Technically, yes, but geologists don't mean what people think they mean by that. Technically an ice age is a period in which parts of the Earth are permanently covered by ice sheets, and since the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets remain, the Holocene epoch is still an ice age, although that doesn't mean 1/3 of the continental US is covered with mile thick ice.

The technicality that the Holocene is part of the Quaternary ice age doesn't make warming a good thing. We are heading into conditions our species and certainly our global economy has never experienced before. While there is no doubt the species will survive, civilization as we know it is considerably less certain. I personally think there will be continuity of civilization, but adapting isn't going to be easy or pleasant.

Octane has nothing to do with it; octane is just a rating of how prone a gasoline mixture is to pre-ignition. Higher octane gas is not fundamentally better than lower octane gas in any way except for it's tendency to knock in high-compression engines.

Gasoline formulated for California has to be formulated to produce less air pollution, for example by having a lower sulfur content and fewer smog-promoting alkene bonds. In other words gasoline refineries in California have to remove a lot of stuff from their product, and that removal adds to the price.

Because of what the thing said tells you about how the group works. Heroism is the simpleton's answer to complex problems: some hero will fix it. Institutionalizing heroism is normalizing systemic failure.

(a) on the kind of problem and (b) the type of AI.

LLMs are are all the rage, but I will never trust an LLM except for things where the appearance of plausibility is the only thing that matters -- for example writing a story. But where accuracy matters I wouldn't trust an LLM more than I would a human whose total sum of knowledge and education came entirely from reading random Internet sources. This isn't to say LLMs aren't extremely useful tools, they absolutely are. But using this kind of generative AI responsibly for important tasks really calls for human operators with higher order critical thinking skills -- exactly the kind of skills that will become even rarer in a world where all entry-level mental grunt work has been taken over by machines.

There are other kinds of AI I'd be more inclined to trust like classification and regression trees. That's because CART produces a model that a human expert can examine and critique, both in general and in how the model has been applied to arrive at a particular conclusion. That said, I wouldn't just throw a training data set and have the algorithm spit out a decision tree and trust that tree. There's a lot of labor and thought and expertise that goes into making that kind of system work on a problem, which is probably why it's not as exciting as something that appears to magically answer all your questions.

The ability to critique the process by which a result was arrived at, and being able to verify that the process is anchored in underlying evidence -- those things are fundamental to generating answers that are trustworthy. It's the same reason why a scientific paper is more trustworthy than a political screed, but, sadly, is also far less accessible and ironically less persuasive.

In my state recreational marijuana is legal. The inconsistent application of marijuana possession laws was a major argument that swayed a lot of people who didn't like the idea of legalization.

14 years imprisonment for possession of 17 grams. Even under Russian law possessing this much cannabis would normally be punished with a small fine (roughly 100-300 dollars) and a suspended sentence. However they chose to prosecute this as drug *trafficking*, even though it's about 200 dollars worth of weed.

This is typical of Authoritarian regimes, to impose particularly harsh sentences individuals for political purposes under the guise of being "tough on crime". Tough it may be, but it's not the *rule of law*, in which laws are administered without favor or disfavor.

One of the riskiest and most costly things businesses do is to find customers to purchase their products, so it's good business to convert *purchases* into *subscriptions*. The fact that it's bad for consumers is neither here nor there, this is a zero sum game.

Consumers need regulatory protection. What this company is doing is (a) perfectly legal and (b) good business sense. Consumer backlash is no deterrent, because this is so clearly profitable it's ubiquitous. You might as well backlash against the incoming tide.

I heard the same thing about the UK, but it also turns out retrofitting existing heating systems with heat pumps instead of furnaces is popular there for its low cost, but it's inherently less capable than the mini-split design popular in the US. It's cheap because you just swap out the furnace, but only works in very mild winters. The heating fluid in a heat pump only gets about 40 degrees F hotter than a typical target room temperature. That's fine if your circulating air through the room with a fan, but if you're waiting for a lukewarm radiator to heat up a room by natural convection, it'll never happen.

So you need to design your system for the coldest conditions it will need to handle; there are mini-splits rated down to -15F/-26C, and if you live somewhere where it goes below that you'll need an auxiliary heat source.

Well, there's Dunning Kruger. It's easy to underestimate how complicated, expensive and risky designing a car is, even if you *think* you're pretty hard-nosed about it.

Take your typical boring Japanese economy car. It doesn't squeak or rattle, and all the body parts fit together without any odd gaps. It's got a paint job that won't rust through in ten or even fifteen years of driving on northern roads. It's got a transmission that lasts so long nobody really can put a number on it, but safe to say a quarter million miles. It's got an electrical system which, despite being extraordinarily complex, is completely free of gremlins like ground faults.

It's all to easy to overlook what extraordinary accomplishments these things are. And whatever the things you take for granted are exactly the things that will end up biting you on the ass.

Banning is really just the most extreme form of state restriction. A majority of states (33) have some forms of restrictions on non-competes that fall short of banning. On top of that we shouldn't forget case law, which differs radically between states.

For example, on paper Massachusetts and Texas have similar restrictions on non-competes, with a few minor differences. Both require restrictions on the employee to be "reasonable". But Massachusetts courts take a very strict view of "reasonableness" and Texas courts take a very permissive view. This is huge, because it determines who has the burden of proof for whether a restriction in the contract is enforceable. Thus Random361's experience in Texas where his lawyer advised him that challenging the noncompete would cost more than he could afford. In Massachusetts. In Massachusetts it's more likely to be the employer's lawyer telling him it's too expensive to pursue.

you have to *possess* it. You can't possess an NFT; it doesn't even confer *copyright*.

What an NFT is, is an identifiable (if trivial) set of non-tangible rights in a commercial money making scheme which you purchase in expectation of making a profit. In other words, it's a textbook example of a security.

Well, look. Any predictions you hear out of a startup are bound to make what they're doing sound m,ore revolutionary than they are. If AI technology is about to surpass and supplant humanity, then really the only viable position as a human being is to own a piece of a company that owns a piece of that technology, right?

On the face of it, an artificial general intelligence that outperforms humans is a capitalist's dream and a worker's nightmare, but if you think about it, it's almost the other way around. Elon Musk gets the big bucks for making astute decisions about technology, but when general AI can outperform him at that kind of decision making, all he will do is hold it back. The socialist's world view is that value comes from labor and that owners are leeches who don't contribute to production at all. The problem with this view is that owners perform important tasks making decisions about resource allocation, but when artificial general intelligence outperforms human beings, owners *will* be just useless appendages in the process of production. We'll still need plumbers, electricians, and janitors, but captain of industry will be as obsolete a job as being a pin monkey in a bowling alley.

This has long been my argument against artificial general intelligence -- it's going to take a lot of money, and it's not really in anyone's rational interest to spend the money for that particular result. Of course, people could do it *by accident*, say in the grip of an irrational speculative fad.

Dealing with things that will kill us later before things that will kill us sooner is a form of procrastination.

... in five billion years. Which is a good thing, because Mars will be if anything *less* habitable than it is now. To put five billion years in perspective, animals only diverged from our common ancestor with mushrooms only 800 million years ago. Any descendants we may have alive at that point will be less human than a hagfish -- the most primitive vertebrate still in existence.

Well, most *tech* projects fail; if you "probably will fail" rules out funding then very little gets funding. It's not necessarily technical reasons; sometimes the money dries up and it's not your fault. Sometimes you end up making a product that for unforeseen reasons people don't buy it.

Although I dunno on that last point. it kind of "stands to reason" that people would find resurrected mammoth tasty...