I've worked on police systems that are connected to home alarms. The false alarms got problematic, so police agencies started a 'one false alarm, then you get billed' policy.

Very shortly thereafter, there were multiple vendors offering tracking and billing solutions that would integrate with police call taker / incident tracking systems.

It seems like this would work exceptionally well for robotaxies - give them an economic incentive to find a way to confirm someone is in actual distress prior to calling 911. Like maybe a remotely activated just-below-hearing-damage alarm in the car if you're not moving within 2 minutes of the car pulling up at your destination.

But then there's another fancy option - the car could drive towards the nearest hospital ER or EMS station during the 911 call, with the service's agent reporting location and redirecting or stopping the car if so instructed by the 911 operator.

It also can depend on the gear ratios in the transmission. The 5-speed manual version of my car has a higher gear ratio for 5th gear compared to the final gear ratio in the 4-speed automatic. As such, on the freeway the RPMs are higher in the manual version and that negatively impacts the mileage. I'm assuming the reason is a combination of the manufacturer selecting closer gear ratios for the manual for the fun factor, and attempting to make it so people wouldn't have to downshift to pass on the freeway.

That's really no longer true, at least in the US. Nissan recently discontinued the manual version of the Nissan Versa, which really was the last car sold in the US with the manual transmission offered as a cheaper alternative to the automatic (or CVT in Nissan's case). The remaining cars sold in the US with a manual transmission are sports cars and a handful of SUVs where the manual option isn't really about cost savings.

Writes age it, so the best method is to write once, then plug it in for a while every few years to let it do whatever automatic maintenance can or must be done. And honestly, I'm not sure whether that's baked into the hardware or if you need some software process to check the thing. Not my area of expertise.

In theory you can throw one in a drawer and it'll be fine a decade later... but you can't trust that it will be.

Cool story bro time.

I developed finger-based calculation independently as a 10 year old. Freaked the teacher right out, she didn't understand what the hell I was doing.

Probably not as complex or effective (I have never heard of Chisanbop, but I assume it's well-developed), but my method definitely helped me rapidly finish math tests without the more traditional intermediary steps of pencil and paper or a calculator.

Please keep in mind that a flash drive is next to useless for long term storage. It will randomize over a surprisingly short time if it doesn't have power for data maintenance.

Your typical CD is better but still not good enough - under perfect conditions it will outlast you, but the way most people store them you might be really disappointed when you try to read it a decade from now. You're also going to run into the issue that even 20 years from now there may not be a consumer 'CD reader' available.

For music, your best bet remains a carefully stored vinyl collection. For now you should grab a USB vinyl ripper with a laser pickup and listen to your digital copies on whatever media you like, knowing that there will probably always be a traditional record player to fall back on if you look hard enough.

>What's next, making them learn how an abacus works? Yeah, real good use of time there.

I shall don my fedora for a moment and say, 'ecktually...'

There's value in teaching kids how to use an abacus. I doubt anybody benefits much anymore from learning to use one like an expert, but for basic counting, place value, and addition / subtraction I'd consider it an excellent tool for starting kids down the road to mathematical literacy.

Manual transmissions in a world where we're heading to EVs? Not so much. The ability to drive stick is more a hobby thing, and soon a historical curiosity for niche enthusiasts.

My kid lost his Minecraft account due to 'suspicious account activity' that magically registered while converting his Mojang account to a Microsoft account as they were pressuring him to do.

'Customer service' was completely unhelpful and presumably the company knows you're not going to go to the bother of taking them to court over such a small amount of money.

So congratulations, Microsoft - I pirated the game because we owned it and you were denying access. You 'win'!

You can't stop the LLM if it's published... but you can sue the company that scraped data it was not legally entitled to scrape, and the legal sanctions should involve destruction of the collected archive of training data and all copies of the resulting LLM as well as a financial penalty that is sufficiently large to dissuade future repetitions of the offense.

"But that would harm our bottom line" is not an acceptable defense against this. Don't steal. It's easy.

Of course, stealing's easier if you're a megacorp who can buy politicians and pay settlements out of the corporate equivalent of pocket change.

Merit should always consider strictly value.

When a significant portion of your labour is a near-slave class of recent immigrants doing jobs natural born citizens won't without more pay, and you start chasing immigrants out of your country... that's a cause with an effect.

Then you add on tariff wars with every nation on Earth (and an island of puffins for some reason).

Then you start some wars that cause oil supply disruptions.

And you threaten your allies so they increase military spending... but spend it somewhere else whenever they can.

If only the US had educated economists who could have warned the government this was the certain outcome ...

Actually, I'd kind of expect the loss of labour to have been balanced by a loss of jobs, so maybe this is not quite as predictable an outcome as I initially thought.

If your job is filling out forms or collating information to produce reports, if it's taking notes, if it's taking inventory, if it's managing schedules, if it's producing documentation...

All those jobs are going to fall to IT. Not entirely, but it'll be human oversight and an AI replacing a team of white collar workers.

At the same time, it'll be embodied in robots and unskilled manual labor jobs will evaporate (this is already happening).

Good luck adjusting when the disruption is broad, deep, and rapid throughout the economy and workers can't retrain as quickly as jobs are eliminated. This isn't the automobile, this is "cheap obedient slaves with almost no support cost for those who can afford the upfront price tag".

I was really talking about in the beginning of Internet advertising.

I do actually recall what things were like before AOL and eternal September. Google didn't start the hire, they just perfected arson.

In the beginning, websites hosted their own ads. Then they farmed them out to someone else to manage, then that was (almost instantly) abused to deliver malware, then people started using adblockers and websites started implementing adblocker detection and refusing to serve people with such protections enabled.

Nobody seems to be willing to route both the original video and the ads through the same server to seamlessly splice the ads in and make ad detection and suppression more or less impossible.

I'm not sure Disney needs to worry much about inserting ads into streams; the low effort direct-to-video sequels they churn out are effectively merch and theme park ads.

If they give away access to that crap, they'll make it up on plushies and clothing and theme park ticket sales.