I'll counter your anecdote with my own. I know quite a few homeschooled kids who are now adults who are homeschooling their own children.

Religious motivations aside, those children can all read, write, and perform basic mathematics far above equivalent public school levels. Their grasp of basic science is pretty good, too, at least when it doesn't conflict with religious beliefs. And every one of them plays some sort of musical instrument, and is active in sports.

I was once a homeschooling skeptic myself, but the results speak for themselves. Done right, homeschooling provides excellent outcomes. Done poorly, not so much. But in that respect, it's certainly no different than a whole lot of public schools.

I know a few. I don't know what it may or may not mean. It may be relevant that the ones I know used a community-based approach, where groups of homeschooling families worked together to create something akin to a school, with different parents teaching different subjects. This meant that while the kids socialization groups were small, they did hang out with and learn with other kids, not just their siblings.

It's more than that. Research into the possibility of a link between vaccination and autism has been done, and no correlation found. This is evidence that there is no connection and it's entirely different from a case where no research has been done. One is evidence of absence, the other is absence of evidence. The GP is equating them, but they're not remotely the same thing.

Show me all of the studies that have evaluated the correlation between FSM action and autism. There has been a lot of research on the possibility of a correlation between vaccination and autism, and no evidence of correlation has been found. There is an enormous difference between "We've looked hard and found no connection" (evidence of a negative) and "We haven't looked at all" (lack of evidence).

In addition, there's no need for the CDC to debunk a claims that are not being made, or non-harmful claims. To pick a less-ludicrous example, there's no significant population claiming that eating grapes causes autism, so there's no need for the CDC to address it. Further, if there were an anti-grape lobby touting a connection with autism, the CDC probably still wouldn't need to address it because some people avoiding grapes doesn't create significant health risks to others.

But there is a significant population claiming -- against strong scientific evidence -- that vaccines cause autism, and that claim is causing them to reject vaccines, which does create significant health risks for others. So, the CDC absolutely does need to address it, since public health is their job.

Your analogy is terrible, in every way.

Yeah but I bet the price of antihydrogen molecules at Walmart won't drop by 1/8th. I bet they won't even go down by half.

The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.

Bullshit. I live in the western US and have regularly driven through some of the least-populated areas of the country, but I've never seen an area you can go 500 miles without encountering any infrastructure. You might be able to accomplish it if you take careful note of where the truck stops are and go out of your way to avoid them, but on any realistic route you'll encounter truck stops -- if not towns -- at least every 150 miles.

As for charging infrastructure, if you stay on the interstates I don't think there's anywhere in the country you can go more than 100 miles without finding a Tesla Supercharger. Those aren't designed for truck charging, but this demonstrates that building out the infrastructure isn't that hard.

They certainly seem to have completely missed Article I. You know, the part that says that the legislature makes the laws? Even if you think restricting AI regulation to the federal government is a good idea, the right way to do it isn't with an executive order to set up a DOJ task force aimed at litigating state AI regulations out of existence based on complex legal theories about interstate commerce. The right way is for Congress to pass a law barring states from regulating AI. This is simpler, cheaper and should invoke public debate about the issue, which is how things are supposed to be done in constitutional republics.

I don't even think Trump is taking this route because he and his advisors don't believe they have the votes for it. I think they're doing it this way because they don't even consider governing through legislation rather than through executive power. Granted that Congress is fairly dysfunctional, but they actually can and do make laws... and the way to fix the dysfunction is to work the system.

Sure. I would expect that each country would want to protect themselves from other countries.

>"This is about whether a hostile third party can affect a vehicle remotely because of manufacturer incompetence."

Oh, well, both are important :)

I have often wondered if it is reasonable to just find the antenna(s) and put a keyswitch across it/them, so you have absolute control over when/if they can be accessed remotely at all.

The above was already quite long, but allow me to add a bit :-)

I spent a few minutes looking for the state of the art in C++/Rust interop for contexts that don't have a nice intermediary like binder. It turns out that the situation isn't as bad as I thought. The CXX project enables automatic generation of bi-directional definitions between Rust and C++ and is being used at scale by the Chromium project and that seems to be going pretty well.

There's also a Google-funded Rust Foundation project to define a better solution, though I don't see what, if anything, has happened since it was announced last year. Hopefully that's because there's a small group working too hard to waste a lot of time talking about it.

The reason I went to look is that my new team (I left Google a couple of months ago) might need such a thing. I've been asked to define an API that would benefit from being implemented in Rust and usable from C++ and Rust.

>"I will pause judgment until they conduct the same test on domestically made buses."

Most new vehicles have all kinds of spyware and remote control crap (mine certainly does). But, presumably, domestic ones are nowhere near as much of a threat than a foreign, potentially hostile nation-state.

Telling people that vaccines are bad, ensuring that any parent who wishes to refuse to vaccinate their children is fully supported in that decision, and working to make vaccines harder to get, more expensive and more painful (RFK Jr. wants to separate the MMR vaccine into three shots, each of which will still require three injections, so kids will have to get 9 shots to be fully vaccinated instead of three).

This is similar to their plan to fight inflation by imposing tariffs and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates in spite of rising inflation (note that this last part hasn't really happened yet -- the interest rate cuts have been measured, cautious and justified by economic conditions -- but Trump is working on it). Though to be fully fair, by making the tariffs arbitrary and capricious so that business leaders are completely unable to plan, Trump is also causing a contraction in US economic activity that might eventually generate significant unemployment, which actually does reduce inflation. I see no corresponding "silver lining" in the mumps plan, though.

And, ultimately, slavery was a far less efficient and effective economic system. One might think that keeping a big chunk of the populace poor is efficient, since you're not "wasting" a lot of production on providing them with unnecessary goods and services, but it's really not, at least not since the industrial revolution. I think the core reason that it's so inefficient is the same reason that Marxist communism is inefficient: From an economic perspective, both systems value the masses only for their physical labor, and fail to cultivate and take advantage of their brains, which also actually tends to reduce their labor output. Harnessing the distributed ingenuity of your workforce requires giving your workforce some reason to exercise ingenuity and some way to benefit from doing so.

It's going to be interesting (or maybe terrifying, or maybe just sad) to see what happens when we fully automate ingenuity, too, which will mean that the system no longer depends on or benefits from distributed ingenuity because the machines are smarter and think faster, just as the machines are already stronger and indefatigable.

I don't think vibe coding is going to last long as a thing, because it's just a sort of intermediate step to telling the AI to do what you want and having it do that. Right now, people are telling the LLM to write code to accomplish a thing and then running the code to see how it works, then telling the LLM to refine it, but that's a lot of unnecessary extra steps. I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future people will just tell the LLM what they want to do, which may require creating a custom user interface to make user interaction convenient, and may require creating databases or performing network queries or whatever, and the LLM will understand what they want, and do it.

In that future, it's possible that the LLM may generate code to implement the requested functionality, but if it does so that will be a compute-saving shortcut, essentially a way to cache the LLM's work and be able to repeat it with less effort. There won't be any need to show any of the code to the user, or even tell the user that the LLM chose to generate some code.

As an aside, the whole notion of leaning "prompt engineering" is another intermediate step that will die. The whole point of natural language-capable AI is that it will be able to understand what humans want when we express ourselves as we would to other humans. As the LLMs get more capable, it will become less necessary to treat them as something different from an entity that is fully capable of understanding and acting on human communication.