What's copycat about it by the way? It's well known that Elon got the idea for Starlink after WorldVu went to SpaceX for launch services to launch its own mega-constellation. And WorldVu itself was just a extrapolation of Motorola Iridium.

These satellites are hundreds of miles from each other. Furthermore they are in LEO which means the orbit decays in under 5 years if they don't have regular thrust correction. We've already had satellite collisions in space and last I checked space is still fine. The only way for Kessler to be real (and that too temporary) is if someone put hundreds or thousands of tons of ball bearings above a certain size up there.

We don't have anything that works. There are dead zones even in cities. Rural, hilly, or forest areas have terrible coverage. Tens of billions spent and hardly anything to show for it. And I'm just talking about the US.

I don't think we should expect to see steady progress toward a climate solution, I think it's going to happen quite suddenly after some combination of the technology to do it getting cheap enough and the climate producing enough "shit's getting real" moments for a large fraction of the first-world population. At that point either we'll get our asses in gear and set up oceanic and atmospheric carbon sequestration megastructures all over the planet with maybe a little SRM sprinkled on top, or we'll be too distracted or impoverished to do anything about it for some silly reason or another and all the disastrous predictions will come true because this is a problem we're collectively too stupid as a species to solve. That's a real possibility.

Anybody else ever play You Don't Know Jack with three other people? I think that was the first really clean and comprehensible party quiz game, and a YDKJ title seems like it would be a good fit here.

Pretty much any cellphone can now do a decent imitation of a Wiimote (besides the sensors, you could also use camera data) and it would also be hilarious to see people accidentally chuck their phones across the room while bowling.

Stop calling these eVTOLs flying cars. A helicopter is more of a flying car that some of them. If something is to be called a flying car you need to be able to drive it on land, on a road. If it can't do that it lacks any aspect of "car".

Mozilla keeps thinking that they can make Firefox popular without the nerds somehow. But all the shit that makes it better than other browsers is nerd shit, so they need nerds to advocate for it, teach other users how to use those features, etc. Meanwhile they seem to actually be trying to alienate us. Just like in the movie, here it the pulse, and here is their finger, far from the pulse, jammed up their ass. Pretzel?

You are correct, they absolutely, positively do not have a flying car. They have a drone that comes out of a cybervan. And it's six-wheeled to boot, which would be cool in an off road vehicle but absolutely sucks on pavement. I did not bother to look up whether it has rear steering because IDGAF about it even if it does, even though that would be kind of neat. The rest of it is dumb.

I think BeauHD is a dipshit for posting this dupe

False, I just did this and it did nothing.

I see you didn't read the Toyota unintended acceleration report by the Barr Group, and have nothing of value to add to this conversation.

Correlation, even massive correlation, is not causation.

Test scores are largely a matter of preparation, and preparation is largely a matter of parent wealth and local and family culture as well as resources.

I have met countless Chinese and Indian people with cognitive problems.

There is definitely correlation between race and academic performance in America, but there is no reason to think there is causation, or much causation. What little causation exists would be hard to tease out and is likely because of immigration selection. An Asian who comes to America likely is here because they out-competed their peers to make it here. My customers are almost completely immigrants from China and India and are mostly in tech. They are largely smart people who did well back home and do even better here. Their kids, on average, perform well too, but in addition to coming from the parents who could get through all the selection processes to get and stay in the US, they also have access to great schools, great nutrition, tons of extracurricular activities, and good genes for their races. If I go to India or China, I'm going to find a far dumber distribution of people, and even then, most of that will be because of economic circumstances, not genetics. The genetic component, of the US grabbing mostly the cream, lowers the average intelligence of these countries by a vanishingly negligible amount.

A child with genius genetics who is raised by wolves will effectively be a moron. A sub-100 IQ person who receives immense resources can graduate college. When I was done with him, a low-IQ autistic kid I taught, fully verbal but pretty damn simple, passed his college English classes and wrote proper, passing rhetorical analysis essays for exams without help. It took years of work, from late middle school on, but he got there. Both his mom and dad have PhDs. He reads at at least an average level for American adults, which is not that impressive in general but is for him.

You can make rap songs on Suno. It's terrible, but it works. Then again, I find much of rap to be terrible. As for jazz, that should be pretty easy to make too, and harder to tell the good from the bad since so much jazz is just a bunch of riffing.

Going to a jazz concert tomorrow.

What about top speed limiting?

And speaking of which, what about an emergency stop button? They've had a number of self-driving vehicle runaways which could have been stopped with such a thing.