just bums who want to keep using drugs while being unwilling to do any work? You are making up things about strangers just as they do.

Do you have young kids? How would you feel if a child started crying because they saw a guy walking around with a drawn knife and muttering to himself? Do you think children should be seeing public urination, defecation and drug use on the street? With all the drug use and desperation going on, is it safe for a child or a vulnerable adult to walk outside at night? That's how some of us experience your favorite city.

As for help, sure, but first there is little I can do personally that would make a durable difference. Even if I give someone $100 and they use it wisely, this will not get them off the street for more than one night. Help needs an organization with resources and training, to which I am willing to donate or pay taxes or whatever. Second, helping often does mean gone from the street and probably gone from San Francisco. Say someone gets help with mental illness, and substance use issues, and job training. The realistic goal is then a job in a place with low cost of living that pays for a little apartment with a roommate. If this is impossible and we are going to be caring for an adult with permanent disability, again we have to be cost conscious so that can help more people.

You seem to be intimately familiar with feeling intense hate and may be projecting it on others who don't hate anyone and are simply trying to take care of themselves and their families, which includes having clean and safe streets.

OF COURSE recycling can work. It may involve use of different plastics that are friendly to recycling or biodegradable. It may involve different container design optimized for reuse/recycling rather than disposal. It may involve use of other materials such as glass, metal, wood or paper as makes sense.

But it should not involve shaming individuals for using simple modern conveniences or often not even having other choices to get needed goods. It's bad enough that we were shamed for not recycling while recycling bins were tossed to landfills. I would love for my phone to keep getting software updates until it's physically worn out or performs too slow for my needs, and to be able to just get new one as the body without any cables or packaging.

But those are the problems that need to be solved by industry at scale rather than just making individuals feel bad with no practical recourse. Make packaging efficient, make recycling work and provide convenient ways to actually recycle.

We need some focus on dealing with the most pressing matters first though. For example, first to not have a US-West nuclear WWIII, then some plan to get emerging bacteria/viruses/fungee under control, then a rational plan for slower but impactful climate change... When chatbots are the most pressing matter, we will see which states they are in then and what to to do about them. In the meantime, the biggest problem with chatbots that can launch nukes will be still the nukes and impact of datacenters on climate change is non trivial, so we can focus on the most direct problems at hand.

We are talking about a layer of foil right? If not, just how much EM emissions are we talking about and should I be advising someone with a pacemaker to sit in my car?

Naturally the PIN for a bank card should not be kept with the card.

I tattooed mine on a very sensitive part of my body. The only problem is having to explain myself when I walk up to an ATM and drop my pants.

Oh, and it's a 14 digit PIN.

What part of "self driving" don't you understand? No need for Uber drivers. Quite possibly transport of animals is one of exceptions where human driven ICEs make sense.

Hail an Uber.ai to take you 2 miles or 200 miles, with any combination of passengers and cargo and watch videos or play games while the network takes care of all the details. This is what will eventually make both ICEs and old EVs obsolete. Well not all of them and for various corner cases there is nothing wrong with human driven ICEs. It's always a question of scale, both routine commute and industrial trucking are more conveniently served by automated vehicles running on locally generated power.

I would greatly prefer ordering for the family on the tablet where I can clearly communicate what I want and keep track of what I already ordered despite everyone talking at once in the car, and then pass it around once to make sure nothing is forgotten/misunderstood. Robotics could help by passing the tablet through the car window so I don't have to unbuckle seat belt, open the door and reach out if I am not parked just right taking it back once I am done.

On the other hand, if I am not satisfied with a tablet and want to talk to a human, I probably have some questions or requests that AI can't help with. Someone may have allergies or dietary restrictions, or I have a mess in the car and need extra napkins, or I want to know where is the nearest gas station.

This seems to both screw up the common case - Google/Siri never understand my accent and I don't expect this to do any better - and corner cases that potential repeat customers will eventually get frustrated with and go elsewhere.

An even better solution: ebooks without DRM. Artificial scarcity doesn't work, least of all with institutions like libraries tasked with providing public knowledge. For the time being, lets not worry about people who want to sell copies of their works for entertainment of others. Want your writings to be taught in schools or read by patrons of tax-supported libraries? Find a more modern solution. At the very least, accept a one time payment for libraries to make your works available for all their patrons. But no double dipping where the public is forced to pay taxes for your books and still can't read them freely.